"Implicit/sensory memories
Frequently, memories of especially traumatic events, including severe child abuse, are reexperienced later
in life on a sensory level, for example as “flashbacks.” This is thought to be due, in part, to the fact that those brain and psychological systems responsible for directing the encoding and early organization and processing of explicit, narrative memory material may be flooded (or at least bypassed) by overwhelming emotional input during severe abuse or trauma -- resulting in less integrated, primarily sensory (as opposed to verbally/autobiographically mediated) recollections upon exposure to trauma-reminiscent stimuli (Metcalfe & Jacobs, 1996; Siegel, 1999; van der Kolk, McFarlane, & Weisaeth, 1996). In addition, traumatic experiences that occurred prior to the child’s acquisition of language necessarily will be nonnarrative, typically sensorimotor in nature.
As opposed to narrative memories, implicit, sensory recollection is generally devoid of autobiographic material, and is often experienced as an intrusion of unexpected sensation (e.g., sights or sounds of an event) rather than of remembering, per se. Although sensory reexperiencing is often accompanied by the associated emotions that were involved at the time of the abuse, the sensory memory of the maltreatment experience and the affects conditioned to the memory (i.e., CERs) are likely to be separate phenomena (Davis, 1992; LeDoux, 1995). In many cases, sensory memories become the stimuli that release strong CERs, which can, in turn, reinstate enough of the context of the original abuse to trigger additional reexperiencing. As will be described below, the combination of triggered sensory memories and associated negative affects is often characteristic of posttraumatic stress".
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye
"So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of? And there are various facets. And there's referential and non-referential compassion. But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering. But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex,means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome."
