Life - The Original Trauma
This report from Reuters comes as no surprise to me:
Traumatic memories easier to recall than happy ones
By Claire Sibonney
TORONTO (Reuters) - Memories of traumatic events are not suppressed by the people who experienced them but can be recalled clearly, according to Canadian researchers.
Sigmund Freud developed a theory that victims of horrific events repressed difficult memories in order to cope with what happened to them.
But scientists at Dalhousie University in Halifax found in a five-year study that pleasant events were more difficult to recall than unhappy ones.
"We were frankly blown away," lead author Stephen Porter said in an interview.
"We were surprised at how consistent (the traumatic memories) were relative to the good memories in life which had deteriorated dramatically and looked nothing like the reports that we heard about years ago."
The researchers interviewed 29 people who had gone through a traumatic event such as a sexual assault or domestic violence in the past few months.
The participants were asked to provide details about the experience as well as a recent happy event such as a wedding, birth of a child, award or vacation.
Porter and his team re-interviewed them after three months and again after four to five years.
Based on a questionnaire with a maximum possible score of 36, the average mark among participants for consistently recalling a traumatic experience was 30, compared to 15 for a positive one.
"I think it's quite obvious that these types of events really permeate our conscious awareness. They were just haunted by them," he said referring to the traumatic events.
"I think this provides evidence that (Freud's theory) is completely off-base," said Porter, whose findings will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
"It really makes good sense to remember the event well in the future so we can avoid those circumstances and maximise our chances of survival," he added.
I remember seeing a documentary about how the brain rewards and punishes us. When something good happens, or we succeed at something the brain runs endorphins through our body which act as a pain killer and gives us a sense of euphoria. In men, particularly, this is what gives us our competitive edge as the tendency to be rewarded for success is very much linked to testosterones. However, when we fail at something, and invariably when something bad happens to us, the brain withdraws all niceties (that sinking feeling in the stomach is a result of that) and the brain commits the moment to chemical memory so that we remember. It's all about survival. In less complicated times it would be like "Holy crap! There's a freakin' bear in those caves! I barely managed to escape alive. Okay, let's not go up there again until we invent fire and really, really big spears or something." or "Whoa, that gorge is way too wide to leap. When my bones have healed I'll remember not to go trying to jump that gorge, no matter how nice those berries look on the other side."
Independent of the documentary (i.e. since before I saw it) I've always said that the human race as a whole has a propensity towards a negative attitude - this is mostly a product of our time. In the same way that the function of stress was to give you a boost so as to escape from the lion that's trying to eat you, it has been perverted with our modern lifestyle to becoming about non-deadly things like deadlines, money and stuff but without a physical outlet (like running away from a snarling lion intent on feasting on your flesh) then stress just becomes a negative. Likewise, outside of a need to have any sort of survival instincts (for the majority of us) all the same physiological triggers become psychologically tripped instead of environmentally tripped, which is to say that instead of remembering that almost falling off that mountain could be a bad thing, we are more likely to remember other traumas, or general bad stuff that happens to us. It's still survival in a way: survival in the modern world, but the modern world is one big nasty place which means we remember a lot of crap. Coupled with negative reinforcement (e.g. "You're no good" "You'll amount to nothing" "You're crap") we tend to believe the bad stuff more than the good stuff (e.g. "You're good at this" "You got some real talent" "You're great") which makes us happy to hear it, but generally gets forgotten, drowned by the bombardment of negativity from all directions. If not kith and kin then media and cultural stereotypes - whether it make people think they're not thin enough, not pretty enough, not rich enough, not worthy enough, not clever enough, not experienced enough, etc.
Whether it be ideology or theology, both use the same tactics of negative reinforcement again and again and again until you end up with a complex of from a very young age. Stereotypically the question therapists ask is "Tell me about your mother" - I don't think anyone's mother is the real problem here, it's society. It's Big Mother, telling us what to eat, what to wear, what's cool, what's not, what we need to succeed and how we're all misfits, freaks and drop-outs when we don't conform.
Christianity holds the concept of original sin, saying that we're all born from sin and therefore our life is one long road to redemption and salvation. Original sin's not very original, in my opinion, but the trauma of simply existing in this world is another thing. Society does enough to fuck you up without religion telling you that you're damned on top of that.
Buddhists have the right idea - all of life is suffering and the ultimate goal in life should be to escape the cycle of rebirth and attain the bliss of Nirvana.
Now I need to figure out how to commit this life thingamajig to my own personal Akashic memory so that next time round I'll go "Whoa, that life malarky is pretty bad, I remember that. Let's give it a miss and do something else, like, drink Sambuca and play cards in the Sun."