Remembering
For people with dissociative disorders, remembering is a conundrum. It’s there but it’s not there. We know but we don’t know. It hurts but it helps.
Next summer, I’ve been asked to give a talk on remembering to a large group of people. The stakes are high so I’ve already started thinking about it. What do you say about a topic that’s elusive? How do you catch and hold a slippery eel long enough to describe it? Can you understand a firefly who twinkles momentarily only to disappear into the darkness?
Not Remembering
Remembering by Gena Brodie Robbins
I remember some things but, by no means, everything. My system kept an iron-clad guardrail around my mind that allowed only overwrought emotions, unreality, fragments, and memories that seemed flat and distant to seep out from behind the locked neurons where they were packed safely away from my awareness. No Name, an alter who appeared out of a tunnel, told me, “I have all your memories in this box. See? It’s locked. It’s my job to keep them away from you forever.” He was only one of several alters whose job it was to protect me from remembering. After years of therapy, and healing in a number of areas of my life, I moved on. I decided I wanted to live my life rather than argue with my alters all day about the benefits of knowing everything. I knew enough.
How do I explain to people that remembering my past is important even when my alters didn’t want me to remember? Even when I did a very poor job of remembering? Even when my own personal relationship with memory is a fraught dance of love and hate?
Mounds have been written about the Holocaust of European Jews in the 20th century. Many survivors of the concentration camps moved forward without looking back, relegating those memories to the trash bin of history. Others, like Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, who spent a year in Auschwitz where he watched his family die, vowed never to forget. Wiesel said, “Forgetting the past is relegating the victims to die a second death.”
Dark Night of the Soul
I think remembering our traumatic past is something akin to a spiritual discipline. Wiser people than I have called it the “dark night of the soul.” While we may not have chosen it, we are compelled to enter a liminal space where memories or the lack of them seem to control our very breath, life, will, and spirit. Like riding a roller coaster ride we didn’t choose to ride on, we hold our breath and hang on tight until the ride is over.
Front & Back Brain Memories
Last winter, I led a workshop at Healing Together entitled Hidden Memories where I explained to the best of my ability why some memories remain hidden. When we experience an event, the sensations enter our body through the back brain which instantaneously decides whether we’re in danger or not. If we’re not in danger, the memory is sent to the front brain where it becomes a part of our narrative story. If we are in danger, the sensations bypass the front brain and go immediately into our bodies initiating a flight, fight, or freeze response, the body’s protective response to danger. That’s why our traumatic memories so often reside in our bodies, why we are on emotional overload, and why our fragments of narrative feel flat and distant. With DID and OSDD, some of our alters may hold the full narrative of the memory which does not become a part of our front brain storage until we’ve met, communicated with, and learned the story from the part of us who experienced it. Still other alters may block the sharing of memory for internal reasons, pacts they’ve made with each other to protect the greater whole, or comfort with the way things are so why rock the boat. While we build our memory bank with memories we remember and memories we don’t remember, our system heals from the simple act of being heard and acknowledged.
Self-Care
Remembering traumatic events comes in flashbacks, body memory, fragments of memory, and other back brain means of storage. I’ve found the best way to move forward in healing is to trust my own system to give me the memories I need. Usually, our bodies modulate the release of information in small bites we can manage. Still, new memories are often dysregulating.
When you are receiving new information from your insiders, self-care is your highest priority. Try to limit outside responsibilities. Ask family, friends and co-workers to pick up some of your load. Share your memories with your therapist or, better yet, ask your alter who holds the memory to share it. Take care of yourself gently. What do you need right now? A nap? A drink of hot chocolate? A bubble bath? If you’re up to it, write in your journal about the memory itself or about how you are feeling.
When you are remembering, remember, this too shall pass. And you shall become whole.
Invitation
Check out my website at www.lynbarrett.com where you can download my free ebook called DID Unpacked and receive a free weekly newsletter. My memoir, Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory will be released on December 1, 2021. Our new Dissociative Writers website is filled with writing opportunities to explore.
What Do You Think?
Writing about remembering with you, my faithful followers, helps me get my thoughts in order. I’m still stewing over how to develop this talk in a way that is not only informative but inspirational. Help me by sharing your thoughts on memories and remembering in the comments below.
What is your relationship with traumatic memories?
Does traumatic memory come fast and furious or do you need to coax the memories out one-by-one?
Do you experience remembering as an important part of your healing process or as an unwanted intrusion you try to avoid?
🕊
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it.
Memories need to be shared.”
Lois Lowry