REPRESSED MEMORIES

REPRESSED MEMORIES

And another installment of CAREGIVING AND TMS PAIN
from my friend Avis Carlson’s book IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME
which has GOOD STUFF ABOUT JOURNALING FOR REPRESSED MEMORIES

In her 80s, Avis, who wrote a column on and for senior citizens in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote about the stresses of caregiving from
her own and others’ experiences.

Here is what she wrote on “Perceiving One’s Life as Whole.” Even though she wrote
it aimed at senior citizens, her wisdom applies to all ages. It could be helpful to
TMS sufferers who are coping as parents or caregivers of elderly parents. So much
of her reflections apply to any of us in pain from our repressed memories.

She didn’t know about the term TMS but what she says is pure Dr. Sarno knowledge
and philosophy. Reflecting on our life as a whole can be a roadmap to effective
journaling that can lead us into discovering our repressed emotions which can
free us of pain.

Avis writes: In the last section, we were talking about opportunities for growth and
usefulness still open to us from the outside. We now will turn to the inside –
to the opportunities for pleasure and growth through reflection. There are,
I insist, such opportunities, and we ignore them to our peril.

In old age we have for the first time a chance to think about our life as an
evolved pattern, as almost a whole. Always hitherto we had to think of it
in parts and as incomplete. [TMSers can also reflect on their lives thus far.]

As young children we could not do much more than react to the stimuli
beating upon us from moment to moment. In the identity crisis of
adolescence we learned to look back on our childhood and make
judgments about our parents and the effect they and the other
circumstances surrounding us had upon our development.

In the overwhelming need to grow up, we were apt to make harsh
judgments upon both parents and the surrounding circumstances,
such as poverty or lockstep schools. We might say, “If my home life
and neighborhood had been different, I wouldn’t be feeling so boxed-in,”
which is the almost universal plaint of adolescents. Sometimes, resentment
and a desperate desire to break out of what seems to be the cramping cage
creates a rebellion that the youth never quite outgrows and that leads to
an almost total dependence upon peer groups for behavior guidance.
Or he may become one of the fiercely independent, aggressive loners
never fully able to relate to anyone.

Later he may or nay not come to realize that his negative reactions toward parents
and surroundings influenced his choice of vocation and marriage partner.
If he makes unfortunate choices in one or both fields, his whole life may be
badly affected, and its ambience may become one of regret, either angry or sad.

Because hardly any of us ever achieves what we dream of in youth, most of us
have carried through the harassed middle years a secret load of self-reproachful
sadness, even of guilt. Or, if we happen to be the active, unreflective type,
we may have kept ourselves too steadily on the run to think much about how our
lives were shaping up.

In old age we have at last the experience and the leisure to think about our life
as a whole. And the necessity to think so of it, because how can we accept the
fact of having grown old, of having already spent most of the coin dealt out to us,
with nothing to show for it except a life that has been an assortment of bits and
pieces instead of a meaningful whole?

More than two millennia ago, Cicero proclaimed in his lofty rhetoric that
“the harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously
secured.” It was a good metaphor, It really does seem like a harvesting,
a gathering in the fruits of one’s life – to look back over the years and see how
this led to that and both to something else.

That long ago illness, for instance, could it have caused a tendency toward
neurasthenia? [A psychological disorder marked especially by easily being
fatigued.] And how did the Great 1930s Depression, which fell upon us
just as we were getting started, affect the later turns we took in political
philosophy?

How would life have been different if one’s father had been less
authoritarian, or less permissive? Less easygoing, or less ambitious?

And how did it happen that we got the right (or the not-so-right) marriage
partner? How did that choice affect our whole life?

What were our own most serious mistakes, and how did they happen?
How did our successes, such as they are, come about? Did we do about
as well as could be expected with our life, given the ingredients
originally placed in our hand?

She then writes about some of the “blessings previously secured.”
But I will save that for the next installment.

Did you recognize yourself (at any age reading this) having TMS pain
that, if you journal about your childhood or adolescence, can help you
to discover repressed memories or emotions that cause you to have
pain today? And do her descriptions of childhood and youth remind
you of your children today? As I have said earlier, while she wrote her
book aimed at seniors, the wisdom is applicable to those of all ages,
and can be especially helpful for TMS sufferers.

What Avis wrote about children who are at odds with their parents
for any number of reasons only the child knows rang home to me
when I applied it to the grown son of my close friends who are now in
their 60s. He is a retired lawyer and his wife a retired grammar school
teacher. They both have been unable to solve the mystery of why their son
argues with them all the time and rejects anything they say about anything.

I’ll call him Joe, which isn’t his name. He is about 40 now, never married,
But made a girl pregnant while on vacation in Jamaica. When their son was
born he walked out on the girl and came home with the baby but left him in
the care of his parents, even though he doesn’t get along with them. They
took the baby boy in and have reared him through high school with love as if
he was their own child. Still Joe does not appreciate the years of love and
care his parents gave his illegitimate son. Maybe Joe felt insecure, that he
could not live up to his parents’ expectations, but I don’t think they
pressured him,. Their two daughters were happy children and both have
grown into well-adjusted, happily married women. Why their antagonistic
brother became such an ungrateful young man is anyone’s guess.

Another example is my stepfather. He had to give up dreams of college
In the 1930s Great Depression and go to work instead, as did his
brothers and sisters, They didn’t hold that against their father, but he did.
He held that resentment all his life and became a bitter man and an alcoholic
to the end. He was unable to deal with losing his dream and it haunted him
all his life, blaming his father for what his father had no control over. He may
have had a lifelong inferiority complex because he never got to go to college,
but he became a successful executive at a large company but felt he was
passed over for a big promotion because he didn’t have a college degree.
Yet, he could have gotten one if he had gone to night school while working.
Instead he chose to nurse his anger at his father.

I came to understand why he was bitter and angry but only learned it after
I learned about TM and journaling. I put myself in his shoes and it brought
me to understand him and, ultimately, forgive him for the years he made
life very unhappy for my mother, sister, and me. Rest in peace, Leo.
You did not make it easy to love you. Too bad you didn’t know about TMS.