How do I retrieve lost memories?
Dear John,
I grew up in a middle class neighborhood...a carefree tomboy, totally comfortable in my skin and was lucky that my best friend from the ages 3-10 lived across the street from me…he’s important to know in my story as he was diagnosed with cancer in HS.
My mother...Around the age of eight /nine I began asking my dad what’s wrong with her & he’d always say, “When you’re older and more capable of understanding things I’ll explain it then”
One summer night, when I was 10, my mom woke me up and said my dad wasn’t feeling well and we were all going to the hospital. We lived about 10 minutes away from the hospital and for the first five minutes of the drive my dad with sweat dripping down his face was looking back at my brother and me assuring us he was fine…he began making these loud God-awful choking noises and then began desperately gasping for air...I was watching him have a massive heart attack .
Fast forward hours later, doctors came out to say it’s nothing but miraculous he survived this heart attack. I knew something terrible in me changed. My dad died a few months after the heart attack on an operating table after undergoing bypass surgery. I was 11 years old. My mom was mentally ill also and no family came around.
When I was in my early 30’s I had lunch with my father’s sister, whom I had no relationship with ever, and she informed me my memory was forgetting one HUGE part. Apparently I saw my dad laying dead in a hospital bed and my brain completely erased that memory from my consciousness.
Any suggestions to help me retrieve this memory as I believe a lot of my patterns of behavior (fears) are circling back to a place in my brain I can’t even remember.
Dear Releasing Your Fear,
First, I want to acknowledge what incredible bravery it takes to re-explore such a painful moment. Your life may be impacted by fears, but it takes real courage to explore this openly with curiosity and a willingness to be free of your fears. Up until the time we start to individuate in adolescence, our parents hold an almost God-like, omnipotent place in our psyche. I know that I at the age of 41 still thought my dad was invincible until he started limping with severe osteoarthritis and accidentally fell a few times. The fact that you confronted your dad’s mortality first-hand at such a young age, with both the witnessing of his near fatal heart attack and his passing after an unsuccessful cardiac bypass surgery, is enough to disrupt your trust of reality and shake the foundation of your safety to the core.
In reading through your question, I am deducing that your dad held a particularly significant role in your life. Not just from his ability to show up and be a dad, but also in his ability to protect/shield you from the consequences of your mom’s mental illness. The graphic and dramatic events that you witnessed preceding his passing are enough to instill a heavy dose of fear and disrupt your sense of safety. Coupled with the loss of your protector of your mother’s mental illness, it is easy to understand how your sense of safety could feel grossly compromised. Over the years, without processing this trauma or having someone help you through it, your distrust of the world and it’s safety can grow exponentially, magnifying any circumstances into something terrifying.
The selective omission of your memories around seeing your father dead is not surprising. Children will self-protect to avoid processing painful experiences and emotions. This is known as dissociation. Dissociation is a mental process or strategy people use to avoid having to process information or events that overwhelm their resources. We often can’t access painful experiences in our memory if we have never processed them. In order to properly integrate those experiences, we have to be willing and able, or have someone assist us, to reconnect with those painful memories, emotions, and experiences so we can re-integrate them back into a congruent life timeline. This is the process of integration or becoming whole. It is taking the fragmented pieces of our life, consequences of trauma, and accepting them for what they were. If you don’t have someone who can help with that, e.g. a parent, a sibling, friends or family, or access to professionals, these experiences in our life get compartmentalized and stored in fragmented ways in our psyche. Because they are not processed and categorized properly in our timeline, when we are triggered by something that reminds us of those traumatic events, we can re-experience them entirely like they are happening all over again at the very moment we are triggered. It can be overwhelming, exacerbating the fears of reconnecting with painful experiences and setting us up to be wary and avoidant of new experiences or uncertainty.
It is an assumption on my part that if your mother was preoccupied with her own mental health illness, she may not have been present to help you process the tremendous pain you were experiencing. Left on your own, you did the best you could. You boxed up your pain and stuck it in the recesses of your psyche. This works until it doesn’t. It sounds like fear is a constant theme in your life. A self-limiting pattern that keeps you from truly experiencing the world. You don’t have to be a victim to the fear or live a constrained life. You have a choice, and your freedom lies in re-exploring and revisiting these painful memories.
To be continued next week…
With love and light,
John Moos, MD