I have recently completed an article "Healing Traumatic Memories through Closure" which addresses a question I have been asked many times in my career. That question is: "Why do you think that flashbacks of traumatic life events return to consciousness when you really want to forget them forever?"  The article looks at the latent reaction that roughly 76% of all survivors experience as a result of going through a traumatic life event. This latent reaction, which I consider to be the worst symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), is the mental re-experiencing of a traumatic life event. Mental re-experiencing is called recollections or commonly referred to as flashbacks. Going through an unexpected flashback can be very confusing, unexpected and emotionally painful.

 Many of you who follow me know that my work has focused on how traumatic memories are treated by the human brain. Research has proven that the brain treats traumatic memory differently than non-traumatic memory of events we experience in life. The brain's operational objective with non-traumatic memory is to process the content and emotion in an orderly fashion. Once completed the brain stores the memory in long-term memory bank. The brain is all about order. The overwhelming emotion of a traumatic life event and the inability to experience the intense emotion causes the brain to route the recording of the event to another portion of the brain. This alternate routing by the brain is to save the victim from the emotion that could otherwise cripple them. The human ability to survive traumatic life events is incredible.