Do you remember the film directed by Michel Gondry with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet ‘If you leave me? In that film, the girl, after the end of the relationship with her boyfriend, decides to undergo an intervention for the deletion from the brain of all memories left by the tumultuous love story.
And so a specific treatment is sufficient because a person, who perhaps has loved himself madly for years, totally disappeared, as if he had never met her.
The transition from fantasy to reality now seems to be close, at least according to Raffael Kalisch, director of the Neuroimaging Center Mainz which, during the 9th Fens Forum of Neuroscience (The Biennial Conference of the European Federation of Neuroscience), held in Milan from 5 to 9 July, presented the first results on the effects on the memory of frightening events of psychotherapy in association with a drug, called levodopa (or L-Dopa), mainly used in the therapy of Parkinson’s.
It seems that thanks to these tools, the possibility of eliminate the past from our brain that we do not want to remember.
When a past does not want to be remembered?
We can answer this question with another: what transforms an event into something traumatic?
Each individual has a physiological information processing system through which he activates a process resolution process, reducing emotional stress and helping to generate new learning.
During the experience of a traumatic eventthe biochemical responses eliminated by it (adrenaline, cortisol …) block the innate system of the brain of information processing, leaving the information connected to the trauma isolated, trapped in a neural network with the same emotions, convictions and physical sensations that developed at the time of the event.
A traumatic eventTherefore, it can cause an interruption of the normal adaptive processing of information resulting in an unreal information: the experience remains stored exactly in the way it was lived.
The picture is complicated since, as human beings, we continually create relationships between events, words, emotions, experiences and images.
And so, through mental associations, countless stimuli can elaborate the psychological suffering connected to the experience does not ‘digest’.
If, for example, we think about the closure of a significant relationship, the thoughts relating to it can be activated by a song, by a restaurant, an emotion of sadness or by a romantic sunset, so that the avoidance of suffering is practically impossible.
Kalisch and collaborators have discovered that the process of modifying negative associations could involve the brain mechanisms related to pleasure and reward, and could therefore depend on release of dopaminea neurotransmitter that controls these mechanisms.
Here the discovery of the German research group can be welcomed very positively by those who suffer from all that symptomatological correlated connected to the post-traumatic stress disorder.
What can be better, in fact, than to get rid of the weight of the painful memories of an event through the cancellation of everything that is connected to that experience?
Moreover, this possibility would be in line with a reason for cultural order that pushes people to want to change their unwanted internal experiences and to implement experiential avoidance.
Western society, in fact, supports the idea that happiness is more easily accessible through theavoidance of suffering And that attempts to implement a check towards their painful internal experiences represent the keystone to feel good.
And so the avoidance is learned and encouraged by different sources in the life history of each individual and is elevated to the main strategy in front of the stimuli that cause anxiety.
Waiting, however, that the effectiveness of the L-Dopa drug is confirmed in removing painful memories, one can always resort to a psychological intervention aimed at unlocking the adaptive process that our brain usually performs and which, in the case oftraumatic eventhas jammed.
EMDR as a tool for processing and growth for the individual
EMDR (acronym for Eye Movement Desinsitization and Reprocessing) is an empirically validated psychotherapy approach (for a recent review on therapeutic effectiveness, please refer to Shapiro 2014) which, through desensitization and reworking through i eye movements – or other forms of bilateral stimulation – allows the development of the memory of the traumatic experience by reactivating the innate information processing system.
As a consequence of this process, the person begins to perceive the memory as something distant, far away; Change the cognitive evaluations of oneself, incorporating the emotions adequate to the situation and eliminating the disturbing physical sensations.
Helping the brain to reactivate that blocked mechanism means allowing it to find its natural resilience and use traumatic experience in a functional-adaptation key.
The opportunity to use a negative experience as a resource of a positive self -transformation is at the center of an important research area, which has been developed for over twenty years now, known as post-traumatic growth (Post-Traumatic Growth; among others, Germans and Calhoun, 2004).
Post-traumatic growth is the possibility that a traumatic event acts as a stimulus to positive change by transforming itself into an occasion of personal growth.
The idea that humans can change as a consequence of their ability to face the challenges of life is not new. What is reasonably new is the systematic study of this phenomenon in order to investigate everything positive that follows traumatic events, such as diagnosis of serious diseases, mourning, heart attack, car accidents, sexual abuse, disasters.
This does not mean that in the case of a post-traumatic growth The traumatic event turns into something positive. The growth process, in fact, does not eliminate the pain of experience.
What changes is that the devastation and the sense of confusion left by a trauma can provide an opportunity to open up to new ways of life, first not present; to a different perception of self as endowed with greater strength; to a change in interpersonal relationships, with the development, for example, of more intimate relationships and an increased sense of connection towards the people who suffer; Finally, to a greater appreciation for life in general.
Therefore, the integration of a painful event of our life, when suitably elaborate, with the set of other experiences can represent an ‘growth opportunitiesenriching the individual.
Are we sure, therefore, that the elimination of painful memories represents the desirable solution? Personally I don’t think. We are what we are, in fact, because we were what we have been.
