Loss of Mindfulness and Forgetting

It is the word 'trauma,' which refers to a terrible event we have lived through that cannot be remembered but which causes painful related symptoms, that best captures an acute paradox in our relationship to our own histories: some of the most significant events in our lives are inaccessible to our day to day memory; the more significant something is, the less likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

There appears to be a pain threshold beyond which our minds will not go in order to retrieve a memory of an incident. We'll have no trouble recalling a pleasant childhood spring morning thirty years ago by the river bank, when we swam and fed the ducks; but we'll be unable to recall a moment on that same day when our troubled father lost his cool over an apparent triviality and, seemingly out of nowhere, smacked us across the cheek with such force that we were forced to walk home alone. The memory-retrieving region of our brains behaves similarly to an eye that clenches shut in the sight of a flash, and similarly to a computer that shuts down when requested to archive and then recover instances of tremendous rage or terror, ridicule or disgrace. Some of the issues are quite serious, such as a bomb or a bodily violation, while others appear to be more insignificant, such as mockery, an unexplainable surge of wrath, or a protracted absence. The subjective impression that an incident is too difficult for us to make sense of; that it is too out of sync with our models of reality; and that it poses an unacceptable risk to our hopes for ourselves and those we want to love is what defines a trauma, not an objective score on a scale of awfulness.

While our ignorance of our traumas may appear to provide some protection, the cumulative effect of our dissociation has the potential to completely derail our lives. Our father was a terribly vindictive and terrifying guy, which we may not have realized at the time, but it is on this premise that we have come to fear all men and to loathe our entire being. We may not have remembered our mother's terrible competitiveness, but it was her buried presence that instilled in us a detrimentally shy demeanor and a propensity of withdrawing oneself from any situation where we may prevail and be admired by others throughout our formative years. It is not because problems have been relegated to the catacombs that they disappear; rather, it is precisely because they cannot be brought to consciousness and resolved via discourse and sympathetic analysis that their impact is magnified.

Among the difficulties of recovering from trauma is that we are unable to recall information about which we are not even aware that we have forgotten it. We must continue in a circumstantial manner, awaking ourselves to the prospect of buried difficulties on the basis of a variety of otherwise unexplainable present-day worries and tic manifestations. In the absence of a readily apparent cause for our body dysmorphia or shyness, impotence or insomnia, paranoia or despair, we should begin digging — in the presence of those who love us and understand our minds — to prevent our stories from being controlled by figures from our personal histories who do not have our best interests at heart.

We must regain as much of our past as will be required in order to begin living the liberated adult lives that we so well deserve.