This is another chunk of our memory work essays, posted as promotion for the AllFam Kickstarter. Down to the last three days, y'all, and it looks like we're busting into the final essay! Every $300 raised will get another 1000 words posted, until the end on Oct. 3rd!

Previous Chunks: see index!

Memory Work, Five Years Later

The Data

It’s been almost exactly five years since the first All in the Family strip. In that time, we’ve dealt with roughly thirty memories, smashed into roughly 300 chunks and assimilated one by one. We are nowhere near done.

At the start of 2016, we started keeping obsessive records of the process, and our numbers show that our memory work cycle is predictable and regular over the long-term. Not only that, it seems to have been so even before we started narrative memory work. We made this strip back in March 2013:

All that has changed since then is that the cycle has compressed (from an average of six days to four and a half) and the memory content has grown more grotesque. But the cycle itself has stayed the same:

We feel increasingly tense and antsy.
We relive a memory chunk and do a lot of crying.
We are mentally drained and hungover.
We recover and gain more energy… but also more tension.
We start again.

In the short-term, there’s some variation; a month can have anywhere from 2 to 12 memory chunks. Once we hit more than 8, we are unable to fully compensate; we simply don’t have the time to recover in-between and are mostly incapacitated.

Having grown up during the Memory Wars, we worried that we were auto-suggesting false memories to ourself, and ached to find some way to test their validity. Organizations like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation proved completely useless at providing this information; the implication seemed to be that if we just stopped seeing our therapist and believing we were abused, then the memories would stop. But this has proved untrue. Homeless or housed, in therapy or out, credulous or skeptical, the memory steamroller rolls on. The only things that slow it down even temporarily are intense external stress or making a personal bid to our brain for a break. Even at the best of times, the reprieve only lasts for a couple weeks; then, once the choke point passes, we get bulldozed by many memory chunks in quick succession, so the long-term averages stay the same. Most of the time, it’s better to just take our lickings in their due time and let our brain set the pace.

For the math whizzes, here are our numbers:

Month	Memory Chunks
Jan-16	4
Feb-16	5
Mar-16	8
Apr-16	3
May-16	6
Jun-16	6
Jul-16	6
Aug-16	8
Sep-16	6
Oct-16	3
Nov-16	6
Dec-16	5
Year Sum	66
Monthly Average	5.5
Jan-17	7
Feb-17	5
Mar-17	4
Apr-17	5
May-17	10
Jun-17	2
Jul-17	6
Aug-17	4
Sep-17	3
Oct-17	6
Nov-17	10
Dec-17	8
Year Sum	70
Monthly Average	5 5/6
Jan-18	7
Feb-18	2
Mar-18	3
Apr-18	9
May-18	6
Jun-18	8
Jul-18	6
Aug-18	4
Sep-18	10
Oct-18	6
Nov-18	12
Dec-18	8
Year Sum	81
Monthly Average	6.75
Jan-19	5
Feb-19	7
Mar-19	4
Apr-19	9
May-19	4
Jun-19	6
Jul-19	5
Aug-19	6

However morbid it may seem, having numbers on the patterns of our memory work has proven extremely helpful. It’s transformed a scary, seemingly uncontrollable process into predictable routine. We still sometimes have to cancel work events or stagger through them punch-drunk, but as long as we are mindful of our memory work cycle and make it our utmost scheduling priority, we are mostly able to get done what we need to, in our limited way.

Memory Chunk Triggers

Triggers are the stimuli that summon memory chunks. They are both gate and guardsmen.

The vast majority of our triggers are sexual. For Rogan, orgasm is a silver bullet trigger, even if a memory has no sexual content. Sucks to be him, but at least it gives him something to try when he’s desperate to set off a memory chunk. (For instance, if we have a comics convention to attend on Saturday, it’s common practice to try and intentionally spark a memory chunk on Thursday or so, thereby insuring we’ll be in working condition on the weekend.)

IMG COCKBLOCK

As time has gone on, though, we no longer need to intentionally trigger ourselves as much; even the silver bullets are starting to break down in efficacy. Instead, we can go to our headspace and outright ask for a memory chunk, and it will try to accommodate us… or tell us when that isn’t possible, which has been a huge boon. (See our essays “Headspace Discovery and Defense” and “Headspace Communication and Negotiation” for more details on the specifics.)

IMG BLACK OCEAN

Memory Order

Part of our memory work’s predictable cycle is memory order. With few exceptions, we process one memory at a time, working our way from “easiest” to “hardest” for each perpetrator, who are also dealt with in the same order.

We use quotation marks because our brain’s criteria for “easy” and “hard” are idiosyncratic and not necessarily what most people might agree with. Even the most ghastly actions, to our brain, are “easier” if we have outside corroboration. And among the factors that make things harder:

Mortal terror.
Complications—an interruption, things going wrong, more than one people being involved even if they’re not attackers.

Betrayal and disappointment.

That last one in particular seems to be the big kahuna; it is what we tend to remember as the most soul-crushing, rather than any physical pain or violence we underwent. So, for instance, our little brother was the least violent of our familial attackers, certainly the least competent, but he’s so far been the hardest, just because there’s such a sense of terrible heartbreak. Even a failed attack, coming from a person we wanted to protect or keep safe, was far more devastating than our grandfather’s worst depredations, whose cruelty was easy to take for granted.

Perpetrators

When we ended All in the Family, we had only just started dealing with memories involving assaults from Dad. Since then, we’ve moved past him to our mother and little brother, and now we’re mostly dealing with complicated group attacks where all sorts of things didn’t go according to their plans. All this makes sense according to our memory work pattern.

Jeff was never forgotten, because not only was he never physically violent or threatening, but he had the least betrayal associated with him. None of our family or friends really liked him, and he lived in a different part of town and went to different schools, so excising him from our life was low-risk and relatively painless. He was a straightforward case of a bad apple, acting on his own.

Grampa was the easiest familial abuser to deal with, because we had records and corroboration over the years of our parents (and other relatives) telling us he was a pedophile. It was an open secret. The hard part wasn’t actually dealing with his behavior on its own, but the nagging questions like, “why did our family keep bringing us to his house every Christmas?” “why did our mother think it was totally okay to send us on a trip with him?” “why did our family keep bringing their children to him?” That was the loose thread that unraveled the whole thing.

--to be continued in Chunk 12!

Scribbles and Bits

Memory Work Personally: Data and Triggers