This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book entitled Aces High to Aces Low! Let me know what you think.
Despite what some people say, healing from trauma isn’t as simple as choosing a happier feeling. If it were that easy, no one would get stuck in the muck of their life for years and years. What worked for me was figuring out exactly which story from my past was preventing a better future from happening, and that took a lot of effort.
Understanding the process of how each memory was created was paramount in my healing. Once I understood how the painful experience was locked into my mind and body, I could then reverse the process, eliminate the trigger, and set myself free of it.
Memories aren’t facts. They are stories created at the end of every experience, and based on the level of comprehension you had at the time. Memories begin accumulating in the filing cabinets of your mind shortly after birth. In the first few years, those memories will be mostly pictures, but as you mature and learn how to communicate with words, those stories become increasingly more involved.
Memories are categorized based on how you felt during and after each experience. The neutral cabinet holds the memories of experiences that didn’t generate enough intensity to move them over to the LOVE or the FEAR cabinet.
At the onset of a new experience, your mind’s process, using data from your five senses, begins searching in the filing cabinets of your mind for a narrative that appears to be similar to what is currently happening. It places that Mind File in your conscious awareness, giving you a comparison. Almost always, you will agree with the story being referenced because it feels familiar. This is why we tend to reference previous experiences when justifying our perspective to others, and to ourselves.
“In my experience ________________________.”
It is during the second familiar experience where we consciously and intentionally add emotion to the original story describing the event, and sometimes expand on the narrative within that Mind File.
Initially, the emotional filters we add are simple statements of I like this, or I don’t like this. As we mature and accumulate a larger vocabulary, our stories and accompanying emotions become more descriptive and dramatic.
The more a Mind File is referenced and agreed with, the more emotional filters are added, and the more intense that file then becomes.
Extremely traumatic experiences could add hundreds of emotional filters all at once. These files are so intense, they are often buried deep in your FEAR cabinet, that even though the mind’s process is referencing the file, the narrative is kept hidden from your conscious awareness for protection. Once you have progressed enough in your healing that you have sufficient tools to deal with the intensity of the file, your mind’s process will release the file’s contents into your conscious awareness. This is how repressed memories work.
In the first ten years of my life, there were numerous experiences that had the potential of becoming problematic Mind Files.
1. I was given up for adoption.
2. I lived in foster care for several months.
3. I was adopted by a new family.
4. I experienced discrimination and bullying because I walked with a limp and couldn’t run and play like the other kids.
5. I experienced a violent and terrifying beating from my grandfather. The event was so intense that my conscious awareness buried that Mind File deep in the back of my FEAR cabinet.
6. A chiropractor confirmed that I was born with a skeletal deformity and suggested that surgical intervention was necessary.
7. The first surgeon I saw informed us that, to his knowledge, the surgery I needed wasn’t available yet, and to wait as long as possible before doing anything. He suggested that I might have only a few years of mobility left before being relegated to life in a wheelchair.
8. My parents, out of desperation to do something, completely disregarded the advice of the first surgeon, and allowed a different surgeon to perform a surgery that ultimately created far more harm – both physically and emotionally – than good.
As far as I am aware, my mind’s process did not create any narratives about being adopted that were problematic. My parents were completely upfront about being adopted, so I didn’t feel abandoned by my birth mom. However, after reading about prenatal trauma, I do believe that it is possible that my little body’s developing endocrine system could have been negatively impacted and might have been conditioned for an exaggerated adrenal response. Additionally, when I began studying nutrition and alternative medicine, I learned that the health of the biological mother’s microbiome also lays epigenetic groundwork for a propensity toward developing gut dysbiosis such as candida. Both the gut and adrenal ideas became relevant when I became very sick and had to figure out how to get my physical body back into balance.
Today I know that the pinch of my skin and the tightness of the tourniquet triggered the terror I experienced in the sudden and violent beating I got from my grandfather a few years before the first surgery. In both experiences, I couldn’t flee. I was physically held in place while being subjected to physical pain. When a body goes into fight or flight, everything appears to be bigger and feels considerably worse than it is. Simply put, fear exaggerates everything.
The intensity of these experiences was extreme. In the first experience, I was being punished, and in the triggered experience, I felt as though I was being punished. These Mind Files ended up blending together not because the experiences were exactly the same, but because the terror I felt was.
I also developed claustrophobia in my childhood, and I suspect these two experiences, and others that you’ll read about later in this book, ended up blending with another Mind File from my infancy and contributed to the fear of being bound or held, unable to flee, and suffering a great deal of pain as a result.
While I don’t have any conscious memory of being bound in a blanket as a fussy or crying infant, I do know that one of my dad’s practices for dealing with fussy babies was to wrap us up tight in a blanket so our arms and legs couldn’t move, set us on the couch or on the floor, and let us cry until we eventually were so exhausted that we stopped. I don’t know if my mom thought that was a good idea, but my mom didn’t question or confront my dad very often. I can count on one hand the number of times I remember her confronting him.
The bullying I experienced in the first few years of school definitely negatively impacted my self-worth, but it wasn’t the sole cause of the destruction of my self-worth. Growing up in a dysfunctional home where you’re inundated with criticism at every turn is what kills your self-worth. I honestly don’t recall getting a whole lot of praise ever as a kid, but I do recall not being capable of doing anything right.
Thanks for sharing the Mind File process for how memories get stored and released years later. I can see how it creates challenges for us as our memories resurface many years later by unrelated triggers. This is fascinating.