Repository

 

 

 

“It’s more important for people, for survival, to notice the lion in the brush than it is to notice the beautiful flower that’s growing on the other side of the way,” - Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University

If you think about it, do you tend to remember negative experiences and comments, in your past, rather than more of the positive ones?  How do we regain a different perspective of our repository of memories of our past?

Again, we can look at what our amygdala has been up to all our life.  Perceived fear and sadness can be distorted and misread by that Lizard part of our brain.  (“Reptilian brain includes the main structures found in a reptile's brain: the brainstem and the cerebellum. The reptilian brain is reliable but tends to be somewhat rigid and compulsive. ... The main structures of the limbic brain are the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus.” – McGill.ca) We, as human beings, have evolved but that part of our brain is still in the early stages of being dumped in a life-threatening foreign space and place and was meant top be protection during this time.  Our Lizard Brain is still living in those times and is trying to protect us, this we notice scary and threatening things because of this and some tend not to forget them.  It is still in survival mode and we are supposed to remember those things in order for us to remember what threats were.

It is also that women tend to internalize things and express them in either sadness or regret at different levels of such.  Men, they say, react with protective rage. Like earliest stories around a cam[fire, we share and discuss these things and learn from ‘our tribe’ about how we should be wary and take care and accept defined negative things that happen.  This, then, begins the story of our lives.

It takes a great deal of effort to dampen down this part of our brain and retrain it to see that not all perceived threats are life-threatening and we need not store such memories.  We need to take another look at what we have stored that were NOT life-threatening.  Once I was prone to ask a crying one of my children, who did not get their way,  if they were bleeding to death, if not, then I would say, “whew, you are going to live” but I never took my own information to heart, rather, to brain.  There is more to the trite phrase about being grateful, about stopping and seeing the positive things more.  Some days these positives might hardly be noticeable, but, if we seek them out, we will find them:  what we expect we get.   So, what can we do to change how we input memories?

When you notice a negative memory or response, break our pattern of seeing EVERYTHING as negative.  Weigh it:  Are you bleeding, are your guts hanging out?  Then, we are probably going to live through it.  If you have to analyze a situation, stop and think about how little a situation does in the whole of your story. I can tell you that I have been grateful for many negatives in my life because it made me better at my career.  You see, little kids did not have to say all the words.  I knew them already.  I knew the look on the face of a teenaged girl who had had a horrible experience.  I knew the drooping sadness of women.  I was there once.  They did not, as I said, need all the words.  It made me better at my career to be able to recognize signals of desperation, of depression, of negative experiences they might have had.   I know my courage and bravery by many parts of my story.  I survived.  I overcame.  I have thrived.  I know how to balance our negatives with positive things; like getting up out of my worrying bed and doing something that pleases me;  arting, creating.  Do I have all my proverbial ‘chite’ together?  Of course not.  I still forage for comfort food when I might feel negatives seeping in.  Sometimes I over-react.  Sometimes, I allow myself to be influenced by a moment or two and I have to do some serious self-talk. 

You know how you always think of something you could have said or done, after the danged fact?  Well, that is your cue to learn a new way of coping.  Those things you wish you had done, typically, not always, are the best way to deal with negative situations in the future.  I have spent a great deal of time substituting my own negative self-talk with positive talk.  When we wish we had done or said something different, take that wish and make it a reality when you meet the same kind of situation.  Sometimes we need to take the perspective of our own best friend.  How would we talk to our best friend if they were feeling, reacting, to a negative situation?  We would ask them if they were okay.  We would aske them what has happened.  We would ask them to explain exactly what happened and why they were feeling negative.  Then we would talk to them in the kindest, most compassionate way to help them get through.  Why don’t we do that for ourselves?  For goodness sakes, we have to love ourselves because we are the only one who really counts.  Be patient with yourself.  It takes time; sometimes, a long time.  We are conditioned and we must recondition our thinking and our sensory memory storage. 

Remember this above all things:  “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”  - Eleanor Roosevelt. 

If you, like me, are working on all this, be kind to yourself.  Life is hard enough without bullying yourself.  Remember: “I love you.  I forgive you.  I love myself!” (a main phrase in the story of my life) Let’s check our repository.

©Carol Desjarlais 8.3.21

 ***the art journal page, here, is one using vellum.  I struggle with its use.