Bad Memories

The amount of garbage one can find in one’s blogroll on any given morning is overwhelming. See, for instance, the following guide on becoming a total neurotic:

How to Weaken Your Bad Memories

The method described in the article is almost exactly the same as a method that author and motivational speaker Anthony Robbins (of all people) has been training people to use for the past two decades.

To extract the poisonous fangs (as it were) of your bad memories, bring the memory into your mind, and then imagine it getting smaller and dimmer, like you’re watching a tiny black-and-white TV.

Now add details that scramble the memory.  For instance, if you’re remembering a time when you flubbed a presentation, turn the audience (the little bitty audience in the little bitty screen) so that they’re all wearing clown suits.

Do this five or 10 times and you’ll discover that the bad memory simply doesn’t sting any longer. If anything, the memory of that presentation will make you chuckle, because you have literally and physically rewired your brain.

Yes, most certainly do that if you want to end up an alcoholic, drug addict, or a professional depressive. Denying one’s experience and pretending that one’s trauma isn’t real is the best way to these enviable identities.

A healthy way of dealing with painful memories is, of course, the exact opposite. They will only lose their potency if they are verbalized in as many details and as many times as possible. When there isn’t anybody willing to listen to them, it’s a good idea to verbalize them to oneself. Take a particularly bad memory and narrate it to yourself, aloud, in as many details as possible. And then do it again. And again.

After the memory stops being deadly, the time comes to analyze why it causes so much pain. In the example offered above, one would be well-served to figure out why public speaking is so fraught with danger that the pretty trivial memory of a failed presentation has acquired so much potency.