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lb_leePrevious Chunks: see index!
For instance, at one point Rogan was worried another beloved relative had abused us. He was getting recurring nightmares about this relative, all our usual memory symptoms, and he was getting increasingly unnerved about it. However, when he went to our headspace ocean and asked about it, the ocean replied by giving him a memory, piece by piece, that showed no, this relative had done nothing wrong. On the contrary, he had protected us once, entirely by accident, and that was why he was appearing in nightmares—he’d been involved in a lost memory of abuse, but as an impromptu rescuer, not an attacker! Obviously, that was a huge relief to find out—Rogan said he’d never been so happy to be wrong. And knowing that our brain had ways of telling us that we were wrong helped ease some of his fears that he was somehow auto-suggesting memories of trauma.
Another time, as mentioned earlier, we found records that Mac had existed in our system a year earlier than we’d thought. Mac immediately went to the ocean to ask about it, only for it to gently push him away as though to say, “not yet.” It turned out that we needed to deal with other memories first, because they held the necessary context to understand the one we were wondering about. We’d accidentally jumped too far ahead, and so our brain had to tell us no. It was a pretty tense nine months, but now we’re finally coming back around to that memory, as of the time of this writing!
Your mind may have its own ways of communicating its various kinds of “no.” Keep your eyes open, build that trust, and hopefully you can learn it together.
And finally, sometimes something did happen… but there is no memory to recover. Lynn Wasniak, the founder of the multi newsletter Many Voices, writes, “maybe, the memories really were not stored… or at least weren’t coded in a way that they could be retrieved. […] I’ve really fought this explanation. I keep hoping there’s just some massive thick barrier separating me from the ‘real past’… that someday it will open and I’ll know what happened for sure. But as time goes by, I am becoming to accept the possibility that I will never know, that I can’t know because the record isn’t there.” (Many Voices press, pg. 3)
After the Kidney Stone Passes (AKA: you should rest now)
Even when nothing happens, narrative memory work is exhausting. When a memory chunk passes (or doesn’t), give yourself a lot of rest and recovery time. It usually takes us a couple days to a couple weeks to recover from a memory, and much of it is spent crying. Arrange your environment to be as gentle and stress-free as possible: Disney movies, favorite books and video games, herbal tea, whatever. Have your coping skills and your psychological pain scale ready; trust me, you will need them.
While you are resting, leave the memory alone. Take a few notes as to what you experienced, your level of distress and how you feel, and then put it down and let it be. Give it at least a couple days to scab over, and while all the new stuff is settling into your head, go do something else for a while. Hug your kids. Walk your dog. Go to your knitting club. Work on a project. Remind yourself that you have more to your life than memory work. The memory’s not going anywhere; it’s waited this long, it can wait a little longer.
Patience is vital. With us, at least, memories rarely come up within one go. The longest ones have taken five months. (And that’s not including “not yet” memories that had to be abandoned for months or years.) For us, memories overwhelmingly come up in bits and pieces—sensory details, emotions, and narrative memory are often separate, and things rarely make sense until everything gets knitted together at the end. No amount of wracking our brains could change that, and we had to learn when to leave things alone.
Taking Stock and Memory Distortions
Once you’ve had some time for things to settle, when you’re no longer distraught, exhausted, or distracted by corporeal matters, you can try taking stock of the memory info you’ve gotten.
Go through your records. Even if they don’t deliver on a silver platter (ours rarely do), they can at least help give context or a sense of time or place. You might find things that jog your memory—a seventh grade composition book held a bounty of information, including early references of our little brother sexually harassing us. Records like this can help a memory seem more or less credible, or at least give a paper trail to compare things to later.
If records aren’t available, or don’t really help one way or the other, take a look at the memory. Try to think critically about it, without lapsing into denial. (Easier said than done, I know.) Does the memory make sense? If multiple memories have come up, are they contiguous with each other? Is there anything that strikes you as really out-of-character or unlikely, requiring further explanation or less credulity? Does the memory explain anything you didn’t understand before? (Our memory work has spent a lot of time answering questions we never even thought to ask, like why our headspace is the way it is, why some of our headmates have weird specific hang-ups, stuff like that.)
In the heat of the moment, you might believe things that now you’re not so certain about. (This is especially true for us if memories come up when we’re groggy or asleep.) You might find yourself thinking, "no, no, I really don’t think that’s true. It just doesn’t feel right." This does happen! Memories get distorted and confused! Here are some ways they can happen:
--to be continued in Chunk Ten!
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Date: 2019-09-18 05:33 pm (UTC)EDIT: past life memory reconstruction is not the same as traumatic memory work in the conventional sense, but hearing that was helpful anyway
--Hikaru
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Date: 2019-09-27 07:27 pm (UTC)I mean, AllFam might give a false impression that our memory work is clear and sensible, but there are a LOT of parts that are just foggy, confused, or that we can't make heads or tails of.
Y'all might find the memories issue of Many Voices interesting and relevant if you're curious about reading about memory distortion in multiples. Some multiples, it seems, really are intensely suggestible and have memories that warp pretty easily.
--Mori