What a Trauma Memory From 16 Years Ago Taught Me

I've never really liked the dentist as an adult, but never thought much about it. But recently, I had a dentist appointment scheduled, and, as the day went on, something kept nagging at me. After a few hours, the nervousness had become straight-up fear. "It's just the dentist! What are you so scared of?" I kept asking myself throughout the morning as the appointment grew closer. I could not put my finger on it. As I grew more and more fearful, I started to feel like my younger self, the one who found herself in an environment where she was not always safe. This realization caused me to stop what I was doing, find a quiet space, and try to understand what my younger self was trying to tell me. Over the years, I've learned to listen to her and to approach this feeling with curiosity instead of judgment. It doesn't happen often anymore, but, when it does, I listen.

I started to think through the dentist appointment step by step to see if I could pinpoint where the fear was coming from. I thought about walking into the dentist's office and being ushered back to the individual exam room. That didn't seem to be it. Next step, you lay down in the dentist's chair. It felt like I was playing the game of "hot and cold" with my memories and thinking of this step made me feel like I was getting warmer. "OK, you lay down in the dentist's chair, then what happens?" I thought. "Then...a stranger...puts their fingers in your mouth." Ding ding ding. I'd found it, the memory that my brain had felt safe enough to bring forward after all this time: 16 years ago, when I experienced an attempted gang rape, one of the attackers shoved his fingers in my mouth.

Making Space for the Hard Memories With Radical Acceptance

It has been so long since I was sexually assaulted in that dark fire station, 16 years since the event that I often describe as the "cherry on top of a trauma sundae" that I'd been building for a few years by that point. For a long time, I had virtually no memory of the event, other than the three men entering the room I was hiding in and me running out of the room an unknown amount of time later. A posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis in 2012 and the subsequent hard work of trauma recovery guided by a trauma therapist helped me remember more. You can watch my TedxTalk here for the full story. But I'd never had the memory I'd just recovered. I'd just defended my Master's thesis (Exploring the Mental Health Impacts of Incidents of Mass Violence on First Responders) a few days earlier and therefore completed graduate school (MA: Human Services, Trauma & Resilience.) I'd been a long-time crisis counselor and first responder. I had no shortage of education or real-world experience helping others manage and understand their own trauma memories or triggers. It was time to apply the same grace and understanding to myself.

The first thing I did was respond to the memory with acceptance. "OK," I said definitively, out loud to no one. OK; I accept that this is a part of my story. OK; I accept that this happened to me. I steadied myself internally and prepared to feel the weight of the event with this new context. I knew that I had the ability to hold all the feelings and not be capsized by them. Anger came. Sadness came. I met all of it with acceptance and let the feelings wash over me, instead of trying to push it all away like I did when the assault was fresh. I consciously worked to stay present in my body, as I didn't know if the disassociation would come again as it had all those years ago. My sweet, sensitive dog Bailey had been eating her food but came over and laid her head down on my lap. Feeling her was a great anchor to the present, and after many minutes of staying open to any reactions or feelings, the heaviest ones subsided.

The dentist appointment was now less than an hour away. I felt like if I cancelled it I might never go back. So, I went. Throughout the short appointment, I kept reminding myself that I was safe both in my environment and in my body. During the exam, I was able to hold space for the new memory and told myself that it was OK to feel uncomfortable and scared based on what had happened to me. The appointment was over quickly, and after I was able to talk to my husband and best friend who supported me with love and validation.

Episodic-Autobiographical Memory

The idea of going to the dentist, being laid down, and having a stranger put their fingers in my mouth and having that bring back the memory of my sexual assault is an example of a memory that gets stored in the memory center of our brain, the hippocampus in our temporal lobe. Then our amygdala, also in the temporal lobe, is responsible for tying emotions to memories and giving our memories emotional context. This is called episodic-autobiographical memory. Dr. Faith Harper tells us about episodic-autobiographical memory (EAM) in her book Unf#ck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers. "This is the storage of event-based knowledge...the sh*t that happens to you" (Harper, 2023). So my EAM had associated the dentist with my sexual assault for almost two decades, and it took all of that time for me to connect the two. Making that connection didn't take away the memory, but it gave my reaction context and allowed me to give myself extra support, understanding, and grace.

"The ability to mentally travel to specific events from one’s past, dubbed episodic autobiographical memory (E-AM), contributes to adaptive functioning" (Petrician et al., 2020). I think of it as my brain doing me a kindness for all of those years. Remembering everything that had happened to me in that time period would have pushed me into mental collapse, and I was already dealing with way too much trauma. My best friend, therapist Hannah Myer, and I often talk about how our brains bring us memories when we have the ability or capacity to handle them. I've learned to trust my body and my mind, and this means that when something like this memory comes forward, I feel that I have the ability to make sense of it and weave it into my greater life story. For more on finding coherence in your life story, I wrote about that in my book After Trauma.