Remembering and forgetting

This post is mostly a questioning one because I’m trying to find what works regarding what to remember and what to forget.  I suppose the universe in everyone’s earthly mind needs to find its most productive space in what to remember and what to forget.

Since being off of 21 years of antidepressants since 2009 I have been remembering a lot of stuff that I didn’t have access to before.  Some of it has been pretty icky, but most of it has been pretty nice.  The largest benefit is that I feel more integrated as a person now than when I was living in a superficial brain state with lots of extra serotonin and norepinephrine floating around.  I’ve also been learning how my brain decided to forget things by association.  If something was a trigger, I would lock that event away too because of any closeness of association.  I have forgotten things that I want to treasure.  I have no memories of my mother reading to me, no memories of some parties I had in my youth, and very few memories of tender touching moments between my parents and myself as a young girl. I want those memories back.  I had forgotten them because of association.   At my age I want to have a more solid and effective brain with better learning powers.  It is important to me to not throw away new information just because of a negative association it may elicit.  I want to resolve and put to peace the negativity by understanding it and loving it, and continue to learn.

This last week a friend delivered a trigger and a complication arose in which I wanted to completely have nothing to do with that friend.  For many reasons he needed to not be a house guest any more.  However, I needed him out of my space and I know that my hyper strong reaction had a lot to do with the trigger.  I still needed relapse time and time to recover from the delivered trigger.

A good friend of mine reminds me that with brains, that which “fires together wires together.”  She is right.  She says that this is the reason why it is important to forget traumatic events.  It is not good to relive them over and over again.  She is right.  However, I want to know just how much I need to know.  As I write this, it occurs to me that this is where the power of the subconscious just might help.  It’s going to work anyway especially as we sleep.  We might as well give it good direction.

I am blessed with a loving partner who has such a deep capacity for love.  It seems sometimes that his love falls to the lowest of us – those who need the most compassion.  His powers of forgetting are staggering and have served him well.  He doesn’t know resentment.  It doesn’t work for him.   If it arises, he finds ways to shuttle it away because it is just not an effective state of mind.  He is a good example for me.

I, on the other hand, have had a tendency to give things a negative skew.  I have had to learn to remember so that I could understand why I have done this.  Now that I am learning why and how I have been doing this, I want to delete the icky stuff.

It occurs to me that when we were babies crawling around and learning how to walk, we stumbled along and fell down a lot.  We probably had temper tantrums and cried a lot about the “failures,” but then apparently we did get up again and go forth.  I think about consciousness in the context of a continuum from personal mind to universal mind and think sometimes as we echo forth we need to prune away the non-essential – much as our brains prune away in learning and plasticity.  Since the microcosm is found in the macrocosm, and I believe we are of a fractal nature in physicality and energy.   I believe that once the task is accomplished, we can forget the pain and agony of the learning experience.

Sometimes I suppose I wish I’d be able to just get up and walk on!  Arrgh.  What are your thoughts?