Even though trauma is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disfunction of our memory.

Even though trauma is triggered by a stressful incident, it is really a disfunction of our memory. The problem isn’t the trauma—it’s that the trauma can’t be forgotten. Most memories, and our associated emotions, fade with time. But traumatic memories remain intense, bleeding into the present and ruining the future. So, in theory, the act of sharing those memories is an act of forgetting them.

This mistaken notion has been around for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, we have come to realise that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.To attempt to share these memories within in group settings only alienates us more and cements the abuse into place further compounding the abuse to both ourselves and others.


The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives.

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