For a full year, I didn’t listen to music. Music was seemingly dead to me after the death of Prince. Perhaps it was a part of the grieving process not to be able to listen to any music, but I feared a playlist of Prince popping up, and I just couldn’t bear to hear his voice and know that he was forever gone.
Needless to say, I engulfed news stories about him in an attempt to understand and gain some peace, but making peace with his death was difficult. In fact, it seemed more difficult than I thought it should have been, considering that I didn’t personally know him and we’d never actually met.
For a while, I distanced myself from news stories too because there wasn’t anything that could be done to change what was inevitably true. Prince, the artist was gone. He’d only live on through his music, but I just wasn’t ready to listen to his music at all. So, instead, I tried to move on, but my mind retaliated, and my body finally gave up on keeping up with the score of past trauma.
Around February 2017, I began having a lot of déjà vu moments. It was strange. I’d be in the middle of doing something when I’d experience flashes of light within my head and it would feel like what was occurring within that moment had been something I’d already experienced before. There might be words or situations that I knew had happened before as they were occurring within that moment, and these experiences were happening so often, I told my therapist about them.
The therapist thought that the frequent déjà vu and the flashes I experienced were likely my brain actively working to reconnect fragmented memories, almost like puzzle pieces snapping into place. This is a known phenomenon in trauma recovery—when the mind has dissociated from certain experiences for years, it often reintegrates them in bursts, which can feel like sudden flashes of understanding or even déjà vu.
For the most part, I look back and realize that the beginning of 2017 was the beginning of another part of my healing journey. First of all:
- My Brain Was Repairing Itself
- When trauma is deeply stored in separate memory networks, the brain can work in the background to piece them together over time. When this happens rapidly, it can feel overwhelming, almost like a flood of memories trying to make themselves known.
- The flashes I experienced might have been the brain connecting old experiences with present awareness, leading to a sudden feeling of recognition (which can trigger déjà vu).
- Dissociation vs. Integration
- Before healing, trauma is often stored in disconnected fragments—some memories might be felt in the body (like anxiety or panic), while others might exist as vague images or sensations without full context.
- As I processed and integrated my past during this time, my brain likely merged those pieces, which might explain why déjà vu was happening at such an overwhelming rate—it wasn’t just “random,” it was part of a larger repair process.
- The “Flashes” of Recognition
- Some trauma survivors report seeing flashes of images, places, or even symbolic memories as their brain processes old material.
- This suggests that during the time I experienced the deja vu episodes that my brain was likely shifting between explicit memory (conscious recollection) and implicit memory (subconscious emotional/physical memories).
- The déjà vu may have been a sign of those two systems syncing up after years of disconnection.
My brain has likely finished much of the heavy lifting when it comes to reconnecting fragmented memories. Since I’ve already processed a significant portion of my trauma, there’s less material left in a dissociated state that needs “snapping together.” I’ve also built stronger neural pathways for understanding and integrating past experiences, so there’s no longer the same level of confusion or disorientation.
The fact that déjà vu has drastically decreased means that my mind is no longer working overtime to repair those fractures—a sign of deep healing. Although I might still get the occasional déjà vu moment (which is normal), it’s no longer coming from a place of unresolved trauma.
That period in early 2017 was intense, but I believe it was my brain’s way of protecting and healing me in the best way it knew how. I wasn’t broken—I was rebuilding. 💜
Read on to the next part …
My Voice Unchained 