This is part 3 of a three-part interview. Read parts 1 and 2.

Large swaths of populations, including Americans, are experiencing the devasting effects of trauma. To honor this epidemic, to offer new insights into its mechanisms, and to inspire hope for the reduction of human suffering, I extended my interview with Daniela Schiller, professor of neuroscience and professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital and director of the Schiller Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience.

Dale Kushner: Can someone suffer the effects of a traumatic memory but be unaware of the event that caused it? If someone had trauma but doesn't remember it, what’s going on?

Daniela Schiller: A lot of what is happening in the brain is unconscious. We have learnings that we are unaware of. We can have events that impact our behavior such that when there is a trigger, we'll respond in a certain way, but we wouldn't remember the association that formed it. A simple example is phobia. People are afraid of flying, but it isn't always because of a traumatizing event. The same is true with phobias about snakes or blood. The heart of these could be some event that they're unaware of. There are events that shape our behavior, that make our behavior habitual or strongly associated with something without our awareness.

DK: But if your research is about eliminating or muting the negative feelings and someone doesn't know the original trauma, how could they be helped?

DS: There are several lines of research, like the research on reconsolidation, the idea that you have to reactivate a memory in order to modify it. Also, the research........

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