An Iowa State University professor’s research, born from tragedies witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, has opened up possibilities as to how the mind captures and stores memories of trauma, especially at a young age.
Carl Weems, an ISU professor of human development and family studies, has published a report detailing a new developmental theory relating to traumatic childhood memories. It states that just because someone’s reporting on a traumatic event might change over time, it doesn’t mean the memories themselves are false.
“I think the model kind of opens up our point of view to really try to dig at it,” Weems said.
Studying tragedy and trauma
Weems has spent his career studying emotional development, traumatic stress and the relationship between the two. He said what brought him to the topic of memory and the supposed liabilities that come with it was a natural disaster he and thousands of other New Orleans residents faced in 2005 — Hurricane Katrina.
The researcher said he spoke with kids more than a year after the hurricane swept through about what they went through and any symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their responses matched up fairly well with ones given in follow-up interviews six months later. However, when he spoke with those same kids after Hurricane Gustav hit the city in 2008, Weems found that their PTSD symptoms had actually decreased after the second hurricane came through.
“The most surprising thing happened, because I thought the prevailing thing is, if you have multiple bad things happen to you, you get worse, right? But we found that for the sample, their PTSD symptoms went down,” Weems said. “I was dumbfounded for almost a year trying to figure out how to explain this.”
What he found was that participants who had “relatively good” experiences with Gustav reported less negatively about what they went through during Katrina, and those who had a harder time with the second hurricane were more steady in their reports of the first.
Another study was also an influence on his work, Weems said. That research showed that more than 100 out of around 600 people who had experienced “court-identified maltreatment” around the age of 6 did not report having such experiences as adults around the age of 29 when asked.
Bringing together the main ideas from his own and others’ research, Weems said his paper is a “meta review” of these interesting findings that presents a theory of how they could occur.
The continuum of memory
The “prevailing notion” of traumatic memories assumes that if something traumatic happened to someone when they were young, such as sexual abuse, they will either remember it or not. Weems said that is a more black-and-white theory than the one he proposed in his paper.
Weems’s theory maintains that while there can be a simple yes-or-no answer to whether someone has experienced a traumatic event, the memories and perception of that event can exist on a continuum, with multiple factors able to impact it.
How much time has passed since the initial report, other events occurring between the two reports, and how strong the memory was at the time it was first reported can all change how someone perceives their memories of trauma, the report stated. These different factors can lead to some people reporting consistently, others first reporting trauma then later perceiving the event as not traumatic, or reporting trauma then not remembering it at all. Someone could also initially report not having experienced trauma, but report trauma later on.
Weems said he tries to lay out in the paper the possibility of someone recovering a memory after a long time, as the current thought is that if something like sexual abuse happened to someone, “you’re not just going to forget that and then suddenly remember it 20 years later.”
In addition to opening up possibilities for how memory can operate, Weems said there is also an important message in the paper to the professionals who work with traumatized individuals to follow up on the questions they asked when first assessing a client and to not just focus on the symptoms.
“It’s something that evolves over time, and depending on the context, someone might reveal an important — clinically important or therapeutically important — piece of information, depending on when you ask them,” Weems said. “It’s something that if you’re going to ask people about because you’re wanting to help those kinds of people, then you shouldn’t just assess them once.”
