I Can’t Tell You What I Remember!

Although memory has been a favorite topic in many of the psychology courses that I have taken, I have not had memory and language acquisition concepts presented together. These two developmental processes and the way in which they interact can have crucial implications for later treatment of trauma experienced in the preverbal stage of early childhood. Research indicates that memories that may have been formed before a child acquires language will be difficult at best to be described verbally by the child once language is acquired. It seems that the most likely of reasons for this phenomenon is that the memory was not encoded using language and therefore not retrievable using verbal cues, discovering the precise retrieval cues may be problematic.

When an adolescent or even an adult is experiencing inexplicable difficulties in their everyday life, there can be a link to early childhood trauma. Symptoms of mood disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, dysthymia, and major depression often find their roots in the early childhood stress/trauma experienced by individuals. What interests me is how we can begin to treat a client who is unable to recall and articulate in words events that may be contributing to their disorder. Some individuals have flashes of memory, like snapshots in time or just a ‘sense’ that they were abused, neglected, or mistreated as very young children but cannot retrieve the memories. The inability to remember or recall more than scant details of the past may lead to further complications when the client is unable to substantiate their feelings with memories.

I am interested in working with children who have experienced trauma and am aware that simple talk therapy may not be completely effective. I have been investigating alternative ways in which traumatic memories can be accessed in an effort to guide a client toward better mental health. One such alternative to talk therapy is art therapy. The notion behind art therapy is that creative artwork gives clients an additional language to explore their current situation, identify issues, and cope with their feelings. The use of paint, clay and puppets are a few of the ways that children create in art therapy. Art therapy may be particularly effective with preverbal memories because although language originates in the left side of the brain, artwork engages the right side of the brain, which matures and develops earlier than the left/language side. Through use of creativity and the right brain children may retrieve memories, gain insight, and/or be able to ‘describe’ events that have activated trauma responses and abetted a detrimental life course.

If I weren’t already sold on art therapy…the connections that I have made between the developmental concepts of language acquisition and memory would have led me in that direction.