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

[lb_lee]

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.)

 

1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. 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.)
4. 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 that plural in 2021 went batshit, abandoned their cats, one of whom died, and went on a binge of 24/7 hypnosis and memory work with their partner, which they later admitted mostly gave false results. They also scammed me for over $600. 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!

Comments

Memory work, from one aphantasia system

[(Anonymous)]

Leaving this here as another system's experience of memory work.

We get memory chunks kinda backwards. We start getting emotional flashbacks and body memories, usually in response to some kind of trigger. It's taken practice to recognize, especially the emotional flashbacks. Just realizing "wow ok, that's not a typical emotional response to this situation. Something going on here?"

As for getting memory chunks up, usually we're already flashing back, so it's close. And a lot of strategies, like using headspace, don't super work for us, since headspace is blackness with sound and emotional projection and people located in space.

This is what we do:
We stole the tapping idea from EMDR, since bilateral stimulation is supposed to help process trauma. Someone had shared a study on playing Tetris for bilateral stimulation just after trauma to help process trauma, and we were desperate enough to see if it worked on newly emerging trauma.

So, we sit wherever our safe place of the moment is, with our legs crossed and alternate tapping on our knees. Then we try to sink towards the feelings like you'd pull away from front to reach inner world, or like meditating. Following the feelings down usually starts the memory chunk flowing. Sometimes it takes multiple times going back over days to get the flashbacks to quiet, and we just try to focus on processing thoughts and feelings and like, keep the body reasonably fed and cleaned and rested in between.

I don't recommend AT ALL using EMDR like methods to locate memories that aren't already right at the surface. Please, for the love of all things holy or good or sane, do not go spelunking through your psyche and trying to dig out the deep stuff. Listen to LB on this one, don't go digging to prove you have trauma, or trying to hunt for a specific memory that's not ready to come up. That's a great recipe for dynamiting something important and the whole ceiling coming down. Trust us here, getting thrown ass backwards into memory work, unprepared, easily the worst experience of our lives. Finding this guide helped make it tolerable, and we throw it at everyone from therapists/in training to friends who say they have memory gaps, just so they know not to dig and have a chance to prep just in case.

Re: Memory work, from one aphantasia system

[lb_lee]

Ah yes, at the start, we definitely got emotional flashbacks and physical sensations first, and narrative was often completely divorced from that! Man, don't miss THOSE days at all... it just felt like freaking out for no reason we could see, absolutely humiliating and frightening.

And yeah, we've seen folks go to TERRIFYING places going too fast, too deep. Sometimes you just have to fucking WAIT.