A problem many of us have in our personal development, and in our desire to live a more joyous life, involves negative and painful memories of the past. Memories due to trauma are one thing, and I’ll address that later, but right now I am talking about memories that have stuck for some reason (they loop) and that cause us pain or embarrassment when we recall them.
One of the most sobering realities of life is that we become someone else’s bad memory more easily than we realize. A careless comment, a joke made due to our own insecurity or immaturity, a cruel joke that made you laugh, can stick in someone’s mind for a long time, even years. It’s not because the act was monumental, but because the feeling it created took hold.
The person who experienced the barb did not know how to handle it at the time, could not avoid being hurt by it and might struggle with a memory of the situation ever after. Our minds, for whatever reason, often make us revisit negative experiences and their emotional effects. The more I have talked to other folks about this, the more of a problem this seems.
People are, of course, more likely to remember emotionally charged events, and negative memories often carry a stronger and longer-lasting emotional tag. Research shows that people who frequently “ruminate” on negative experiences are more likely to experience depression, anxiety and lower self-esteem. Here’s another variation on the Golden Rule: don’t plant memories in someone else that you wouldn’t want to live with yourself.
So here’s why I’m writing this essay. One day, something hit me. While kind of ruminating, I imagined a person who had deliberately tried to emotionally harm me apologizing.
I imagined the guy saying, “Dan, that was a while ago, and I’m a different guy now. I’m really sorry. Boy, was I rotten I can’t believe it. If I could go back in time and undo that, I would. I suddenly realized what my motives were, how I was deriving gratification from doing petty, malicious, lousy things and I have stopped. I’m sorry.” (Even if the guy really still is the same guy, I imagined him as the better guy he could be, apologizing for behavior he now found beneath him.)
It kind of worked. If nothing else, it made me laugh. But, it actually made me feel better to imagine a rotten guy as a much better guy, smiling and shaking his head over what a rotten guy he had been. Why would this work?
If nothing else you, yourself, can see that the person was irrationally motivated when they hurt you. They were not acting rightly and you did nothing wrong. You also see the hopeful situation of the other person realizing that they really did something wrong even though they thought they were right in doing something petty at the time.
You, yourself, engage in a type of de facto forgiveness because you can see the person was not really the best person they could have been and a better version was possible, just not chosen. The flaw in the person who hurt you becomes more palpable to your observation and your innate compassion for that supersedes everything else.
So as Freud experimented on himself, I decided to experiment on myself. I started going back in my memory and trying to find some lousy incidents of people who either hurt me or really wanted to hurt me. The worst culprits I could imagine were the self-righteous folks who attempted to cause harm while acting as if they were being morally upright. And I found a good one, I mean a good example.
By the way, did you ever see the 1960s TV series (it can be streamed) called The Prisoner? The very last two episodes, in fact, incorporate this methodology. To free himself, the prisoner, Number 6, ruminates to end rumination. Ending rumination seems to be one of the keys to his escape.
In my experiment I landed upon an especially righteous and mercy-less high school administrator in my past. At one point he decided that it was morally right to punish me back to the stone age for cutting a couple classes while being a member of the National Honor Society. The guy intended to break my spirit. His virtuous desire to humiliate and debase me was pure unrecognized malice (he didn’t recognize it, but I did, actually, I am assuming he did not recognize it).
I was like Papillon on Devil’s Island and he was the warden: “We want to rehabilitate you!” I was like Cool Hand Luke and he was the little squirrely camp supervisor with a falsetto voice who kept saying, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” So here is what I imagined this, now deceased, educator saying:
“So Dan, after I died, they threw me in Purgatory. Jeez. I thought I was going straight to the top. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. Then I find myself in Purgatory. So they strap you to a chair, it’s like the Ludovico Treatment. They strap you in and make you watch these TikTok like videos of rotten things you did in your life, but you didn’t know they were rotten things when you did them. I really didn’t know!
“They made me watch the TikTok videos involving you, like, 200 times. Man, it works. When you watch yourself doing crazy stuff that you are calling moral, over and over again, you just wanna jump out of that chair and take off, even if it’s to hell, but they won’t let you. That’s why they strap you in, or you’d just find old Lucifer and surrender to save yourself the pain of realizing what a butthead you really were.
“I gotta hand it to them, it’s a pretty effective method. When you watch yourself doing mean stuff you begin to realize, jeez, I was quite a jerk, wasn’t I? Then they get these big angels to slap you around a little. But at this point, you feel grateful they are slapping you around because you feel like such a jerk.
“Then Peter or Matthew or Mary Magdalene or someone comes over with a smile on their face and says, ‘Hey, bro, it’s over. You’re a different guy now. And, that guy’s OK too. The guy you messed with because you had a little power and no empathy. He went to a good grad school (not because of your high school, by the way) is an educator himself and is living pretty well now.
“’He travels a lot. Got really good friends. He’s a better educator than you ever were. Ha ha ha. You tried to break him but he let it slide off his shoulders. Wasn’t that a pity? Ha ha. Now get your can into heaven, before we change our minds.’
“Then you start crying and saying you don’t deserve to go but Peter gets a little angry and almost literally kicks your butt into heaven. They pretty much drag you in there after the Purgatorial Ludovico Treatment. You know you don’t deserve it but they are so good that they whip you into shape and dump you in anyway. I guess they kind of rehabilitated me. I guess what I had was a failure to communicate. Sorry again. Did I tell you what a jerk I was?”
So by imagining something like this, it’s no longer about resentment or revenge, it’s about witness. You were hurt, and your pain deserved recognition. It was and wasn’t the jerk’s fault, they weren’t acting to their higher potential and that’s why, in a weird way, they wanted to hurt you. It happened, you understand why it happened, you can imagine them as better people and compassion now rules in your heart and mind.
Closure isn’t always possible in real life, but it is in your imagination, and sometimes, that’s enough to move forward. We don’t always get justice. But sometimes, justice isn’t from a courtroom, it’s a confession whispered through the veil of a type of purgatory (frankly, I don’t believe purgatory exists but let’s let that one slide – we’re imagining this). And if I imagine it the right way, I can hear justice clear as day.
Now, here’s my caveat. Some people I know have endured real abuse. Horrible physical abuse. I do not think this method will work for them. There are treatments, however. Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) might help. It helps a person process traumatic memories, challenge distorted thoughts, and learn coping strategies. It often includes relaxation techniques, gradual exposure to painful memories, and reframing.
Somatic Experiencing focuses on how trauma is stored in the body. It helps people become aware of physical sensations and gradually releases tension and fear that is “stuck” in the nervous system. Internal Family Systems (IFS) works with parts of the self that hold trauma (like a part that feels afraid, ashamed, or angry). It helps the person understand these parts with compassion and shift internal dynamics toward healing. This is often useful for survivors of prolonged or childhood abuse.
My heart goes out to these folks and I pray there is a method to relieve their suffering and they can be relieved of the lingering severely painful emotional effects of their terrible experiences and consequent memories. So my imagination scheme might not work for people who experienced such severely traumatic abuse, but it might work for some of us. And, of course, you are now thinking, what about the times we acted like jerks?
Well, we can make our own apologies, preferably before we hit purgatory. We can also pray that anyone who was hurt by us will be able to have their own imaginary dialogues with us and then drop us completely from their memories. The consolation: we’re all probably going to be strapped into that purgatorial chair and suffer the heavenly Ludovico treatment anyway.
So if you’ve ever been hurt, maybe try imagining the apology that never came. And if you did the hurting? Start gearing up for your TikTok purgatorial reel now.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
