Internet rabbit holes are my new best friend lately. A few weeks ago, I started off on usmagazine.com and ended up on a random website, crying as I watched Miley Cyrus’ breakdown during her performance of “Wrecking Ball” after her break up with Liam Hemsworth (luckily, knowing they are back together, got me through it). Last week, after watching the movie Miss Sloane, which involves a trial and key eyewitness testimony, I ended up down another rabbit hole, this time researching the history of eyewitnesses.
It got me thinking about how much we rely on our own interpretation of events, whether in the courtroom or not, and how that, like some court cases, skews what we recall actually happened. More specifically, I started thinking about a conversation with a friend on healing. She heard advice from her therapist that I heard a few years back – memories can help us identify specific points of trauma or warn us of danger, but after a certain point, they are not quite as useful. We have to let them go to allow our new self to come forward and make judgments on more recent information.
So when should we use our memories to process and heal from wounds or when should we think back less?
In Anatomy of the Soul, psychiatrist Curt Thompson gives a great visual for how our memory works:
Every time we remember something, the memory itself changes, for the neural networks that are associated with that mental image are either reinforced to fire in a similar but slightly different fashion, or they are shaped and altered to fire differently…. In other words, the context in which you are remembering – both the setting and feelings about it – will shape the very memory you are having.
This quote rocked my world. I had always thought of my memories, or at least the really vivid ones, as fixed. I have one memory of winning a contest at my swim club when I was young and being terrified to go up and claim my prize. I hid and cried in the bathroom instead of going to get my winning jar of gummy bears. Sadly, because I didn’t, the prize got placed in the swim club office and melted into a big ball.
The context in which you are remembering – both the setting and feelings about it – will shape the very memory you are having.
It is one of my only memories from when I am younger. When I think of that day I recall fear, embarrassment, shame and other very negative, almost traumatic emotions (which sounds silly writing out loud) – but was it as I now recall it? Maybe it wasn’t actually that bad, just a short cry, but because now when I cry it’s always about something big, I am associating that memory as being on the same level as some of my more recent crying experiences. Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill because I’m incorrectly associating the memory.
The truth is, only God knows. I might never know the truth of my gummy bear experience (*sigh*). Luckily this memory doesn’t involve any real harm, but I think the time has come to let it go. Thinking about this memory is not helping me to move past anything and only reinforcing negative feelings. Are there any memories that do the same for you? To do this, for me, this means literally talking to myself in my head. As soon as I start to sense memories I’ve identified as making me feel worse, I tell myself a positive affirmation or Bible verse. For others, like my friend, doing something to bring you back to the present moment might work better. There are a lot of different ways to do this that might be worth exploring. Our minds never want to go down the road less traveled, but sometimes that’s exactly where we need to force our thoughts.
Leslie Delery 