Reflections: pt 1

A few years ago, I unknowingly began my healing journey, which started with a lot of mental breakdowns, memory errors, and very little motivation to live my life the way I really wish I could. To this day, I have a lot of trouble finding the balance between too much social media and living in the real world. I suppose that shows how much millennials have been affected by technology in ways that we didn’t truly see coming. Technology and social media have their good sides and their bad sides, but in my case, if it weren’t for social media, I wouldn’t have run into a post that forever changed my life. I came across the account for The Holistic Psychologist, a post about learned behaviors and patterns we get stuck in. From then on, I began to dive deeper into what makes us who we are, how our brains are developed, and anything that may have affected me throughout my life. I wanted to find out anything and everything so that I could begin to help myself with figuring out the coping mechanisms I needed to learn for my individual story. For this paper, I will be focusing on memory errors, reasoning, emotional intelligence, and motivation.

“Thus, traumatic memories become harder to recall as time goes by; and they sometimes contain errors, just like all memories do. Traumatic memories are also better retained if they’re rehearsed (thought about) once in a while.” (Gleitman, page 330). My memory malfunction, as I like to call it, became noticeable to me every time my mother would point it out, she would nag me about my lack of memorization, which would in turn just leave me feeling disappointed, especially after my mom would say it in such a negative connotation. There were also times when she would bring up a memory from my childhood and I had no recollection of it, even though I was old enough to remember. An even more alarming time for me was when I ran into a friend at a supermarket and asked me about a time we hung out for a musical event at a cafe. It was then that it hit me, I couldn’t remember a big chunk of my late teens. As much as I tried, I couldn’t remember a lot from that time in my life. When I began going to a therapist, they mentioned to me that this can happen especially during traumatic times, and also to people with anxiety. She had expressed in simpler terms that I could understand at the time, that when you’re going through a lot of stress, it may be hard to focus and may also cause a lot of memory loss. In 2019, I went through a traumatic miscarriage and surgery, and just as the book mentioned, I intentionally stored this memory in a room, inside a hallway of doors, never to reopen ever again. The event was too traumatic for me to ever want to deal with again, and even now when I remember a tiny bit of it, I can only recall very few details, and even then, I try to shove that out of my memory as quickly as possible. “There are, however, some striking exceptions to this broad pattern. Researchers have documented many cases in which people have suffered through truly extreme events but seem to have little or no recall of the horrors.”(Gleitman, page 331). In recent events of my personal life, my brother was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which is of no surprise to me, seeing as the environment in which we were both raised. He struggles a lot with learning coping mechanisms to deal with his trauma and finds himself dissociating often in ways that even he doesn't understand.

I’ve learned that I myself have been dissociating throughout my entire life, a survival mechanism I took on as a child when I was struggling to deal with my real life in a harsh unstable household that dealt with an alcoholic parent’s rage. I’ve also come to learn that I’m not the only one, which makes me realize that there’s much work to be done in the field of psychology, and I want to be at the forefront of this research. It’s beyond important to me to be able to help others fight their demons, or at the least, learn how to dance with them. My previous career line was as a graphic designer/social media coordinator, which in general encompasses being creative in a high-level functioning workplace. That didn’t reflect how I wanted to help people in this world, so my main goal is to help others heal through art, and teach others how art has helped me in my darkest times.