Reminders of the traumatic event are especially significant for people with PTSD because they have a strong tendency to be more aware of trauma-related stimuli of all types (McNally, 1997; Paunovic, Lundh, & Ost, 2002; Sutker, Vasterling, Brailey, & Allain, 1995) and, when these stimuli are present, to pay less attention to other information that may mitigate the salience of trauma-related stimuli. Trauma memories, thus, may seem especially accurate, but may in fact not correspond faithfully with the other verifiable accounts of the event. What this point suggests is that seeing the “whole picture” at the time of the trauma or afterward in remembrance is especially difficult for survivors to accomplish on their own. Furthermore, the convincing quality of trauma memories with their high levels of sensory data makes it difficult for survivors to imagine that they remember anything less than the whole truth of their experience (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Thus, being confronted or challenged with memory inaccuracies might be necessary to the psychological healing of trauma, but in the process may evoke embarrassment or shame in survivors for being mistaken about the veracity of their own accounting.

Moreover, the presence of trauma-related stimuli not only tends to arouse and perhaps hyperarouse the person, but they tend also to disrupt the person’s ability to learn (and remember) non-traumatic material (McNally, 1997; Wolfe & Schlesinger, 1997). The presence of trauma-related stimuli with high emotional valence may contribute to people with PTSD thinking predominantly and automatically in binary, fight or flight, terms and their distractibility toward trauma-related stimuli can make learning a slow and frustratingly recursive process— and can negatively affect a student’s confidence in her ability to learn.