The emotional presence of people who have passed away, memories of traumas experienced, collective memory — all this causes us strong feelings and affects our lives. Why can returning to past experiences and dealing with grief be useful to us right now?
Our memories are made up of many different fragments. We store them in photos, playlists, dreams and thoughts. But sometimes the regular repetition of the past becomes a form of addiction: immersion in melancholy can have different consequences.
The obsession with memory is a phenomenon that was isolated in the 1980s, and a decade later it took shape in the term Trauma and Memory Studies. Trauma memories, like all human memories, are prone to distortion. People tend to remember more trauma than they experienced.
This happens for two reasons.
The first one can be called «memory enhancement»: after a traumatic experience, his intentional recollection and obsessive thoughts about him can add new details that over time the person will perceive as part of the event. For example, if a child is bitten by a neighbor’s dog and he talks about this incident again and again, over the years a small bite will be recorded in his memory in the form of a huge wound. Unfortunately, memory amplification has real consequences: the greater this amplification, the more obsessive thoughts and images haunt a person. Over time, these unexperienced thoughts and images can become as familiar as the experienced ones.
The second reason for this distortion is that people are often not participants in traumatic events, but witnesses. There is such a thing as witness trauma. This is a trauma of the psyche that can occur in a person who sees a dangerous and terrible situation — while he himself is not threatened by it.
Olga Makarova, an analytically oriented psychologist, talks about how relevant this concept is in the modern context:
“If earlier, in order to receive such an injury, it was necessary to be in a certain place at a certain time, to literally become a witness to the incident, then today it is enough just to open the news feed.
There is always something terrible going on in the world. On any day of the year, you can see something that shocks and traumatizes you.
The trauma of the bystander can be very intense and, in terms of the strength of negative feelings, even compete with actual participation in traumatic events (or physical proximity to them).
For example, to the question «How stressed are you on a scale of 1 to 10 about the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan?» the Japanese, who was directly in the event area, will answer «4». And a Spaniard who lives thousands of kilometers from the threat, but who has examined in detail, under a magnifying glass, the details of destruction and human tragedies in the media and social networks, will quite frankly say that his stress level about this is 10.
This can cause bewilderment and even aggression, and then the desire to accuse the conventional Spaniard of over-dramatization — they say, how is it, because nothing threatens him! But no, these feelings are absolutely real. And the trauma of a witness can greatly affect the mental state and life in general. Also, the more empathic a person is, the more they become emotionally involved in whatever they see.”
In addition to shock, fear, horror, anger and despair at the moment of encountering traumatic content, a person may later face consequences. These are panic attacks, lingering sadness, a shattered nervous system, tears for no reason, sleep problems.
The psychologist recommends the following steps both as a prevention and as a “treatment”
Limit incoming information (it is desirable to give preference to text only, without photos and videos).
Take care of your body (walk, eat, sleep, exercise).
Containerize, that is, process, emotions (drawing, singing, cooking are suitable — a favorite pastime that helps in such situations best of all).
Recognize boundaries and distinguish your emotions from those of others. Ask yourself questions: is this what I feel now? Or am I joining someone else’s fear?
In his famous book Sorrow and Melancholy, Freud argued that we «never voluntarily give up our emotional attachments: the fact that we have been abandoned does not mean that we are ending the relationship with the one who left us.»
That is why we play the same scenario in relationships, project images of mom and dad onto partners, and emotionally depend on others. Memories of past relationships or people who left can be addictive and affect new relationships.
Vamik Volkan, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, in his article The Work of Grief: Evaluating Relationships and Release, calls these psychological twins. In his opinion, our memory stores the mental twins of all people and things that inhabit or once inhabited our world. They are far from the originals and rather consist of sensations, fantasies, but evoke real feelings and experiences.
Freud’s term «grief work» describes the mechanism of internal and external adjustment that must be made after a loss or separation.
It is possible to stop returning to past relationships or yearning for departed people only when, when we understand why these relationships and people were so important. You need to decompose them into small puzzles, immerse yourself in memories and accept them as they are.
Often we miss not the person, but the sensations that we experienced next to him.
And you need to learn to experience similar feelings without this particular person.
During periods of global change, many adapt to changes that no one expected. The future looks different and much more unpredictable. We all deal with loss: someone loses their job, the opportunity to do their usual things and communicate with loved ones, someone loses their loved ones.
Returning to the past in this situation is therapeutic: instead of holding the anxiety of loss inside, it is more correct to mourn the loss. Then there is a chance to understand its meaning. Taking the time to identify and understand the feelings we experience because of loss and grief and verbalize them is the best way to learn from the past.