Dr. Don WoodResolving Your Trauma-Based Challenges So You Can Unlock Peak Performance

Past Event Still Impacting Your Life

4 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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1:18

A short video by Dr. Don Wood explaining how traumatic or disturbing events are stored in memory with high sensory detail (high-resolution) and later trigger physiological responses when similar cues appear. The speaker contrasts ordinary low-resolution memories (easy recent recall) with vivid traumatic memories that activate the nervous system in response to reminders (e.g., seeing a white van after an accident).

Chapters

Are you struggling to overcome something that happened to you years ago? Humans store explicit memory. That's all the details about an event and experience. If something you experienced was a traumatic event, a disturbing event, all your senses are heightened. So if I asked you what you did last night, you could probably remember it even if it wasn't traumatic. So that's just going to be stored in a fairly low resolution file. Not a lot of detail to it, but enough that you could recall it. If I asked what happened to you a year ago last night, that would be harder to recall, unless it was traumatic. Then you would be able to pull up a lot of information, because your mind stored that and uses memory as a resource to protect against that happening again. So, for example, you got into an accident with a white van, and then all of a sudden, you're walking down the street and a white van drives by, and your heart starts beating in your chest. Why did that happen? Because your mind recalled the old memory that was stored in high definition, started to read that memory in real time, activate your nervous system, because it's not activating to the current van, it's responding to the old van. Something that doesn't exist anymore. But your mind doesn't know that because of the way it reads the data.