Why A Memory Can Trigger An Emotion

By Andre Duquemin

I wanted to touch on something that happens to every single one of us on a daily basis.

Why is it that when we recall certain memories, we also feel an associated emotion?

We all know how true this is.

Think back to a time when something great happened - maybe the birth of your firstborn. A great job that you managed to get, or perhaps winning a sporting event against the odds.

Are you smiling? Or perhaps you have a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Now recall a memory that isn’t so good.

Remember when you broke up with your first love? Or maybe a parent passing on? Or even a car accident.

How do you feel now?

We all have memories that trigger emotions. That's part of life…

But what happens to cause these emotions to stay with us, perhaps even years after the event?

Most days pass by without anything of real note every happening.

You probably can't remember anything at all about, let's say, May 31st 2011.

For the vast majority of you, a day that happened more than eight years ago, will barely have any impact on you at all.

But not for me - I will remember that day forever.

This was the day that my father passed away. Strangely enough, on the day, it was also his 73rd birthday.

For most of you reading this post, nothing of any substance happened and you will, in effect, have filed away all the events of that day, all neatly bound and processed by our very efficient internal filing system.

But why is that not the case for me?

When something overwhelming happens, our ability to deal with this event becomes markedly less effective.

It's almost as if this highly stimulating event goes “rogue".

It evades the attempts of our minds and bodies to deal with it and instead runs amuck. Refusing to be filed away under "a normal day”.

Sometimes obviously this is a good thing.

I would hope that my father's passing, my wedding day and the birth of my daughter would have some sort of resonance for me.

But I don't want the memories of those experiences to become overpowering.

In the work I do, I talk of these events as "undigested life experiences”

Every experience we have creates a thought which couples with an emotion.

We receive an email from our boss asking us to work a weekend and we think "oh, no I really had plans to sit on my backside and binge watch Netflix”.

As we have the thought, we feel an emotion. Perhaps anger or resentment.

For the most part these thoughts create an emotional "charge" we feel in our bodies.

Luckily, for most of us, these pass by without any real lasting effect. We have the thought, experience the associated emotion and get on with life.

But when overwhelming powerful events occur in our lives, this normal processing doesn’t work.

Imagine a graph where we plot our emotions over time.

The horizontal line plots time and the vertical line plots emotions.

At the very top of the vertical line we might have "ecstatic joy" and at the bottom we might have "soul destroying grief”.

Now if we were to plot these graphs carefully, day after day, most of us would rarely reach either the peak or the trough of the vertical.

We would have some highs and some lows and we would see a gentle oscillation between general happiness and some low moods.

Some days will be worse than others.

But for the main part we’d never go into the ultimate peak or the ultimate trough.

So when something happens that is truly unusual, we’re not used to it.

And we get caught by a tidal wave of thought and emotion.

Now THESE thoughts and feelings stand out from the crowd.

They aren't normal to us. We create a very powerful memory in our mind and body that makes these situations stand out from our day to day experiences.

We create a very powerful charge that means when we recall the event, we trigger a powerful cascade of thoughts.

These trigger an even more powerful cascade of chemicals in the body.

The problem occurs when we don’t want to recall these events.

A serious accident. An incident of abuse. A painful divorce.

All of these things create a powerful charge when we recall the event.

We’re overcome with emotions and often feel ourselves being re-traumatised. It’s as if we’re going through the experience all over again.

So how do we deal with these undigested life experiences?

Diminishing the charge is vital.

I have worked with the body for over 20 years and for the past few years I’ve learned ways to effectively remove this “charge".

A wise man once told me “a memory without the associated charge is simply known as wisdom” - and that’s exactly what I’m suggesting in this article.

One thing is certain.

To effectively deal with memories that have a lot of emotion attached to them, we need to work with the charge of the event to successfully negate any negative impact on us.

If this sounds like something you need some help with, please message me at hello@andreduquemin.com