July 25, 2007

EDWARD TICK, Ph.D.
Soldier's Heart Dir., Veterans Safe Return Initiative, Albany and Troy

Folks With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Shouldn't Suppress Memories

"Study: Bad Memories Can Be Suppressed" (July 13) declares that scientists have discovered that people can actively suppress bad memories by choosing not to think about them, and that this "finding could lead to improved therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder."

As a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans and civilians, I want the public to know that this small article indicates potentially disastrous consequences if its beliefs and practices are put into effect.
Scientists have not newly discovered through brain scanning that bad memories can be suppressed and that people do so after trauma. The suppression of painful memories has been studied in the Western world at least since ancient Greece.
In the modern era Freud documented two kinds of forgetting -- conscious forgetting is suppression; unconscious forgetting is repression. Ancient and modern psychology both teach that people forget disturbing events as a normal defense against emotional pain. Knowledge of this mechanism is nothing new, though perhaps taking brain pictures of it is.

Psychologists from ancient and modern times also demonstrate the dangers of pushing bad memories out of your mind. If we consciously or unconsciously push bad memories away, they do not go away and stop bothering us. Rather, suppressed memories turn into other uncomfortable symptoms as they attempt to come back to the person's mind.

Thus, if I refuse to remember a traumatic event, I may have nightmares about it; it may turn into physical illness; it may drive me to dangerous, addictive or violent behaviors. Teaching people to purposely forget in fact harms rather than helps. The memories keep coming back as their way of demanding helpful attention.

The path to healing is in remembering our true events, recovering our numbed feelings about them, and giving meaning and purpose to the events, no matter how painful they originally were.

This can be and is done through good psychotherapy and other healing modalities. There is no quick fix or magic answer through medications or mind-control.

There is much hope and healing through wise, caring and honest treatment that invites true stories, no matter how painful, to come out of hiding.


Source: Times Union, Albany - NY - Opin. Sect.