lb_lee | Memory Work Essays, Chunk Six: Passing the Metaphorical Kidney Stone

This is another chunk of our memory work essays, posted as promotion for the AllFam Kickstarter. Every $300 raised will get another 1000 words posted. We're less than $200 to $2000; if/when we hit that, these essays will get illustrated and a special limited color Risograph print run.

Previous Chunks: see index!

Passing the Metaphorical Kidney Stone

It’s a nasty metaphor, but it’s a nasty process. We really don’t like doing it, ourself, because the more force we apply to getting a memory up, the more likely we are to not take no for an answer, which is more likely to lead to memory distortion and false positives. This is something only to try if you’ve done all the prep work, your internal symptoms are utterly unbearable, have remained so for long enough that you’re at your wits’ end, and nothing else has worked.

The tactics are listed in order with the ones that worked best for us at the top. (With the usual caveat that what worked for us may not work for you, especially the headspace stuff. I have no idea whether that’d work for others.)

Using headspace. This is our preferred method, because our memories manifest there, originally as ghosts, now as water or goop. Engage with the ghost or the goop, and engage with the memory. (Also, our headspace has ways to tell us, “no, you’re wrong, that didn’t happen, stop bothering me!” which is super important. If you’re going to dig into your brain like that, you need a method that can tell you yes and no, not just yes.)
If your headspace doesn’t play that role, or doesn’t exist at all, you can try using “guided visualization,” which is a fancy way of saying “imagination with substance.” (Our headspace, after all, is basically a decades-long communal act of imagination that’s been run for so long and under such consistent rules that it’s become freestanding.) This gets a bad rap as wish-fulfillment, so it’s vital that if you do this, your brain or imagination has a way of telling you no, or other things you don’t want to hear. If your imagination never does anything you don’t want, then don’t use it.
If these tactics don’t work, stream-of-consciousness writing or art sometimes helps. Some people apparently use their non-dominant hand for this; we used our dominant hand, but a means of writing that felt safe. (Also, back in our ghost period, ghosts would sometimes be compelled to write down what they contained, usually in rambling scrawling horror movie gibberish.) Whatever you end up making, even if it makes no sense to you or upsets you, don’t throw it out. Just put it somewhere you don’t have to look at it, and let it be for a while. Worse comes to worse, you’ll have records for later. (Especially handy since our memory tends to get cloudy of stuff we make while in this state.)
There’s also the classic trick of plowing into as many of your worst triggers as possible in hopes of jarring something loose, but it doesn’t always work, and it’s the equivalent of doing a tap dance in a minefield. We don’t recommend it if you have anything better. If you must, try to use Staci Haines’ Healing Sex’s chapter on dealing with triggers as a guide.

DO NOT USE THESE METHODS

Some people have done some really stupid things in the pursuit of getting memories up. Under no circumstances do we advise using these methods.

Drugs known for causing trance states or shifted states of consciousness, concentration, or memory. This gets a special mention because of its infamous history in memory work. There’s a reason Sibyl’s sodium pentathol/amytal treatments became infamous during the Memory Wars. We’ve also known folks who self-medicated and put themselves into the deep end, convinced that chemicals were the only way to get memories up, and believing increasingly improbable things as they took more and more. We have seen absolutely no convincing evidence that any drug will directly help memory work at this time.
Anything known for causing trance states or shifted states of consciousness or memory: hypnosis, fasting/starvation/diet manipulation, sleep deprivation, repetitive music/movement combos, and certain kinds of breathing exercises. Some people think drugs are bad, but "natural" things are harmless, and that’s not true. For this process, you want to be on stable ground, physiologically and psychologically, as much as you can. Though it’s unavoidable, we don’t even like it when our brain horks something up in our sleep, because when we’re groggy, we’re far more credulous, and the memory seems more likely to be distorted. If it makes you loopy, goofy, messes with your memory (including “enhancing” it) or puts you in a state you shouldn’t drive in, don’t use it for memory work. (EDIT: in early versions of this post, we cited a plural's work claiming hypnosis could be used safely in memory work, but we no longer feel okay citing them. Please, please do not use hypnosis.)
Doing memory work in corporeal groups. I’ve seen folks do this to "prove" their past life memories were real, as kink play, or in the pursuit of some religious or social group they were a part of. Don’t. Don’t don’t don’t. Even in the best case scenario, where everyone has good intentions and pure motives, that is a level of influence nobody should have on your inner workings. Worst case, you are in the process of having your psyche systematically broken down. Peer pressure isn’t always obvious, but it can be powerful; when we’re in a group of people doing the same thing, we automatically judge our experiences by those of the people in the group, and set our expectations accordingly. We don’t even like having episodes while in our therapist’s office and avoid it whenever possible. This is a personal journey, and experiencing narrative memory chunks is best done with as little outside influence and interference as possible.

While it’s not on the bullet list of “never ever,” we also want to bring up the role of therapy in memory work. Most of what we’ve read shows multiples digging up memories while in their therapist’s office, and depicts this as the best way to do so. We deeply disagree, but we also seem to be unusual for that, so here’s our explanation.

--to be cont. in part 7!