It comes up every once in a while —the pull of memory. Past experiences, past relationships and their energy, past losses. A gravitational weight drawing attention away from what is.

what memory actually does

Memory is not simply recollection. There are two kinds at work in the nervous system, and only one of them shows up as a story you can tell.

Explicit memory is what we know we know, what we refer to when we say ‘I remember.’ A narrative, something you learned, the route to work.  Something you can put into words.

Implicit memory is different. It lives in the body, often underneath your awareness  — as  posture, reflex, tension that arrives before you know why. It doesn’t announce itself as a memory because it’s most often not consciously known. It’s a feeling. A contraction.  Something you just know.

A pull toward the past can seem, from the inside, to actually be the present. That’s not your nervous system being irrational — it learned something once, and it is applying that learning in the present moment.

why you can’t simply choose otherwise

This is why heeding advice such as ‘just let it go’ is not actually possible. 

Implicit memory isn’t accessed by ‘insight’ and therefore doesn’t respond to ‘thought’. You can understand, intellectually, that the past is behind you — that the person, situation, experience is not the dangerous one. 

You can know all that very clearly,  and yet the bracing continues. The pull persists. Not because you’re weak or choosing it, but because the body is operating from its own archive.

Thinking harder doesn’t reach it.

The mind alone can’t figure this out because the memory isn’t in the mind.  It’s in the body.

Your nervous system literally cannot tell the difference between remembering a threat and being in one.  It’s the same message, with the same neurochemicals being released. 

what is also true

No single event predicts the whole journey.

Not because experiences don’t shape us — they do, profoundly. The nervous system is exquisitely sensitive to what happens, and holds far more than we’re consciously aware of, even if not known as explicit memory.

But the nervous system is also not fixed. It is remarkably capable of using new information, forming new responses, updating old predictions when given the right conditions. This is neuroplasticity.  The archive is not the final word.

History doesn’t change but it is no longer an insistent predictor of the future. 

working with what the body holds

This is the foundation of somatic work such as Somatic Experiencing®, working with implicit memory alongside explicit memory.  The less conscious alongside conscious awareness.   

We do so not by rehashing the narrative but by attending to what the body is doing as the story surfaces.  A tightening here. A held breath. An impulse that didn’t get to complete. The work follows those threads, slowly and carefully, giving the nervous system what it couldn’t access in the original moment: enough safety, enough care, enough compassion.

Over time, memory loses its charge.  The pull loosens. Not because the memory disappears, but because the body is no longer stuck living it.

Presence becomes gently available as the nervous system stops looking to the past as though it’s the present.  Your body has learned another way to be.

‘Here I am’ also becomes ‘Now, I am’.

from here

If you’ve tried to think your way free, and yet your body didn’t follow, somatic work may offer something that other approaches haven’t. Book a free 20-minute conversation if you’d like to learn more about your options.