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Originally Posted by Nik-key
This is where I am stuck... I can't bring up the good memories, they just can't surface without me falling apart. Who ever heard of repressing GOOD things!! But it is what I am doing.
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Hey, Nikki, you're not the only one. You're probably not actually repressing them. It's just the way our darn human brains work.
OK, so I'm weird, but I was sitting quietly contemplating my navel just the other day and I was thinking about how our brains work with regard to memories and thinking this very same thought... where are all the good memories. Why does my brain have all the really horrible ones right out there in the front of the wretched filing system. Why is it so difficult to bring forward the good memories.
You see, I may be a little strange LOL, but I tend to think of the brain as a type of filing cabinet with many, many different compartments.
Some of those compartments are hidden away out of reach because the cabinet is holding so much information. The more we experience and the more we live, the more information goes in there.
I was also thinking about our senses, and how certain smells will trigger good memories but can also trigger bad ones.
Anyway, just know you're not alone with this, Nikki.
It's the way our human brains work.
You can dig around in there and consciously bring out the good ones though. I think it's a learned thing... practice, time... a lot of things. When people have experienced extremely traumatic events, they tend to stick there on the surface. Sometimes when I'm trying to think of specific good times, I start in one place in my memory and it just starts to roll out from there.
ADDED: I also know from personal experience that some things are distorted in my memory, as is mentioned in one of the articles below.
I remembered reading some scientific articles about memory and how it all works, and why it works the way it does.
These two below are not those same ones but maybe they'll help you in understanding that you are not alone in having those bad memories out in front... and overshadowing the good ones.
I hope all that makes sense.
Do please remember that you are the child, Nikki. He was your father. You are not responsible. Same as I wasn't responsible for my own mother's death from cancer, although I spent so much time and energy blaming myself for her death. Heck, I was just a baby. I was not responsible. I can clearly and catagorically say that now, but for a while in my 20's I went through a period of time where I put it all on myself.
http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...817329,00.html
Why Do We Remember Bad Things?
TIME health article
By Laura Blue Monday, Jun. 23, 2008
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There's evidence on both sides. The systems that are involved in adding emotional content include a brain structure called the amygdala, which gets activated when we experience strong emotions, particularly negative emotions, and it does influence memory systems — in particular, a structure known as the hippocampus. So there's opportunity there to influence how strongly memories get laid down. But the hippocampus is involved in both the storage as well as the retrieval of memory. Things that are emotionally charged may simply be memories that are more likely to be accessed or used.
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[Emotional content] does not necessarily mean that events are remembered more accurately, and that's an important distinction. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that all memories can be altered. It's a normal process — we're constantly taking our experience and revising it, even twisting it to our own benefit. We might be able to take control of that process in some ways, which would be particularly useful in cases of abnormal, pathological memory processing — for instance, traumatic memory processing.
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http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/08...good/1207.html
Why We Remember the Bad Times More Than the Good
By Rick Nauert, Ph.D. Senior News Editor