Removing Memories...

Memories have life lessons attached to them, and thus have helped you grow into the person that you are today. For that reason I would never want any of my memories removed. My memories make me who I am.

If you remove memories, you are effectively deleting part of yourself.

 

You know, I wouldn't remove any bad memories because boys who have picked on me during school have become reoccurant characters in my dreams.

Such as Pieter, whom, used to be an arse, and in my dream I'd come back from some big party and the street was on fire and a bunch of people were standing there panicked and I saw this tall blond standing near me. I was with my 'grandpa' even though it wasn't anyone I know in RL, and he went up to this tall blond boy and asked him "What are you doing here? Why are you near me?" And the boy, Pieter, becamed angered, I talked to him and recognized him and he calmed down.

The POINT is that later in that dream I found he was living in an ex-rehab center that was now a place homless people slept, and he went into this kitchen pantry where there were piles of shit and some homeless guy was sleeping there and the homeless guy said "Go find your own place to shit" and he said "I'm not here to shit," and then Pieter took the blanket from the homeless guy.

The point is, if I'd never had all of those bad memories happen with Pieter I wouldn't have dreamed that!

 

I am not sure if I should negative rep you for that.

 

It's coincidence. Complete coincidence.

 

The mind can redirect as it grows and ages. The lobe that perceives light can redirect itself for sound if one loses one's sight. My question for you is, Can you redirect your thoughts to think of more positive things? Can you accept, forgive, and replace with positive thought? (The "you" was meant to be personal) Can you, then, move on with your life?
There are people I wish I had never met. There are lessons learned from those people that may have been tough, but those same lessons may have saved my life another day or even prevented worse things from happening. I wish you well with the loss of those negative thoughts, but the knowledge is there working behind the scenes for a better you.

 

I know what you are saying, I have memories that are horrible as well... but I don't think I would erase them even if I could. your history for better or worse is a long chain of events that makes you exactly who you are. Why would you want to change that? Unless you are saying you wish to be someone different?

 

I don't think that I'd want the memories themselves taken away. I'd rather have the associated emotions taken away from the memories. So when something happens that triggers a flashback it would be more like watching a movie without sound rather than re-experiencing that backlash of emotion.

 

At first I did want to forget certain memories, but then I thought that those memories made me the person who I am today. If I didn't have those memories, would I become a different person? I kind of think I would and I wouldn't know who I would be.

 

I recently realized that I've compartmentalized memories to the point of living in denial of them to ease pain. Memories don't go away, especially traumatic ones. They lie buried in your subconscious mind and influence your relationships and behaviors in negative ways.

Best to confront the bad memories, face them and feel them, accept that they are there and have happened and then move forward in life. One has to remain conscious of their motivations stemming from a painful past in the decisions they make, otherwise it's the same mistakes over and over.

 

Here's my humble explanation:

I'm a neuropsych researcher, and with some simple deducing (and confirmation from Von Hase), I've concluded that INFJs have more heightened electrical activity in the limbic system of the brain. The limbic system is mainly composed of the cingulate gyrus, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. Together, these areas mainly contribute to learning, memory, and emotion. My area of focus here though, is the amygdala.

The amygdala mainly controls emotions, fear responses/memories, and "gut feelings". People with heightened amygdalar activity are known to have social phobias (sound familiar?) Now, when something really bad happens to you, because the amygdala is so small, it will take kind of a "flash-bulb" memory. This is a small and undetailed, yet VIVID memory and they are meant for our survival. That's why if you see a garden hose and jump because you think it's a snake at first, that's your amygdala initiating a fear response with a flash-bulb memory of a snake that you may have seen in the past. These memories are the hardest to get rid of because they are there to warn us not to run into the same problem. If anything though, do NOT keep retreaving these memories if you can help it. Every time you do, you're releasing cortisol into your bloodstream, a stress hormone that will make you sick over time. A typical situation for INFJs. Sometimes, there just nothing like a little bit of healthy repression. At LEAST until the intense crappy feeling goes away.

The hippocampus, on the other hand, is involved in emotion as well. But we are starting to learn that this is where our long term memories are consolidated after they're been rehearsed enough times in our prefrontal cortex. Though the connections may get muddied over time the less we access these memories, these memories will always be stored.

I think that we may have more electrically active limbic systems in part due to the fact that it's just where our dopanine and serotonin receptors seem to cross. But I'l have to look into that a little more.


EDIT: I'm almost kinda considering making this it's own thread. I'm suddenly curious how many people can relate to these heightened fear memories and long-term memories... ::shrugs::

 

Okay I'm a noob at all this stuff, but I remember this.

I had an experience when I was about 6 years old, and I wanted to forget it.
I just thought of a certain image when it came up (I remember the experience really bugged me).
And now I can't remember what it was, I can only see the image in my head <.<

 

We all have memories we want to erase. Actually I can think a couple of them right now....but its scary to think about how different I would be without them...Those sad nights crying myself to sleep, locking myself in the dark, and closing myself entirely.As time passed I grew to be a stronger individual. I have experiences to share with other people who need to people to relate with their pain so they themselves can move on.

 

There's a drug out there psychiatrist use to erase certain memories right?
An ex-teacher once said it. It must be dangerous :O

 

Haha, yikes! I guess it's possible to pharmaceutically induce retrograde amnesia, but I can't imagine that the possible side effects would be pretty. Plus, I doubt that it would be memory-specific. They're still trying to figure out whether memories are even a type of protein or not...

 

Yea she said that was the dangerous part.

 

.... How on earth would a drug like that work? There's no way you could put a target on a neuro-chemical process and eliminate it selectivey. We don't even know how anti-depressants work (although there are theories), let alone being able to chemically engineer something of that sort of sophistication. No one knows how memories are hardwired into our brains. You can't look at an MRI image of someone's brain and point to an electric impulse and identify, with any certainty, that that's the person's most traumatic memory. It doesn't work that way. There's two many interconnecting synapses. Damage one, and you collapse a whole bunch more.

Mind you, I can speculate it might have something to do with hypnotherapy and putting someone into a certain 'state'. I can't possibly fathom a pharmaceutical of the sort being able to do something like that on its own. That's just way too advance for what we know in the field of psychology.

 

Agreed.

 

Maybe we should all share those experiences with each other? We'll then all probably get closer to each other, if you don't want to and think it's a stupid idea then that's okay.

 

ooooo.
thank god I'm taking psych.
I understood everything you said
but regarding the dopamine and serotonin receptors thing, you said that the amygdala is where the receptors cross for "us". does this us mean us INFJs of us humans?

sorry.the bio side of my psych course did not go that indepth into such things.