Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Can You Alter Your Memory?” At first, I was thrilled to see this. I am always interested when the mainstream media runs a piece on a topic related to neuroscience.
According to Roger Pitman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who was interviewed for the article, the goal is not to eliminate a memory completely, but instead to reduce or eliminate “the fear accompanying the memory.” The article reviews research by two groups of scientists: One group is working to affect memories with the help of drugs, and the other is studying whether behavioral therapy “can one day be used to modify memories of people who react with fear to common anxiety-producing events.” The conclusion is that these tools, including behavioral therapy, may one day be used to help people modify the effects of memories and recover from “phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety-related conditions.”
While this article is interesting, my reaction can be summarized in one word:
DUH.
Of course you can alter the effects of your memories. We have been doing it forever. I do it for myself and clients all the time. You probably even do it without realizing it.
My first formal experience with this phenomenon was many years ago when I purchased a guided meditation CD designed to help lessen the impact of painful memories. I chose a memory that wasn’t necessarily traumatic, but had somehow become uncomfortably lodged in my mind and would occasionally rear its ugly head and make me feel small, unworthy, and stupid.
The audio on the CD walked me through the process of re-accessing the memory as if I were watching it in a movie. Then, I was guided through a process of “rewriting” the movie (i.e. the memory) in a way that was more positive. I was also encouraged to see the people or person involved in the memory in a new, and more forgiving, light.
The process worked. I still remember the event, but my reaction now is one of empathy and wonder – not humiliation and sadness. I’ve moved on to more personalized and effective methods that I use for myself all the time, and it is one of my favorite processes to use with others.
At this point, you might be thinking something like: “Rewriting the past with rose-colored glasses sounds great, Caryn. But how can you just ‘rewrite’ a memory? Isn’t that being dishonest with yourself?”
There are two points that, in my mind, justify the rewriting of memories:
- Memories are in the past. They have already happened and you can’t change the actual events. What you CAN change is your reaction to them. Ask yourself: What good are you doing yourself to react to a past event in a negative way? What harm can there be in changing your reaction? Remember, the goal isn’t to change the facts, the goal is to change your reaction to the facts.
- Your view of events, and their implications, is not as universal as you might think. You are exposed to over 2 million bits of information each second, but you can only process or take in up to 2000 of them. Your story is selective, and vast amounts of the information is deleted, distorted, or generalized. Your reality is created by you, not by the event itself. This explains why 10 people can witness an accident, and all 10 will have a different story to tell. The only reality is that there is not just one reality.
So, your memories aren’t really the absolute truth – whatever that is. Changing them is just substituting one version of reality with another – and hopefully it is a version that is more positive and affirming.
Have you tried a similar process, and if so, how did it work for you?
Filed under: Hypnosis, Neuroscience Tagged: | memories, Neuroscience, NLP, Roger Pitman, Wall Street Journal
Caryn, I find this topic fascinating and absolutely agree with you that we can change our reactions, and interpretations of past events. A few years ago I realized that my feelings about some things that had happened ages ago were not letting me move forward. So, just as you described, I “re-accessed” some memories and “rewrote” them. Of course the same things had happened – but I decided I was going to look at them in other ways; to interpret the whole thing differently, so that instead of still being upset about it, I could see it as painful at the time but a learning process.
Hi Cathy. Very well put. We certainly can’t change the past, but we can change our reaction to it. Thanks! Caryn
It is the habit of our minds to dwell in the ghost of the past. You are right, we have to change our perception of our past; unless we do this, we can never be truly free.
Thanks, Walter. I like that: “It is the habit of our minds to dwell in the ghost of the past.”
Several years back after reading some Tony Robbins, I was experimenting with rapid emotion change by remembering events in my past. As soon as I felt the emotion of the event, I would switch to another. I noticed that sometimes an emotion would blur over into the next event. So I chose one of my most negative painful memories and went to it only after going to an extremely pleasnt memory. As soon as the negative emotion started, I switched back to the pleasant memory. I went back an forth several times until one time, when I got to the negative expierence, it had changed significantly. To this day, I’m not sure whether the pleasant feelings allowed me to remember the good parts of the experience, or maybe I simply changed the memory. Either way, the new memory is firmly in place, and I have never gone back to the old memory with it’s bad feelings.
Allen – Thank you so much for sharing this. Very nice process. So simple, and so effective. It is almost like you wrote over the painful feelings with the pleasant ones. So even though the events were the same, the feelings and your interpretation of them changed. I love how we can change reality without even moving!