https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sgu-cr8WenU
If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely. Tell you a study first was done by this man named James Pennebaker, a couple of studies, and many other people have done similar studies. And Pennebaker wanted to test a Freudian idea, idea derived from Sigmund Freud, that expressing emotion about past trouble was curative. And so he had university students come in and write three days in a row for 15 minutes about the worst thing that ever had happened to them, or to come in for three days and write for 15 minutes about things that had happened that were mundane in the last couple of weeks. And then he tracked them across time, and many people have done studies like this. He found that people who wrote about negative past experiences were unsettled by it to begin with, unsurprisingly. But six months later, they were doing much better than the control group on a variety of different measures. And because he’s a very smart psychologist, he didn’t stop there. He went and looked at their accounts, and he counted the emotion words, and he also counted words that were indicative of understanding or comprehension. And then he used the number of those words to predict how well people did. And what he found was that emotional content didn’t predict improvement, but words indicative of understanding did. And that’s an extraordinarily interesting finding. And I want to explain, at least in part, why it’s so relevant. So then we might talk a little bit about memory, and what memory is, and what it’s for. I’ll tell you a quick story. I had this client I only saw her once, and it was when I was first starting to work as a clinical psychologist. She came in, she spoke 28, and she recounted this story of being sexually assaulted by a much larger brother. And she told me the story. She was quite tearful. And I said, at the end, I said, well, how old were you when this happened? And she said, I was four. And I thought four-year-old, 15-year-old brother, something like that. You know, that was the image in my mind. And I said, well, how old was your brother? And she said, six. And I thought, six, eh? Well, she’d grown up under the shadow of this assault, and it had contaminated her relationship with, well, men and her family, as you can imagine. And she was still afraid in a deep way that she was vulnerable like that. And I said, four and six, eh? Have you seen a six-year-old lately? She said, we talked about that. I said, you know, when you’re four, a six-year-old is an adult. But when you’re 29, a six-year-old is a kid. And another way of looking at what happened to you is that you were two really badly supervised children. And that really, like, it worked, you know? It triggered something. And it was a relief to her. I’m not claiming something magical about that, but there’s something strange about it, you know, because she had continued to view herself as vulnerable in some fundamental manner. She hadn’t updated that memory of being four, and or the memory of her brother. And when I suggested to her that they were two very badly supervised children, that put the whole episode in a whole new light. One of the things that was so interesting to me about that, because she wasn’t so much the target of someone that was specifically malevolent and exploitative, right? Which is sort of at the core, often, of a traumatic experience. What was so interesting to me about that, at least in part, was that she walked out of there with a different memory than she walked in with. And that’s strange, because you think the past is fixed in some sense, right? But I think the memory she walked out with was a more accurate memory than the memories she walked in with. And that says something about what memory is for. You know, we tend to think of the world as composed of facts, and that what memory is, is a representation of a set of facts. And there’s some truth in that. But what’s more true is that memory is part of the whole process of behavioral and cognitive adaptation to the world. And that’s much more like drawing a map, because what you really want to know about the world is how to make your way through it in a manner that, well, let’s say, isn’t catastrophic and is also desirable. And the purpose of your memory is to guide you in making those maps into now and into the future. Why remember otherwise? You want to extract out from the past information that you can use productively in the future. And so for her, the new memory, let’s say, was in some sense more useful to her, because she didn’t have to think of herself as a four-year-old at the hands of a malevolent force. It wasn’t appropriate for her age and level of maturity. And she may still have had personality attributes that might have made her a target for someone malevolent, but it wasn’t obvious merely as a consequence of having that experience 25 years ago that that was the case. So it needed to be updated. Now, I had a… someone sent me a question online last week. I was answering a bunch of questions in a Q&A, and he said, I’m in university, and I’m plagued by these memories of people humiliating me in high school, because this person was bullied, and I’m having murderous fantasies as a consequence. What should I do about that? And I answered the question. I’ll release that online in a while, but why would he be being plagued by those memories? Why won’t the past leave you alone? Why won’t the past leave him alone? He’s in university now. He’s not even in the same town. Who cares about the past bullies? Who cares about the past bullies? Why can’t you let it go? Or more accurately, why won’t it let you go? Because that’s really a better way of thinking about it in some sense. In this chapter, it was written about memories that sort of come to you unbidden and plague you, and that’s especially the case. It’s relevant if the memories still have a fair bit of negative emotion associated with them. That might be fear, might be shame, it might be rage. In his case, it was all of those, I would say, certainly shame and rage were very much tangled together. And part of the answer to that is your natural response to anything you don’t understand is twofold. One part is curiosity, and that propels you out into the unknown so that you can explore it. Another part is fear, and the reason for that is that something you don’t understand can hurt you. So the fear is there to begin with when you encounter something new. The fear is there. If you watch young children when they go out to explore the world, maybe they’re three, two or three, and they’re, say, they’re with their mother in a playground, although kids differ individually in this proclivity. But what they’ll do is they’ll hang around their mother to some degree when they first get to the playground, and the reason they hang around their mother is because she’s mapped, right? So the space around her is a space the child understands. The child knows what’s going to happen when he or she is in the immediate vicinity of the mother, and hopefully that’s something good. Or maybe the child wouldn’t be there and would be off in the playground, but we’re talking about normal circumstances. And then as the child inhabits this familiar space in an unfamiliar place, they learn by observation that nothing bad is happening, and that is their first map of the, let’s say, the new playground. The first map would be, if I’m beside mom in this new place, it’s just as secure as I am at home, and that learning happens just because nothing happens. And a lot of our learning is like that. If you go somewhere new and you’re apprehensive about it, nothing happens that’s bad, then the fear disappears. And that’s very interesting to know because we tend to think we learn fear, but that isn’t true. Fear’s there, and you learn security.