One of my friends often has horrible memories enter his mind. He remembers times when he was embarrassed or made socially unacceptable mistakes. He just can't take it some days. There is nothing he can do about his mistakes except to justify and forget them. My psychology teacher told us that forgetting something on purpose is called “repression.” What parts of the brain are used in this process? What chemicals? Are there any techniques for it?
well what basicly goes on is that something in Long Term Memory(LTM) becomes inacessable. This happens all the time. You have more stored in LTM than you can easily recall. I've always heard of repression as something that just happens, due to psychological stress. Strong emotions connected to a memory may cause you to try to get rid of, or repress the memory. I wasn't aware that you could do it on purpose, maybe you can. It depends on the memory. If it's something bad then you may kind of "automatially" do it. What parts of the brain? Anything having to do with memory i guess, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex? I don't think there's one area having to do with repression. Granted i don't know alot about emotional cognition. And there are dozens of chemicals in the brain. There's no one chemical for repression. If you are thinking of trying to find some way to get at these memories, I don't think there is a "scientifically proven" way to enhance memory, but there are therapist and whatnot who claim to be able to help. by the way, all this was from glancing at an old text book and what i remember.
I heard a memory will become repressed when any atempt to access it cause pain or a negative responce... this will cause your neurons to shut off all connection to it. Your friend though is like me were we can not do this easily and we remember very tramatic memories easily! Oooooh GOD.... high school... UUug... comming back to me!!!
Seriously, if anyone knows anything about the science of "forgetting memories on purpose," or methods of performing it, please tell me. I think this is interesting as hell!
Memory Repression The key is the particular type of events that his memory keeps reviewing. If your description is correct, these are not merely horrible things that happened to him, but horrible things that he feels specific responsibility for. As a sensitive person in pain, he would like to forget them and move ahead with his life. But he is also a smart person who worries (at this point mostly unconsciously) that things like this may happen again and he will again feel the pangs of responsibility. So part of him doubts the ability to "move ahead with his life" until he figures out how to avoid these recurrences. He is also a good-hearted person who understands that making a socially unacceptable mistake or doing anything else that brings embarrassment does not just affect him, but all the other people involved. He would like to make their lives more enjoyable by freeing them from the threat of having to witness or endure more incidents of this type. What he is trying to do by forgetting is to go backwards to a time in his life before any of these things happened. Or it could be seen as going sideways, bypassing the obstacle. Unfortunately life only goes in one direction, forwards. Instead of muting the loud message that his unconscious keeps sending him, he needs to listen to it and accept its help. When this happens to me, I let the experience flow back into my conscious mind as strongly as it can, so I can observe and analyze all the details. Why did this happen? Was I not paying attention and walked into a situation of a type that I apparently am inept at handling? Did someone whom I trust maneuver me into it? If so was it out of malice, misunderstanding, that person's own weaknesses and blind spots, or their hope that by now I've learned to handle it better? What are the commonalities among these situations? I may have to do a little excavation to uncover them, but not too much since my unconscious obviously wants to help and is surely providing signals that Ijust need to learn to read. At what specific point in a situation did I turn the corner and from then on was committed to having it turn out badly? Was there actually something good that I also acquired or hoped to acquire from the experience, making me reluctant to avoid it? Or was my common sense or my instincts or everything I've learned from my family, teachers, and friends telling me that when X happens the only right thing to do is Y? What could I have done differently to bring about a more satisfactory outcome? If I know the answer, can I remember it next time it happens? Or does the moment sweep me along passively until damn, I did it again? Can I put a label on these situations and henceforth try to avoid them? If I could, would I, or would I be missing out on something important? Do these situations trigger a memory of something similar in the more distant past that went very badly, and fear disables my ability to control them? When these memories appear, your friend has to walk straight into them with open eyes and a clipboard and use his analytical skills to answer all of these questions. It may hurt, but this pain is an investment instead of a punishment or the ravages of a cruel universe. When I identify the moment at which I started to lose control of the outcome of an event, I feel better. Even if the same thing happens to me several more times, each time I can figure it out more quickly. Eventually the realization arrives just a few moments after it's too late. The next step is to see it coming before it gets me, and I really do eventually get to that point. Then I feel much better because I've corrected a problem, and my unconscious has no more need to torment me with the memories. After doing this a few times, it has more faith in my ability to learn from these experiences, and delivers the memories without the overwhelming feeling of horror. Last time I performed my own personal little death spiral, I immediately stopped in my tracks, apologized to everyone, and made a lame, ice-breaking remark like, "Sorry, I must be channeling Cartman tonight!" Maybe friends can help. Although the guy may not appreciate their language: "Right then you turned into a jerk." Or, "You zone out every time somebody talks about XYZ." Don't write off the possibility of a drug problem, since the government has completely confused us as to which drugs are dangerous. I do my best jobs of sabotaging my life when jagged on caffeine. Or he could play a game like StarGate (no relation to the TV show) or Tarot cards (they don't have to be used for just fraud and entertainment) or anything that slices and dices the world into archetypes and probes his relationship to each of them. Or he could hire a Jungian therapist (stay away from the Freudians, they'll probably tell him the memories are an important part of his identity that he should embrace), but if he hasn't done that by now he probably has reasons that are as difficult to overcome as the memories themselves. Memories of this type are not uncommon and they are not indomitable. They are like so many things in life: the only way to put the swamp behind you is to walk through it carefully. Your friend is not alone. Good luck to him from someone who has walked through a few swamps.
Beautiful man! That what I have been doing but I never really realized it before (“don’t want to @#$% up like that again remember…”) You a psychologist?
No, I just play one on sciforums. Just a guy who takes his role as an "elder" seriously. I appreciate your kind words.
I can relate: most of the guys here are HS students... though a 2nd year college student is not much above that am I?
Science of repression? Non-existant! Repression is practically impossible to test in any experimental situation without serious problems in interpretation. It is entirely theoretical, and anyone that claims it is real must admitt an utter lack of solid evidence. It was thought that if you give someone a negative experience of something, they will tend to suppress it. Hence, they should not be able to recall it as well. The experiment has been done. It turns out that they dont remember as well- at first. But here is the catch, they remember BETTER later on. This is true for all emotional or aroused experiences, and is given the name emotional memory. This has fairly well worked out pathways in the brain. This all has destroyed the hopes of many "repressionist" ideas. This is only one of many examples where experiments are failing to find anything like repression. The list of this type of thing goes on and on. Sorry, but repression has outlived its day. It is nothing more than a feudian remnant from century old psychological theorizing.
