The Whole-Brain Child

So how do we help our children when they’re suʃering from the
eʃects of past negative experiences? We shine the light of
awareness on those implicit memories, making them explicit so
that our child can become aware of them and deal with them in an
intentional way. Sometimes parents hope that their children will
“just forget about” painful experiences they’ve undergone, but
what kids really need is for parents to teach them healthy ways to
integrate implicit and explicit memories, turning even painful
experiences into sources of power and self-understanding.
There’s a part of our brain whose very job is to do just that: to
integrate our implicit and explicit memories, so that we can more
fully understand the world and ourselves. It’s called the
hippocampus, and it can be considered the “search engine” of
memory retrieval. The hippocampus works with diʃerent parts of
our brain to take all of the images, emotions, and sensations of
implicit memory and draw them together so that they can become
the assembled “pictures” that make up our explicit understanding
of our past experiences.
Think of the hippocampus as a master puzzle assembler that links
together the jigsaw pieces of implicit memory. When the images
and sensations of experience remain in implicit-only form, when
they haven’t been integrated by the hippocampus, they exist in
isolation from one another as a jumbled mess in our brain. Instead
of having a clear and whole picture, a completed jigsaw puzzle, our
implicit memories remain scattered puzzle pieces. We therefore
lack clarity about our own unfolding narrative, which explicitly
deɹnes who we are. What’s worse, these implicit-only memories
continue to shape the way we look at and interact with our here-
and-now reality. They aʃect the sense of who we are from moment
to moment—all without our even being aware that they are aʃecting
the way we interact with our world.
It’s crucial, therefore, that we assemble these implicit puzzle