She is not overly in favour of trauma sharing I think.
There is a lot of people, particularly those who don’t fully recall their trauma, who have difficulty differentiating between memories and intrusive thoughts on the one hand, and horrible intrusive ideas of what could have happened on the other.
That’s been borne out in trauma centres all over the place, and was a huge problem for the trauma unit I attend when they first opened. Individuals’ trauma stories quickly became far more elaborate, and took on elements of the trauma stories of other patients.
Suddenly a person with very little recall of their trauma would have vivid recall of what was essentially another person’s trauma, simply because they’d heard the details.
It’s a huge problem, because for the individual, those transferred “memories” can be just as real, and cause all the same visceral physical reactions, that their actual trauma creates. And once embedded within their own trauma story, it can be almost impossible to whittle it back down to what they actually experienced, and what is transference.
It’s definitely the reason I don’t spend a lot of time going through old trauma diaries. Because it’s something our brain does, of its own accord, to fill in memory gaps. I have memory gaps (big ones), and it’s incredibly important to me not to unknowingly fill those gaps with other peoples’ trauma. I’d rather not know.
I find the whole thing a little bit frightening, especially being a person who does have memory gaps. Part of me naturally wants to know what happened to me, but the thought of suffering someone else’s trauma experience as though it were my own? I definitely don’t need that.
