Memory Work

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Faulkner’s famous line captures something psychotherapy encounters constantly.

The past does not remain neatly in the past.

EMDR offers one particularly clear way of understanding this. Experiences that have not been adequately processed can remain linked with the emotions, bodily sensations, beliefs, and responses that accompanied them. When something in the present activates that network, the past becomes alive again.

A child is laughed at while giving a presentation in fifth grade. Twenty years later, she barely thinks about the event. But when she speaks in a meeting, her face burns, her mind goes blank, and the old conviction returns:

“There is something wrong with me.”

The event is over. The pattern continues.

Experiential therapies work with this living past in different ways.

1. Reentering the memory

Through imagination, we can return to an old scene and introduce something that was missing then.

Someone intervenes. The child finds her voice. She is protected. She discovers she can leave.

AEDP uses portrayals to allow previously impossible feelings, actions, or responses to unfold. In IFS, Self can enter the memory, stay with the exile, offer what was missing, and sometimes bring the younger part out of the scene.

Why should something imagined have the power to change us?

Research on mental rehearsal offers one clue. Athletes can improve actual performance by repeatedly rehearsing movements in imagination. Research on imagery rescripting similarly shows that working with painful memories in imagination can change their emotional impact and associated meanings.

2. Following the associative network

Another way of working with memory is through association.

In EMDR, we activate emotionally charged material and follow its associations.

An image evokes a sensation. The sensation brings up a belief. The belief leads to another memory.

EFT can unfold similarly. As one aspect settles, another memory, emotion, image, or bodily sensation may emerge.

What changes?

The goal is not to erase the memory. We still know what happened.

But its emotional charge can diminish. The body no longer has to respond as though the past is happening now. Old beliefs can loosen. New meanings can emerge.

One possible explanation is memory reconsolidation: when emotional learning is reactivated, new experience can update what the memory means and what we expect because of it.

The past remains.

What changes is how it lives in us.