How Trauma Alters Memory – Why Every EFT Practitioner Should Know About the Amygdala and Hippocampus

If you use EFT yourself or with others, you are using the process of memory. If you are seriously doing EFT with others then you will run into trauma. Even if you are working on knee pain or an allergy to ice cream. It is bound to show up, and you will not know it based on the person’s presenting complaint. The more you understand about how memory works, especially traumatic memories, the more effective you will be.

Amygdala

I think of the amygdala as a satellite dish that is never turned off. It receives emotional and sensory information which it then processes and passes along to get stored in our cortex. I think of my amygdala as my security camera. It acts as an early warning system working to keep me safe from harm. I remember exactly this function. When I was young, I was a competitive tennis player, and my dad was my coach. He knew that I would get very anxious and play worse when he was watching me, so he would attempt to hide in his car or behind trees. He tried not to make me aware of his presence. Bad strategy! I was constantly scanning for him to covertly appear. I can still recall the sense of hypervigilance with its associated tightness in my solar plexus.

The amygdala’s purpose is to take in sensory information from the environment, most especially regarding emotionally charged experiences and to assist in its storage that can come in handy at a future date. It offers immediate warnings to know whether to batten down the hatches (emotionally and physically), to send immediate messages of engagement instructions as to whether to find safety (by attacking or fleeing) or to continue forward without worry. This structure is of critical significance for our survival because from day one, we are born with our amygdala already fully mature. When you walk into a room of new people, you may get a sense that your amygdala is attuning your eyes, ears, and all your other sense organs to determine if this room is safe so you can relax. A history of trauma will affect that scenario so that the degree of alertness and sensitivity toward danger is affected.

Hippocampus

The amygdala’s partner is the hippocampus. While elephants are known as the “memory keepers of the pachyderms” perhaps the “hippos” are equally facile at remembering. The hippocampus acts like an “experience date-stamper” recording what, where, when, etc. It processes the data of our experiences, date stamps it, and creates a linear timeline that gives events a context, for when we recall them at a later date. Recently, I learned that unlike the amygdala, the hippocampus doesn't mature until we are 2-3 years old.

When, as parents, we watch an infant observing and responding emotionally to our facial expressions of googly or sad face, it isn't critical to remember the order of the observations. The date stamping is apparently not yet required for future access. Much speculation has been made that this helps to explain why memories before the age of 3 are much less accessible and may have a very different and more vague quality to them, having no context or date associated with them.

What happens during stressful experiences that involve rapidly increasing stress, a sense of helplessness, an inability to escape a situation that feels threatening or overwhelming? The amygdala goes into overdrive, pulling in gigabytes of both external environmental information, as well as internal physical-response information, that it can process each millisecond. Stress hormones are secreted (adrenaline and noradrenaline are like the short term “sprinters” of stress, while cortisol has the ability to be a marathon runner that does many things in the body (from sending blood flow and oxygen to muscles, increasing heart rate and respiration, reducing pain), but most importantly here, they can effectively put a kibosh on the hippocampus.

During traumatic events, the amygdala is processing all kinds of important information received by our sense organs to be stored, that may not be accurately date stamped. Some theorize that this may explain why people who suffer from PTSD have difficulty when they are emotionally flooded by some trigger associated with the offending trauma, and are unable to accurately place themselves in the present moment vs. feeling like they are right back in the original trauma.

Other research has studied the brains of people diagnosed with PTSD and found them to have smaller hippocampi. The enduring question about this finding is whether those who have PTSD and thus live with elated stress hormones, have their volume reduced by these stress chemicals or perhaps theirs were of smaller size from the outset, which made them more vulnerable to developing post-traumatic stress disorder. A reduced size of the hippocampus may reduce our ability to cope with life’s stressful events.

How does this apply to tapping?

1. Well, when tapping, you can now better understand the supposedly “random” shifting aspects consisting of distantly related memories that just drop in during a tapping. Remember, that neurons that fire together, wire together!

2. You can now better understand why when someone can become flooded with emotion when recalling a past trauma; an important part of their brain is working less than optimally, and they can lose track of whether they are in the present or past. This is why it's important to keep their eyes open and work incredibly slowly and gently and help them to stay in the present moment, even purposely helping them with distancing EFT techniques.

3. You can use this understanding to help your client feel more at ease when they struggle with trying to recall their past and they complain that they cannot remember, especially when they have a large number of Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Craig Weiner is an Accredited Certified EFT Master Trainer of Trainers.