In therapy, is it convenient to open Pandora’s box of memories?

When beginning their psychological therapy, many people fear the possibility of discovering and exposing some traumatic event that is too overwhelming and painful.

It is a kind of fear of opening a Pandora’s box of the memories that, when uncovered, lets loose some terrifying monster from the past.

However, facing the truth, connecting with those memories, means finding the path to liberation.

What leads us to repress traumatic memories

The fear to bring to light some traumatic event was the one that fueled Virginia’s reluctance when she came to my office.

In our first session, he told me that he had known for a long time that he needed help, but that he had put off therapy for years. for fear of uncovering his past. Her emotional situation had reached an unbearable point and, for this reason, she had decided to come to my office.

In these cases, I always like to explain to people how memory and forgetting work. As protection, to avoid the daily suffering that having them alive in memory would entail, our unconscious blocks access to certain very painful memories.

This is a well-known resource for psychologists and, in fact, Anna Freud, in 1936, included this type of forgetting. (or repression of memory) among their “defense mechanisms”.

While it is true that blocking bad memories avoids consciously suffering from them, the reality is that the negative effect they had on us in the past is still active in our present.

We suffer, then, a double suffering, that of the original trauma and that of not knowing its origin.

The problem persists because the root cause is still present. The truth, which always seeks to be expressed, has not seen the light and the consequences of that “forgotten” past continue to cause our current problems.

Our subconscious can hide memories

This was the case in Virginia. She lived blocked by her insecurities and, furthermore, tormented by not knowing where they came from, or what she could do to overcome them. She had sought another type of advice, more directive, to try to get some guidelines and face, thus, some complicated situations for her, but, in the end, she always returned to feel overwhelmed by her discomfort.

for virginia the hidden truth was that she had spent most of her childhood alone. She hadn’t felt accompanied when she needed it most. Her parents worked all day and she used to spend most afternoons at home alone.

She came home from school alone, no one helped her with her homework and she had no one around to advise her when she had a conflict with her friends. She grew up alone and insecure.

However, in her first therapy sessions, Virginia told me of a happy childhood, in which her parents would pick her up from school and play with her in the afternoons. These memories happened, it is true, but they were almost anecdotal.

Most of the afternoons she had spent alone, but her mind had erased these sad memories and had enhanced the few pleasant moments in which her parents had actually cared for her.

On many occasions, the truth is bleak, this is undeniable.

Many people have very complicated stories behind them, but no matter how bitter the past is, it is even harder to continue suffering in the present without being able to do anything to remedy it.

Releasing memories is healing

Although Virginia did not remember her thousands of hours alone, the destructive effect they had on her personality was still very present in her life. She was a girl full of insecurities, especially when she had to interact with other people. She always doubted herself and she didn’t know how to deal with conflicts. She always ran away from them and ran to take refuge at home.

The only way to get rid of problems for good is to open up and go deeper into them.

To understand to what extent they affected us, it is necessary to take the memories out of oblivion and put them on the table. The truth that these memories tell us will help us understand our present.

Understand the reality of our history It is the only way we have to be able to heal. In any other way, even if we don’t see them, we will continue to carry the memories on our backs and these will continue to affect us in the present.

Of course it was hard for Virginia to remember and acknowledge the loneliness she suffered in her childhood, but at the same time, it was tremendously liberating. Finally, he could understand where her current difficulties came from and work to connect with herself. He was also able to free himself from his eternal feeling of loneliness and all the pain accumulated during so many years of emotional abandonment.