A Repressor's Prayer

One day this past fall, I was riding in the car with my friend from school.  We were taking a break from studying, driving to get a coffee or maybe just driving to get away, conversing about random pieces of the law we were learning and life.  Blame it on an attention disorder, but sometimes I start saying something and the next thing I know I’ve gone so far off of the initial track that I have no clue how to get back.  This was one of those conversations. 

I’m not sure where it started, but I know the cluster of sentences that came out of my mouth ended with real tears streaming down my face at an alarming rate, my voice shaking and cracking, and my dear friend having no idea what the fu*k had just happened.  The last thing I remember saying before drying it up and pulling myself together, “I just wish I knew which memories really belonged to me, I just want to remember”.  I didn’t have a clue that day what was going on, which is funny now looking back, because I have been through this many times before. 

I didn’t know this until today, but apparently there is some controversy surrounding rather or not “repressed” memories are scientifically provable.  I can see where this paradox has derived from.  Psychoanalysts going in with a notepad full of loaded questions, essentially leading patients to conclusions about their “repressed memory”.  I’m a skeptic.  I get it. 

I’ve only been to one therapist that I enjoyed enough to stick with for more than one visit, and it was immediately following my divorce.  Needless to say, we had plenty of shit to deal with, WITHOUT ever needing to dive into my ability to repress.  That was also three years ago, so unfortunately for skeptics of repression, I’m pretty sure I haven’t been led by someone else’s bias to reach my conclusion. 

A repressed memory is simply a memory that has been “blocked” in order to avoid stress or trauma.  I think I first became aware of the term “repressed” during counseling as a teen, but it didn’t sink in much what it actually meant or how the concept would play a role in my life.  All I knew, at that time, was that I couldn’t really remember much of my childhood.  To this day, I look back at yearbooks from elementary school and it’s like I’m reading about someone else’s life.  I can only remember one person, specifically, from elementary school, Ms. Duke.  She spent a lot of one-on-one time with me in first or second grade, making sure I made it all the way to 100 AR points (.5 at a time with Berenstain Bears books).  She was small, friendly, and had hair that looked like gold.  By the time I moved in with my father I was a master-represser.  I didn’t know it at the time, I was 8 years old, but I had successfully blocked out a good majority of the years prior to then.

Fast forward to my conversation with my friend in the car last fall.  That day, in my emotional state, I figured my stress must have been coming from something from the earliest years of my childhood.  I was frustrated.  I’ve dealt with that shit, plenty of times.  Why would it be coming back up?   I tried to let it go, move on, but something kept tugging at the back of my mind. 

One of the most beautiful things about a yoga practice is meditation.  Not the goofy-humming-fingers in weird shapes above your head meditation- just stillness.  For me personally, meditation occurs all the time; Sometimes when I’m walking, sometimes when I am listening to a song that makes me feel emotionally drawn in, and sometimes while I’m doing mundane things, like showering or fixing my hair.  When I ‘meditate’ I focus on being quiet in my brain.  Listening to what is happening around me, or feeling the temperature of the air that I’m enveloped by.  I try to clear my mind and create almost a dull humming behind my eyelids.  From this humming, calming place of breathing I then simply try to relax.  Sometimes meditating is just relaxing, no epiphanies, no signs from God, no break-throughs. But occasionally something incredible happens. 

After my melt down last fall I began focusing my meditative energy towards letting go of my fear and allowing forgiveness to come into my heart.  To my surprise, it wasn’t my “childhood” that was bringing me so much anxiety.  Sure, the fact that I was able to repress, with such an astounding accuracy, is most certainly symptomatic of being a kid who had to do so all the time, in order to be okay with the world.  But the real “thing” that was haunting me happened to be something that happened when I was a teen.  Something that has taken me almost 9 years to face and accept. 

Fortunately, my life and my yoga practice have led me to a place where I truly do love myself enough, to NOT take shit too personally.  Bad things happen to people all the time, and I may be a unique snowflake but I’m still just a piece of the snowstorm.  I know that people do mean and hurtful things to one another for a plethora of reasons, but mostly they all boil down to fear and pleasure, not an evil spirit. 

I know I can forgive.  But can I forget how to repress? 

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don’t remember a lot of being a tiny person, and that’s fine.  And now I’m coming to terms with the fact that there is a chunk of adolescence that I have blocked out, and that’s fine too.  But, how do I come to terms with the fact that there is an invisible hand that shields my eyes and mind anytime something bad happens?  How do I teach myself to face and forgive rather than repress and forget? 

Does it all come back to forgiveness?  They (the experts) say repressors carry around a lot of guilt, not for who they are but for what has (or has not) happened to them.  This guilt, stemming from past trauma, affects present situations without the repressors knowledge of association (the invisible hand).  Disassociation of feelings from their origin leads to interferences in present relationships, both with the self and the surrounding world. 

So how do you prevent the repression & the disassociation?  How do I keep the past in the past if I can’t even remember it?  How am I supposed to associate guilt with its origin if it takes 9 years to face the origin? 

I guess forgiveness.  That’s all I can think to do, is forgive.  And when I run out of energy, I guess I’ll rest and then start forgiving some more.  I’ll forgive those from the past; I’ll forgive myself for repressing the past and allowing it to play such a hidden, destructive role in my life; and in the face of future stress and trauma I pray to God that my heart can immediately forgive so that my mind wont forget.  

Please, please, please, God just let me remember.  I can handle it.  Please.