How Could I Forget It?
Traumatic memory is laid down in emotion, body memory, and perception and seems to be heavily guarded in deep brain neural knots, so that it doesn’t become adaptively integrated into explicit historical memory without feeling like it’s happening NOW. Our brain expects what it’s experienced and is constantly scanning for threat, even if we don’t have conscious memory of what that was. But it’s familiar to the deep Right Brain.
Anxiety always starts with primitive brain being triggered, going “UhOh”, and triggering survival protective responses. All those' ‘negative’ responses are actually Protective Emotions that worked pretty well when there were four legged predators in the bushes, but old anxious reactions can happen fast and feel stupid now, when a little slower and smarter would work better if we could create that. And we can.
Memories don’t just go away, but they can be adaptively integrated through the neural pathways and become just memories without unmanageable emotion or losing ourselves completely in them. The first phase is managing, then healing the cause so there’s not so much to manage.