M4 : Lesson 2: Why we target the memory and visualization centers of the brain
Much of what we think, feel, and perceive is influenced by our memory, and we are often unconscious to this. If we have chronic stress and/or trauma, our memory processing can become impaired and our sense of current reality can become distorted by past experiences.
Even our symptoms can be from “activated memory neuro networks” on replay! This understanding alone can be revolutionary in helping you break free from believing everything you think and feel.
Transcript
Lesson 2, brain memory, and protection responses. We’ll discuss the role of the hippocampus and amygdala, chronic stress distorts current reality and memory processing, and memory processing procedures can confuse food, smells, mold, etcetera, as threatening and dangerous. And your current symptoms could be a past memory on replay. When you get triggered by something, ask yourself. Am I seeing this moment through the lens of the past?
Embedded memory structures, which are neural networks of associations, activate our protection responses. We react before we can even discern if the threat is true or accurate in the present moment. Doing brain retraining helps to shift our perception. Yes, we’ve got a bit more science coming up, I want to help you understand why to take the time to use your memories, to help retrain your brain, And I want you to find the motivation to do so as this part of brain retraining can be a bit tedious and people have a lot of resistance to using their memories with brain retraining. So let’s understand a little more about that.
The hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus and the amygdala are 2 brain structures that encode memory. The hippocampus is responsible for putting experience into a chronological order and into perspective. It is necessary for forming new explicit or conscious memories. The amygdala also is involved in memory and catalogs past emotional experiences threats and anger, for example, as implicit memories, which means these are memories that are unconscious but can affect our thoughts and behaviors.
This imprinting that the amygdala does of intense events is for association and decision making for the future and is a critical survival feature of the brain. Enabling an instant response to danger. There are other aspects of memory formation, but we will focus on these two structures primarily for our basic understanding of why we work with memories to help retrain our brain. Chronic stress affects memory processing. Chronic stress affects the hippocampus and amygdala a center’s response to internal and external triggers.
This is why we target these structures with brain retraining. With chronic stress and trauma, there is an underactive hippocampus. There’s a loss of volume in the hippocampus due to elevated stress hormones such as glucocorticoids, which impair hippocampus function, it becomes less effective at proper memory formation and sequencing of events. So you might have trouble telling the difference between a past experience and the present event when you are triggered, leading you to avoid situations that remind you of the past. Basically, your perspective and timelines become very distorted.
The present moment can be confused with the past. For example, we might project that someone is upset at us in the moment because it has happened in the past with the same person and they make a similar face and we decide incorrectly that they are indeed mad at us again or that the situation from the past is still ongoing. Or maybe we have a feeling in our body that reminds us of a past physical event or injury or illness. And we assume that this injury or illness has returned or is still ongoing to some degree. We can also have an overactive amygdala with chronic stress.
The amygdala quickly interprets many things as threats in a way that doesn’t allow the conscious mind to decide if this threat is indeed true in this moment. You see, before you even have time to think, something unconsciously can throw you into a full blown survival and protection response. Simply put with chronic stress and illness the amygdala can get caught up in a highly alert and activated loop during which it looks for and perceives threats everywhere. We must teach the amygdala new associations to decrease this threat response and decrease our symptoms as a result of this. And overall, we need to learn to appropriately file past traumatic events as being complete and resolved so that we can emotionally move forward and teach the memory centers that that threat has past.
Does your brain have a memory induced negativity bias to life? Sometimes the brain only remembers the bad things of the past. Especially if our past was filled with stress and negativity. Our brain also expects the future to be negative. We have to teach our brain to expect good things to unravel the chronic stress response.
If you’ve grown up in a chronically threatening environment or just around a lot of stress, your nervous system had to learn to adapt to survive. However, some of these adaptations might make it difficult to parent or be in relationships or succeed in work now that you’re all grown up. Especially those with a chronic stress response, chronic trauma, PTSD, etcetera. We often have a hard time inducing a sense of safety or self compassion in moments of being triggered. Because these responses to overreact, or to shut down or so memorized in your brain and in your body.
You simply cannot think your way out of them. Memory as it relates to food and chemical triggers. Sometimes things like food and smells, chemicals, mold, pathogens, or even people can get cross wired by the amygdala with a feeling of fear or stress. For example, if during a time of emotional threat, you are eating dairy or gluten, your body may misinterpret the dairy or gluten to be the cause of alarm and the memory association forms. When really the situation might have been someone else you were upset at or hurt by while simultaneously eating those foods.
The same thing with mold and chemicals if you were feeling emotionally threatened or upset or stressed a lot. While living amongst mold or other chemicals, your brain might crosswire or associate the mold and chemicals as the cause of your stress and began to have a threatening response when around those things more than it normally would. Next, I want to speak to genetic intolerance or is it stressed induced epigenetic changes of expression? This is a very exciting field of science that I highly recommend everyone look into. In fact, there’s a book called the Biology of Belif by Doctor.
Bruce Lip that I highly recommend reading to understand this more. Basically, our reactions are not all about our genetic intolerances, even if you’ve gotten the test that shows you have a genetic intolerance to these things. Although genetics can indeed play a role in our inability to process certain talk symptoms. The stress can also have an epigenetic signaling affecting us that causes an increased intolerance and a lack of capacity to detoxify. What is epigenetics?
Well, it’s how your behaviors and your environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. And because it’s epigenetic, or it’s related to your behaviors and how you perceive your environment, the good news is is that the studies are clear. We can indeed change our gene expression as we decrease the stress in our bodies and improve the environment around us. It does take intense dedication to perceive things differently and reset the amygdala and hippocampus memory reaction center. You have to consciously sift out this present moment from the past and change your sense of reality.
You can begin to do this by asking yourself. Am I seeing the situation through the lens of my past right now? As I just described, the past and present can become very blurred in your brain because of the way that stressful memories are processed. It’s this negativity bias of expecting threats that can make it difficult with those with trauma to have healthy relationships or to calm down their nervous system. We can sometimes not even be able to perceive love or nurture or friendship when it’s actually right there presently in our lives now, and I am the first to admit that that was the case for myself.
I could not perceive love. I could not trust any loving connections. I was stuck experiencing the threat. And abandonment that my brain saw in the past as part of my current reality. Also, please note, it’s not just intense trauma that can cause this memory association trigger response, but it is more common with the trauma history.
Either way, the first step of breaking this cycle of heightened stress responses within you is to learn to have self compassion about how you’ve had to adapt to stress and trauma in the past and how difficult it is to stop these behaviors now. In moments when you react in ways that seem irrational or judgmental and protected, understand it’s part of the way that you have wired yourself to protect yourself. And it takes effort to become conscious of this and rewire it And the first step is a, awareness, and some self compassion. As I said, your nervous system holds all of the memories of stress and trauma. And yet it also holds keys to unlocking your safety and well-being, but we must teach it how to do that.
We can consciously engage our own nervous system in a positive way by becoming aware of our feelings, our breath, and our heart rates. We can then respond immediately to cues of threat in our nervous system with the tools of this program. We can discern which tools would be best in that moment to shift our perspectives and calm our bodies. The good news is we can teach our brain and our nervous system to pay attention to the things that are going well in the current situation and reduce the bias towards stress and threat. The practices of brain retraining and somatic orienting, which you’ll learn in the next module, are crucial tools for anyone with a trauma background.
Recrogramming your nervous system to sense cues of safety through site sound, touch, and visualization strategies is what this program will help you do. This is a question that’s very important to contemplate, and it might not make sense initially. Is your body rehearsing memories of the past? Could your symptoms literally be on replay? The brain is wired to produce a neurological and chemical reaction to stimuli and uses memory to decide what messages to send to the body.
Did you hear that? The brain uses your memory to decide what message to send to the body. Now I’m gonna explain something that might be really counterintuitive. The brain’s use of memory could mean that our current symptom might simply be an activated memory structure. You will hear me speak of this a lot in activated memory structure.
This was a mind blowing revelation for me and completely changed my capacity to tolerate the discomfort and symptoms in my body. How do activated memory structures cause symptoms? Well, let’s discuss that. Sometimes what we believe is a current symptom is an unconscious, rehearsed reaction to an association or to a past trigger. For example, we can have an immune rate response, like a fever, when we sensed certain chemical changes in the body that remind us of a past infection response.
I see this a lot with chronic viral infections. It’s an ongoing memorized immune response. We can have a pain reaction to an emotion or a somatic sensation that reminds us of a past physical injury or an emotional stress. Sometimes, our limbic system thinks a past threat is still ongoing, and runs the same body response over and over, much like a movie on replay. It’s like our brain has a rolodex of memories and body responses to choose from.
When we’ve been through trauma or chronic dress, our brain cannot appropriately file these memories into the past and decide that that threat is indeed over and dealt with. For me personally, I started to put 2 and 2 together with my symptoms. When I noticed that what I believe to be in infection symptoms or mold toxicity symptoms would somehow get better and worse within the same day or the same hour depending on my state of being or my current stress level. I saw correlation that I would feel better when I saw a new doctor and came walking out of the office feeling extreme hope and I hadn’t even taken his remedy yet. My mental state of being or my state of hope or sense of control had a huge effect on my physical symptoms.
Pretty much I would say, if I had a sense of control, I would start to feel better. But if I felt a trigger from a family member, my body would flare like crazy. So be aware that the way your brain processes your current situation can play a huge role in how you physically feel. Now I’m not saying it’s all in your head, so don’t get mad at me here. And I’m not saying that there’s not an infection or real toxin or other real challenges in your physical body.
I know. I had the blood test too to approve all of my diagnosis. But I do know that how you feel is mostly due to your brain state and your autonomic nervous system’s response to that brain state, and that does have a true and real effect on your body. I will also acknowledge that many of you likely do have toxins and pathogens and chemicals and pain signals, hitting tissues in your brain, and act evading your amygdala to respond. But I believe we’re always better off and safer by trumping this threat signal with a signal of even though I have some imperfections in my body right now.
This does not mean I’m in a 5 alarm fire that my amygdala thinks it means. We have to be more conscious and certain of our innate okayness than our unconscious brain’s decision of threat. This is basically asking you to use your conscious mind to hack your amygdala and limbic systems response to threat. I’m asking you to do something that feels very counterintuitive, and I’m explaining as much of the science as I can to help convince your rational mind to give this a try. When we feel terrible, looking for the good or remembering the good of the past would seem like the last thing we wanna do.
But from a brain perspective, if you are able to feel good emotions while your brain is sensing and processing toxins, It will often cause the brain to decide that these toxins and triggers are not as dangerous as it thinks, and then our body will relax. And when the body relaxes, our rest and digest and repair system comes back online. We cannot believe that we are in a fight with a tiger and heal at the same time. So because of all this understanding, one way we work on improving memory associations in the brain rather than chasing symptoms and trying to fix them. Is to work on your perception of the present moment and to not assume that your current symptom is an accurate indication of threat because it might be a memory reactivation, and we go into this a lot more in the level 2 primal trust mentorship.
For these reasons, we work on accessing positive memories of the past, and sometimes we have to make up some of those details to simply attempt to give our amygdala a positive input and association. This allows us to move our set point from expecting illness and negativity to expecting health and safety. And our autonomic nervous system then runs the biochemistry to mirror this internal set point over time. With a new perspective of our past and present in our future, our system has more space to flow our vital force. And regulate our immune, digestive, and endocrine systems.
I know the difference between the past and the present. I can find positive experiences in my past, and this helps me expect positive experiences in my future. To summarize, we seek to improve the way our memory networks are relaying information to our limbic system. We improve the perception of the present moment and not assume that our current symptom is an accurate indication of threat. We work on accessing positive memories of the past to give our amygdala a positive input in association.
This allows us to move our set point from expecting illness and negativity to expecting health and safety. With new perspectives of our past, present, and future, Our system has more space to flow our vital force and regulate our immune, digestive, and endocrine systems. Up next is lesson 3, where we’ll discuss what is involved in the Primal Trust ABC brain retraining technique.