| dc.description.abstract | Immediately after a traumatic event, almost all people suffer from intrusive thoughts about what took place (McFarlane, 1992). In addition, trauma victims can experience intrusive brief sensory fragments of the trauma, irritability, mood swings, and (emotional) numbing__all of which are a normal part of the recovery process (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). Within three months of the trauma, many victims recover, however, in a significant subgroup of victims, trauma symptoms can persist for years (APA, 2000; Ehlers & Clark, 2000). In this subgroup of trauma victims who receive the diagnosis PTSD, clear and vivid memories of the traumatic event regularly intrude into consciousness with an immediate sensory and emotional intensity that gives the victims the feeling that the traumatic event is happening over again, and at this very moment in time and place (Ehlers & Clark, 2000). The core problem in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is that the memory of the trauma is not integrated and accepted as being part of the trauma victim's own personal past (van der Kolk, 1996). Instead the trauma memory comes to exist separately from other ordinary autobiographical (personal) memories. This paper has been done independently, in an effort to answer the following questions regarding the re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD: Where is the memory storage system for trauma autobiographical memories? Is it the same memory storage system that contains ordinary (non-trauma) autobiographical memories? How do the memory system(s) involved in intrusive memories operate to enhance and /or inhibit their retrieval? How can the PTSD phenomena of “flashbacks” and “affect without recollection” be explained? Are the contents of flashbacks meaningful? If so, in what way? Finally: How and why does dissociation sometimes occur in trauma victims? In light of these questions, two relevant cognitive-behavioral theories will be presented and analyzed: (1) a “cognitive model of PTSD” (Ehlers & Clark, 2000), which suggests that PTSD becomes persistent in trauma victims who have negative appraisals of the event and are unable to re-tell what happened during the event in a coherent way, due to a disturbance in autobiographical memory; and (2) “dual representation theory” (Brewin, Dalgleish, & Joseph, 1996), which suggests that there exists two separate, and distinct memory storage systems, one which contains ordinary autobiographical memories, and another which contains trauma autobiographical memories. Additionally, I propose in this paper, a 2-system memory theory of how the mechanisms of intrusive memory might work. The model is consistent with the main clinical features of PTSD, draws on some of the previous research contributions of other authors, and attempts to answer the research questions which I have presented. The theory suggests that within the implicit memory system as we know it, there exists a secondary implicit memory system called, “body memory” (e.g., van der Kolk, 1994), which has a minimal amount of conscious awareness, and operates mainly subconsciously to encode, store and play-back many of the re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD. | eng |