I had a conversation yesterday with someone who carries very strong negative memories with them from something that happened many years ago. It wasn’t violent, and didn’t cause any trauma to their body, but it did to their mind. It was essentially an emotional bullying issue, one that especially hurt because it came from someone believed to be a friend. It hurt more because it wasn’t just a one-time thing, it was repeated.

As I listened, I was taken back by the hurt that was still carried. They say ‘time heals all wounds’, but I think sometimes ‘time wounds all heals’. Sometimes the passage of time does not separate us from emotional pain, rather time bathes us in it.

I think that’s why people end up self medicating. It’s easier to numb the pain than it is to face the pain that lurks in our memories, haunting us. The memory, the upset, the anger, or the pain, can seem as present and as relevant as things happening to us daily.

I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t play one on tv or the internet, but I asked this person a question.

I asked, when recalling the incidents, if they saw the experience through their own eyes or if they saw themselves in the memory as if they were watching a movie? The answer was ‘it’s like a movie’.

Aren’t our minds amazing things, that we can recall a memory and see ourselves in that memory! How does that work? We aren’t really reliving it if we can see it happening to us. It’s more like we are watching our own history. This gives us more power than we might think we have:

• We don’t have to review our memories up close.
• We don’t have to recall our memories in full colour or at full speed.
• We can create new endings. Rewind and replay it.
• We can literally put the memory into a television screen.
• We can recall memories as still, black & white, blurry photos in old frames.

We can move memories into the shadows of our minds rather than have them fill our brains in full technicolor and splendour. We don’t have to get rid of them, (I’m not sure we can), but we can reduce their power over us. We can relegate the memories to less significance.

It’s similar to controlling anger. When something upsets us and makes us mad, how long do we hold on to that anger?

Let’s say you are driving to work one morning and someone cuts you off. I mean really cuts you off, you have to break hard and swerve into the curb lane to stop from hitting them and getting in an accident. You slam on the breaks and your horn simultaneously, but the other car drives off, seemingly oblivious to what they just put you through. How long do you hold on to that anger?

Is 5 minutes appropriate?

What about for the rest of your commute?

What about until everyone at work has heard your story?

How about until you’ve told your spouse when you got home.

How about the following week?

How about you recall the incident every time you pass that spot on the road on the way to work?

How long is it acceptable to hold on to that anger, to build up that moment in your mind? How long do you let that that angry moment in the past control your emotions in the present?

We have many memories that belong in the shadows of our mind, rather than in full colour and right in front of us.

If we can learn to not let the anger of a jerk that cut us off minutes, hours, days, or weeks ago control our present state or well being, couldn’t we do the same for something years in the past.

Maybe we can let time heal our wounds .

It may take practice, but if we’ve already changed the memory into a movie, seeing it from a perspective that we didn’t experience, then haven’t we already made changes that have removed us from the original experience? And if our minds can do that on their own, maybe we can choose to ‘see’ those memories in more distant and less angry ways. Maybe we can alter our past so that it interferes less with our present.