You, like everyone, have memories that can affect how you feel. You can remember a happy memory and feel a bit of the happy emotion. Just as you can remember a sad memory and feel the sadness.

Our mind stores all of our memories and they’re always active, just not in a way our conscious mind is aware of. Because of this, we can constantly be affected by the emotions in our memories. Even memories you don’t think you ‘remember’.

The strong emotion associated with memories can cause disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The emotions can also cause more normal life problems, such as anger, stress, sadness, or fear.

The most popular way to deal with these sorts of problems is prescription medication. But, medication only tries to help the ’symptoms’ instead of treating the ’cause’. Long term results are usually just long term symptom management.

The key to long term help with these issues would appear to be the emotional association with the memory. What would happen if that association could be erased, reduced or even changed?

A process is being researched using the medication, propranolol, which works as an “amnesia drug”. The theory is to directly disrupt the connection between our memories and the emotions associated with them.

Described in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, they talk about psychiatrists at McGill University and Harvard University using the drug to disrupt the memories of trauma victims. The drug reduces the emotional connection with the memory while leaving the conscious part of the memory.

With this process, people still have the memory, but the emotion is reduced or detached. The potential problems with this process, such as permanence or side effects, are not known.

There are also ways to reduce and change the emotions associated with memories. These processes are well established and have no side-effects.

In particular, hypnosis. Hypnosis seems better suited for this process since, when in hypnosis, you are using the emotional part of your mind. This is very evident when working with traumatic memories from childhood. When re-experiencing memories from childhood a person often ‘feels’ younger than their current age. You tend to experience memories with the same age of mind that you originally experienced the situation.

Before a hypnotist uses modern hypnosis methods with traumatic memories, they must be properly trained. With the proper training, this process is safe, rapid and reliable. Clients often notice a difference after one session.

Addressing issues in this is about gaining real, inner perspective on your past. When this is done, it creates a sense of distance from the memory. A memory that no longer influences how you feel.

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