Pillemer brought up some things that I have thought about before, particularly in terms of traumatic memories. I think someone said before that the most significant memories from their childhood were the good, happy ones. In my case though, it’s been the painful traumatizing events that have stuck out the most, when I was in a bad car accident and sprained my shoulder, or when I fractured my knee playing basketball. Both of those being sudden and extremely painful are probably reasons they are still so vivid in my mind. That being said, I don’t think of them as particularly haunting either. The older I get, the more I find myself disconnecting with those memories. It’s not as if they’ve faded dramatically, but more along the lines of they have stopped affecting me emotionally. This could be because they weren’t extreme life threatening events, and somewhere along the line I probably decided that I didn’t need to attach myself to those events. It’s funny that the memories that tend to bring up emotion or more visceral reactions are the more emotional memories, memories of a deceased friend or moving to a new home. Remembering emotion brings up emotion…it’s weird.
I also thought it was funny that S. (in the Luria book) had to will himself to forget. It’s been my experience that the more I try to forget, the more I remember. Maybe it’s a subconscious willing that I’m not aware of. It really struck me how tuned in to his memory S. was. Obviously he got better and better at explaining his images and his process of remembering. But even so, to remember how you remember is complicated, and then to be able to put that process into words, an almost story, is pretty amazing.
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I think the emotions of your physical pain no longer being as intense probably stems from the fact that you've grown since then and are now able to cope with the emotions. I have this idea that when trauma happens when we are younger, there is a greater chance that we will be able to cope with the emotions surrounding the crash. I think a more sexually based offense will stay with a child or an adult equally, or even damage a child more, but physical pain fades faster in children.
You also might have had an easier time coping because you didn't have to work around an involuntary reaction resulting from both incidents. In both cases you described, you could have easily experienced something similar to someone fears being a car after her accident, your brain just coped in a different manner. Trauma to one person can sometimes barely cause any distress in someone else.
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