Baxter’s and my recall of our traumatic experiences suggest that stress alters memory formation or learning. Connectionist theorist Warren Tryon (1995) suggests that when learning is conceived as occurring across a network of associations, dissociation “is the difference between what was learned [subconsciously] and what can be remembered [consciously]”
(p. 309). In other words, our dissociative experiences changed not merely how we interacted with our environments afterward, they also changed the predictability of our memories and, hence, of our responses to the environment. As a result of their dissociative origins, fragmented and disturbing memories can be difficult to access deliberately (Tryon, 1995; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995). On the other hand, and paradoxically, these memories tend to be particularly vivid and to arise into consciousness spontaneously (sometimes as flashbacks), to be quite resistant to decay, to be highly charged with emotional and sensory detail, and to have sparse and disorganized narrative quality (Harvey & Bryant, 1999; Roozendaal et al., 1997; van der Kolk et al., 1997). These paradoxes of traumatic memory have stymied clinical psychologists and researchers for decades.