Why some experiences never leave us, and why that’s ok
The infamous fountain scene from Fellini’s 1960’s La Dolce Vita.
Most of us have had bad experiences from which we learn, grow and eventually let go of. Depending on how it has impacted you it might take a few hours, days, weeks, months or even years to let go and forget. If at all.
But sometimes some of us can go through a moment in time which affects us so deeply, it can never leave us. No matter how much time has passed, no matter what we have learned or how we have grown, there is a moment in time which remains - at the very least - as a memory, never forgotten. And maybe even continues to trigger something inside us.
Often an experience would have to had to been a traumatic one for it to have had this impact. However, what is classified as traumatic can also be judgemental as often it is only the big life events (war, rape, abuse) that people say lend themselves to trauma. But physician Gabor Maté (amongst many other great thinkers) beautifully explained:
Trauma is not what happens to you,
it's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.
And there are countless other supportive statements of trauma being precisely that; not defined by the event itself but by how you reacted to that event. And as everyone is different, everyone’s reaction to the same situation will differ; all valid. But…therein might lie some hesitation around ‘am I being too dramatic, too sensitive by having allowed this seemingly menial experience to impact me traumatically?’ As it turns out, undermining your own experience and thinking it was nothing (despite feeling otherwise) is also a sign of trauma.
I’m not trying to advocate calling all your bad experiences traumatic in the way people casually throw the term ‘depression’ around (actual depression is not the same as feeling low or having a sad state of affairs.) But I am trying to say you cannot allow anything outside of yourself to dictate how you should be feeling about something, let alone what is and isn’t traumatic for you.
What’s more, there seems to be a socially acceptable time frame by which we are to ‘get over’ something and ‘move on’. Thoraya’s Youtube channel shares unique videos on human nature, and her videos on asking people ‘What is the most painful thing you’ve been told’ or ‘What’s been your deepest betrayal’ shows how even something seemingly small can live within people for a whole lifetime. Whilst I’m all for moving on, sometimes you can never do so without the remains of the aftermath of ‘that’ experience. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. You may not be able to forget or let go of something, but you sure can change your relationship with it.
Once you know something you can’t ‘un-know’ it. Once you’ve been through something you can’t go back on it. But you can transform how you relate to it and the meaning it carries.
The reality is, if something affected you deeply enough to have forced a transformation because that was the only way you could grow beyond it, you are not about to forget that experience. Ever. Maybe over time some details might become hazy, you might forget what was said, what was done, what really happened but you will never forget this one event, around that point in time. As David Brooke’s beautifully put:
Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease,
many people don’t come out healed,
they come out different.
Naomi Wolf also beautifully said in her book ‘Vagina’, when referring to how women’s emotional needs and their reactions are often trivialised by men:
A culture that does not respect women
tends to deride and mock women’s preoccupation with love and Eros.
But often we are preoccupied with
the beloved not because we have
no selves of our own, but because
the beloved has physiologically awakened aspects of our own selves.
Should we not, rather,
be proud of who we are?
We should be proud.
And whilst Wolf’s quote is referring to women specifically and in the context of love and relationships, in principle it is highlighting if we can’t ever fully let go of something, it is not necessarily because we are still attached to the event itself, but it is because that event enabled a seismic shift within us. That event became a crucial turning point in our development and so, thereafter life was so different to how it was before. We were so different. Any success and good fortune thereafter becomes a byproduct of that experience and so will forever be coloured in that experience.
I’m sharing this because all too often I come across exclamations by someone or the other, around how it has been so long, a quarter of a lifetime, maybe even longer, and they can’t believe, or find it hard to believe that one life experience still lives within that person.
Maybe some of us are more emotional and that’s why we don’t forget, but then that is our right. Or maybe we don’t forget because the damage was deep enough to alter our psyches, and so we remember the girl or boy we used to be, we have love for that girl or boy because we now know we needed to be them first before we can be who we are today. However painfully so.
Either way, it’s important to take the time you need to heal and move forward, but it’s equally important to not allow anyone to dictate how you may continue to remember or relate to that point in time.
We may not understand some people’s plight, but we don’t have to judge them either, nor judge ourselves for that matter. Your cluster of experiences, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of human emotions, have created your History, given you a back-story, and should you so wish, also birthed purpose and passion.
After all, everyone thinks other people are overreacting…until the same thing happens to them.
Another life lesson or two…
