A Past Without a Memory

If you have no memory, you have no past.  Wait a minute, could that be true?  No it is not.  Many of us wander around this earth with little memory of the past, especially if that past was very painful, and very early—predating conscious-awareness. Predating our verbal capacities.

So what do we do in our therapy?  Recapture our past; retrieve our history.  And why do we do that?  So we are no longer controlled and driven by it.  We are historic beings and need again to be historic; complete and full.  Why don’t we remember so much of our childhood and earlier? I assume it is due to pain which sets repression in motion so we do not remember; so we are not so troubled by it.  But it is there, nevertheless and it directs our symptoms and behavior later on.  So even if we don’t consciously remember we still have a past.

Why should we be whole and complete?  Because being unconscious is life-endangering.    We get involved with the wrong people, sometimes dangerous; we take chances we shouldn’t, gamble on things that are not possible for success, etc.  And being unconscious means we have forces gnawing away at our system, making us sick and shortening our lives.  Is that reason enough?

What we do is help patients retrieve key memories that open up the memory system and give us access to whom?  To ourselves so we can be whole beings, not partial entities.  And if we want to retrieve very early memories of gestation,  birth and infancy we need to understand the memory system; for our very earliest memories are of smells; so early that they bypass the usual routes, and travel directly to the limbic/feeling system,  directly to the memory centers.  Memory of odors are idea, concept and situation free; they are pure and unadulterated.  If we let the patient slip into them totally we often get remote pains that were hardly ever retrievable.

I visited a friend in a hospital recently and there was the scent of ether there.  It brought me back immediately to my own time in a hospital which was horrendous.  It was a pure, unadulterated memory that was attached to a specific time and place; it was a first-line memory from deep in the brain and from a primitive nervous system.  That is, smell lives in the deep brain associated with deep and remote memories, the ones that are difficult to access in normal everyday life.  It is one reason I think our patients might benefit for a trip to visit a hospital.  In the same way that we encourage patients to bring in photos of their early lives, and to bring in music that evokes old feelings and their memories.  Remember, there can be no effective psychotherapy without retrieval or our history.  Unless we only rely on cognitive memory; then we make progress on in  our top level and have neglected two-thirds of our brains and their memories.  To access preverbal events we need non-verbal techniques. Words will never do it.  We need to open up the memory bank to get rid of pain and put the system into a pain free state as much as possible.

So if I tell a patient, “tell me about your life in college,” it is a good idea but never ever deep enough to make a difference in what really drives our behavior.  Yes, we deal with college and school life but not to the neglect of very early memories.  The odors from infancy and before have an enduring quality; the reason?  It often has to do with life and death. Those memories could be of life-endangering events even before we had ideas to remember them with.  But they are there in full force all of the time.  They recede but never disappear. What pain drugs do is make them recede for a while, which feels fine but we pay a price for making our memories that could be liberating into deeply hidden events.  Drugs, obviously make them difficult to access and that means we cannot reach deep aspects of ourselves.  Those memories become the “untouchables.” They will certainly shorten our lives, both directly,  and indirectly through our smoking and drinking to keep them down and away.  We become addicted without knowing it to those memories and their suppression.  We are addicted to our unconscious memories; they hold us firmly in their grasp for a lifetime.  They demand more and more of us to keep them at bay.  And we think addiction centers will change that?    Never.

I should add that some preliminary research points to loss of sharp memory as possibly indicative of beginning dementia, and also signs of depression.  They do not necessarily cause them, but are compadres on the route.  Depression means deep often first line repression and that suppresses memory, as well.  Depressives are “down” in every sense of the word.  I think that one thing it means is that first-line deep in the brain trauma has an effect on deep reactions; hence loss of smell and memory.