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Read part 1 here.
"Curses" work by activating the emotions of our threat brain which motivate us to behave aggressively, defensively or submissively. In this series of blog posts, we will be exploring five human curses — consciousness, memory, culture, family and own character — which are particularly potent and which, if we do not recognise or manage, can cause us significant problems.
Memory is a curse when we misunderstand how it works and what it means. Our biological inheritance and our childhood experiences are preserved within our memories. It is memory that encodes, stores and retrieves information received from both inherited and lived experiences. Memory gives us access to our past, informs the present and anticipates the future. However, If we are not careful, it can also misinform, control us and unhelpfully interfere in our lives.
Ultimately it is how we make sense of, manage and apply our memories, particularly those that operate unconsciously (implicitly), that determines how we feel, what we think about and the decisions we make. We are cursed by memory when do not do this, and when we ignorantly allow memory to "message" us in whatever way it feels like without questioning, reflecting and challenging.
Implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) memory
Our implicit memory unconsciously influences our feelings, thoughts and behaviours. In other words, we don’t have to think about these memories in order for them to "work." For example, human life regulation memories enable us to breathe, circulate blood and digest our food automatically. Other unconscious memories concern our individual learned and deeply embedded beliefs, biases and knowledge about the world. These memories enable us to understand the meaning of the cultural cues, symbols and signs that we have been socialised in. They also give us involuntary gut feelings, aversions, attractions, surges of unexpected emotions and sometimes the experience of déjà vu.
We can understand our unconscious as a memory bank containing vast numbers of "deposits" that we have forgotten about or, having been left by our ancestors, not even know were there. Our unconscious sends us information about these deposits especially through our imagination, dreams and sometimes psycho-somatic symptoms including muscular aches, digestive pain and headaches. It does this because these memories, if properly received and understood, provide important knowledge about our physical, emotional and social conditions.
Many of us, however, ignore or misunderstand our unconscious memory until we get in trouble with it through the experience of physical, psychological or social discomfort and distress. This is not our fault for most of us are never taught how to work with the unconscious. Instead, we are schooled in the rationalist tradition which favours logical over intuitive reasoning and impedes the development of our emotional intelligence.
Thus, for example, an unconscious childhood memory of how to secure attention and love may repetitively reappear in my adult relationships without my noticing or "knowing" and I find myself people-pleasing, withholding my true feelings and over-dependent on others’s approval. However, our adult relationships are different from those we experienced as children because we have significantly greater independence and power, if we choose. Memories are a curse when they infantalise us and lock us into the limited and vulnerable world of childhood past.
Our explicit memory is at work when we are aware or conscious that we are remembering. For example, where did I leave my keys? This is how to make a good cup of tea, remember the date of my brother's birthday, five facts about India, that awful day last summer...
Explicit memories can be a curse when we find ourselves ruminating and over-associating the past with the present or imagining our future as a repetition of the past. Explicit memories can also be a curse when they distract us from seeing new information. For example, if I believe all men in authority positions are like my tyrannical father, I am unlikely to see their individuality and the differences that they bring. Thus memory not only curses us but also others who are on the receiving end of our judgments and prejudices.
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an extreme example of how both implicit and explicit memories can sabotage our lives when blasts from our traumatic past take over our feelings thoughts and behaviours. However, even without PTSD most of us know what it is like to be hi-jacked by visceral and cognitive memories.
Sometimes, of course, memories act as powerful response guides to present events, but equally often they are raw data that needs processing before they can be of use. It is the increasing complexity of our processing through connecting, associating and sense making disparate memories that ensures our growth and development.
Wising up: Undoing the curse of memory
One way of understanding wisdom is that it is the result of being receptive to, reflecting on and connecting the fragments of our experience and "knowing" in order to respond optimally to the complexity of life in accurate and meaningful ways. A disintegrated memory is one in which connections have been lost (through trauma, injury or illness) or have not been made at all (lack of experience, education and reflection). The result is we are held captive by a few "energised" memories that dictate how we experience and respond to life.
In making complex, inter-related and contingent connections (as opposed to simple, linear, causal connections) we are able to translate the content of our brain into more coherent and effective feelings, thoughts and actions. Being able to appraise our memories in this way can lead to a more appreciative and forgiving perspective on the past. Changing our perceptions about the past is one way of breaking the curse of memory.
Restored, integrated memories are less likely to interfere in or disrupt our lives. Or if they do, they are less likely to be overwhelming or as damaging. Making sense of what has happened to us can help us, for example, to re-tag threat memories as coherent, meaningful and context-dependent and makes them less likely to trigger generalised warning signals that we misinterpret and misapply.
By recognising that many of our threat brain habits are sustained by old memories, which are partial and fluid re-constructions of past events, we can learn to break free of this curse. We can start to accept how everything we remember is, in fact, a new thought, containing some memories some omissions and some in "in the moment" additions. In this way, memory stops cursing and controlling us and we are freer to be in the present with curiosity and openness.
In part four, next week, we will explore the curse of our character.
References
Wickremasinghe, N. (2021) Being with Others: Curses, Spells and Scintillations. Triarchy Press.
Siegel, D. (2010). Mindsight: Transform your brain with the new science of kindness. Oneworld.
Shaw, J. (2016). The Memory Illusion: Remembering, forgetting and the science of false memory. Random House.
