Memories can be a lot of fun and very distinctive. For example, I recently watched a Quentin Tarantino movie that was about a historical event, only the ending did not go the way we all remember that historical event.
That's what's so great about memories, with a little imagination you can change them like happened in Quentin Tarantino's movie. He twists the facts so that it becomes an alternate history that could have happened. It's fiction, of course, but it's also a story as if it could have really happened
I do find this way of filming interesting and it also reminded me that you can't change your past. You can't change the things that have taken place.
How you handle it, how you see it, how you think about it, how you say about it and what you believe about it can all be changed.
You can even change it so that your memory takes a whole new turn, as if something never happened.
This is the power and pitfall of our brain. We think our memories are real, but studies often already show that this is not always the case. Your memory is even distorted the moment it is created.
Because of your way of thinking and your beliefs, you already see situations a certain way and experience that situation the way you experience it. Then, if some time passes before you pick it up again, it can change again. The emotions you feel at that time and the events you have at that time then also affect the memory again.
Your memory seems very real, it feels real and you really experience it, but it's like a movie. Like Quentin Tarantino's.
You can say you have experienced real things, but even that may not be true. For example, there are people who imagine something very often that it can happen and suddenly it has happened in their mind. It feels like a real memory.
This includes cases of women who thought they had been abused by their fathers, but that was not true at all. That false memory then surfaced during treatment by a psychiatrist. Many (almost all) men have been held innocent as a result. Yet the daughters still believed it. This was because of the retrieval, because of the leading questions and suggestions of the psychiatrists[1]. Because it became a memory, they thought it was real.
Thus, there are many people with false memories.
You especially notice this when you talk to friends from the past. You start with: "Do you remember...?" You then tell your story and then your friends from the past indicate that, according to them, something very different had happened. This can make you wonder if you were somewhere else after all, but this was simply because everyone has their own distortion and that distortion also has to do with how they develop.
Suddenly the memory for one person is then different than it is for another.
The benefit of this is that you can adjust your memories to feel good about it, neutral about it, and some people even use it as a motivator for the rest of their lives. For example, people with bad childhoods may do this. They then shape it so that their childhood makes them want to get everything out of their lives. Unfortunately, sometimes it also goes the other way, that is, they can't get anything out of their life because of their youth.
Anyway, the idea of a bad childhood is often a distortion. Of course abuse or a corrective spanking is bad. But in some cultures, a corrective spanking is quite normal. So what is good and bad is still sometimes up for debate.
I don't do it, I think it's bad. But this is not to say that in retrospect my boys can't distort their childhood in such a way that they still thought it was shit. Rather not, but it's still possible.
They, all of us, have it in us to turn our youth into something cool or something very unpleasant.
Thus, people can still turn a relatively good childhood into something traumatic. How this is possible? It's because of how people deal with their memories and what they make of them.
Facts are facts, of course, and they can be terrible. You can imagine some of that.
The beauty of the past is that it's over.
In your head, you can then distort it to make it a Quentin Tarantino-esque ending. You can turn the color out of your movie, you can rewind the movie. In your brain, you have those possibilities.
This is not always easy because there can be a lot of emotion involved and a lot of resentment or hatred or whatever.
But when you can pass something off as a movie, you can end it in such a way that you end it in such a way that you think, "Yes, this is a good ending." At some point you then start to believe that. Because to your brain, it doesn't matter whether it's fantasy or reality.
Also listen to this podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/195236/1727590-once-upon-a-time?play=true
Memories and their influence on being happy
When it comes to the memory of a child with a bad childhood that makes him want to get everything out of life, you can see that a bad memory does not necessarily mean you will also have a bad life and have to be unhappy.
Research also shows that people who look at their lives as a process in which they want to grow often feel happier[2]. In that respect, it's almost better to have a bad childhood, because that gives you a somewhat easier foundation from which to grow.
So one trick to making a bad memory a good memory is to ask yourself how that bad event caused you to grow as a person. How it made you stronger, how it sent you on a development path.
For example, an integrative memory is one that has taught you something new about yourself or other people.
Slogans such as "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" are so popular for this reason.
Intrinsic memories
Then you also have intrinsic memories. These are memories that have helped you grow as a person. The ones that show you that you built a good relationship with someone or that you did something good for society.
It has nothing to do with status or making money.
So the memory of losing your job can become much less distressing if you also remember that you were well taken care of by your family and/or friends. Or that the job you got afterwards was much better for society as a whole.
Using trauma signals in a positive way
Surely you had a traumatic childhood? Research shows that cues from your childhood, such as a familiar smell, can reduce depressive symptoms you may experience in your adult life due to this trauma[3].
This, according to scientists, even explains why adults sometimes still tend to signal abuse in their adult lives.
After all, as a small child, you have to bond with your caregiver, even if they don't like you. So a strange kind of bonding (positive feeling) comes from negative signals. You can then get this positive feeling from some kind of negative signal.
This may also explain why you keep falling for that "wrong" partner anyway.
Change memory so it benefits you
So there are a few tricks you can apply to still give an unpleasant memory a kind of good spin, but this is often easier said than done.
Fortunately, hypnosis can help you do this. For example, if you find it difficult to see how something has actually put a positive spin on your life or provided insight, hypnosis can help.
Just as suggestions and innuendo can create negative and false memories, they can also create good memories.
As I mentioned, you can change your memory like a movie. This is something a hypnotist can help you with. There are all kinds of variations on how to do this.
Depending on the memories and what they trigger in you, different techniques can be used for this. For example, do you want to get rid of a fear? Then a memory that caused the fear can be changed into a kind of comic movie.
Is it a memory that causes a conviction that prevents you from doing something? Then you can look at the memory in a different way, such as from someone else who was there, to see how logical that blockage actually is.
All of this can be done with hypnosis.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works and what you can do with it? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or register directly for one of our training courses.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029157.1994.10403069
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-22407-015
[3] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/3/881?etoc=&csrt=15537073379147429398
