Dina is pretty, and her smile is simply irresistible. She always attracted the eyes of men. But a strange thing: when it came to intimacy, their caresses did not give her pleasure.
Every time she felt tension and perceived such contact, without understanding why, as forced. At the age of thirty, Dina became depressed, and she found a psychotherapist who was able to hear, to make out what she felt in the most secret depths of her body and heart when she undressed in the presence of a man. At first, some fragments of vague impressions surfaced, vague sensations, or suddenly tension appeared in the lower back. Then, after a few sessions, there were images associated with childhood, with a certain age, when she was six years old; then she remembered the country house, a friend of her parents, whom she admired, but was also afraid of him, some kind of yellow room and, finally … rape. She clearly remembered the feeling of his hands on her back and the back of her head, pressing her to the floor, remembered the terrible pain. In an instant, that all-consuming fear returned, and an experienced psychotherapist helped her get rid of it.
Freud described this phenomenon of «recovered memories» at the beginning of the last century from the point of view of psychoanalysis*. And recently, a completely new explanation has appeared. It is as elegant as it is simple: there are no memories without words, without inner speech. What we don’t tell ourselves, we don’t remember. Adults have very few distinct memories of their lives before the age of two. Despite the fact that young children have a good memory: they easily distinguish acquaintances from strangers, they know where their toys are and where strangers are … But they do not tell themselves about what is happening to them, they just live. Their memories, like those of animals, are fixed in bodily sensations, in feelings, and not in “stories”. That is why later they cannot “tell” themselves again about what happened to them in the past. It’s «forgotten».
In the same way, dreams elude us. If we do not retell them to ourselves as soon as we wake up, they will dissolve. Forgotten because they never became «stories».
The more often we tell ourselves about something good that happens in our life, the more beautiful it becomes for us.
A few years ago, psychotherapist Boris Cyrulnik conducted an experiment: psychologists played with children following one of two scenarios. “With one group of children we played corsairs; without uttering a word, they took a saber, found a chest containing two emeralds, a ruby and a necklace, — says the psychotherapist. — On the other hand, they played the same game, but at the same time they said: “Hurrah, we found treasures! But here come the pirates! How many rubies are here, now we will get rich! Three months later, we met with these children again. Those with whom we did not speak remembered almost nothing about the game, but others remembered it in every detail.
So, «newly found memories» are those that were imprinted in our body and emotions at a time when we could not tell ourselves what happened to us. Either because we were not yet fluent in speech (usually before the age of seven), or because we were intimidated and depressed and did not have the opportunity to tell ourselves what happened. Indeed, traumatic memories are more often recorded in the form of fragmentary emotions than in the form of a coherent story … If you undertake to unravel the thread, starting with the body and feelings, then sometimes it is possible to reconstruct this story and then the memory can manifest itself in its entirety.
The same thing happens with the best moments of our lives. This is evidenced by the experience of those who keep a diary and every evening write down in it the brightest impressions of the past day. The more often we tell ourselves stories about something good that happens in our life, the more beautiful it becomes for us. It remains only to think about such stories.
* Z. Freud «Lectures on Introduction to Psychoanalysis.» Academic project, 2009.
** B. Cyrulnik “Traumatic memory” in “Youth, City, Violence: understanding, preventing, treating”. The Harmattan, 2004.