i've enjoyed writing since i was 8 and read my first nancy drew mystery. But i've been told, at various times in the past, that i have strong openings and endings in my stories- and no substance in the middle! If this translated equitably into neuroscience lingo, one might expect i'd have a bad memory, however, no such
luck. i remember too many unimportant things and not enough important ones. So, it would seem attentional difficulties are my true curse.Most people claim to remember snippets of dreams. Some do say their dreams have recognizable beginnings, middles, and endings. Is that really it? Or is it what the psychoanalysts might say? We contextualize things afterward in order to understand them. Forget psychoanalysts. Here's Nobel prize winner Dr. Eric Kandel: "Once i place these memories in the context of the spatial layout of our small apartment, the remaining details emerge in my mind with surprising clarity." He's recalling something that happened in his youth--Kandel found that when he specifically focused on imagining his childhood home, he was suddenly flooded with all sorts of details that he had not otherwise considered, were he to think on a particular night of particular happenings from a more removed context. (It's the same with expressive writing - EW - and traumatic event reconciliation - TER - which i've posted on before: a TE must be
considered from an honest place, face-to-face with the reality of a client's most personal context). Not to make light of anything, but perhaps this is a more illustrative example: the Method of Loci would not be nearly as effective if you were watching Jim Smith walk the path, instead of walking it yourself).Consider this: are you ever naked in your dreams? Are you certain that you did not later, upon waking, add the crowd of classmates backward into your dream? What does that say about memory? There are those among us who are always, even unconsciously, striving to make sense of things. However, It would seem that the PTSD sufferer is unlikely to be someone prone to analytic fits of self-examination prior to the event of onset because the social-learning circuit for "contextualization" failed to fully develop. That, of course, could be where EW comes in.
As we do with our own dreams, we must aid others in the contextualization of much more horrific TEs, using, predominantly, varied forms of EW. As memories unfold and are faced head-on, a truly remarkable process of healing can begin to take place.
