The Amnesia of Healing

An excerpt from my book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

Walking Your Blues Away

Chapter 7

The Amnesia of Healing

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
—Maya Angelou

One of the most fascinating aspects of true psychological healing is how people who’ve been through a healing experience dismember, reassemble, and re-member their past. Psychological and emotional healing requires that the old stories of what happened to us in the past, and that can fester away inside, be examined, taken apart, and reassembled into a new whole that is supportive and healthy.

         Because this is true healing, the result is a sort of amnesia about the original pain, not unlike the difficulty each of us has in remembering how much it hurt when we physically injured ourselves in the past.

         In fact, one of the ways to know whether healing has occurred is to ask a people if they can remember clearly how much an original trauma hurt. They may say that they can, but the memory no longer brings tears to their eyes, no longer colors their view of the world, no longer nags at them daily. The amnesia isn’t about details or facts—those remain intact. Rather, it is amnesia of emotion. A healed person has cut loose the old pain and let it drift away behind them into their past, where it’s difficult to reach even should they want to reach it.

         Ironically, this means that people, when healed, often don’t realize the magnitude of the transformation that they themselves have experienced. Because in the present they can no longer re-experience the pain of that past, they have no clear basis for comparison between how they feel now and how they felt then. The result is that they’ll often respond to questions about the healing—particularly more than a few weeks or months after the healing shift has occurred—with a shrug, as if to say, “Well, yeah, I feel fine now. But I wasn’t so bad back then, was I?”

         Of course, their friends and relatives remember well what a wounded wreck the person was. But the person him- or herself has, as part of the healing process, disconnected so completely from the pain that it is no longer possible to remember it.

         This is not an uncommon phenomenon: it happens in many other dimensions of emotional life. Ask a person about someone he or she was once in a relationship with, but now have completely left the relationship and it’s resolved and in their past. Odds are that person will have a very difficult time remembering what it was about the other person that attracted and held the two of them together. They may easily remember what they did together, but the feelings are no longer accessible.

         This just makes psychological sense. If we didn’t cut loose from old emotions as we move forward with life, they would constantly harass us. While joy states that stand alone are powerful tools we carry throughout our lives to help us confront daily dramas and traumas, past emotional states that continue to visit us must be released for us to function in the now.

         This can be deflating news for therapists who employ bilateral systems such as Walking Your Blues Away therapy to bring about true, lasting healing. Your clients and friends don’t remember how incapacitated they were, so they’re not as amazed by the changes you’ve made happen as you are!

         The good news here, though, is that when people have developed this sort of emotional amnesia about a past pain, they’ve really and truly been healed. Look for this as a landmark.

         The other significant landmark that lets you know that healing has happened—one that you’ll often see on the very day, at the very moment, the big healing shift happens—is that the story the person tells him- or herself about the past event changes. It shifts from some variation of “I was a victim of that” or “That really hurt me,” to something like “I really learned from that” or “That wasn’t such a big deal, and it’s long over now.”

Personally Experiencing the Shift

When you’ve been through this process yourself, you’ll notice this shift, although it will be an intellectual realization rather than an emotional one.

         Everyone, for example, has experienced a broken heart at one time or another in their lives. It’s part of growing up, passing middle age, and growing old: it happens in every stage of life. Whether it’s a teenage crush that devastates us when it doesn’t work out or the loss of a friend or relative to disease or accidental death, we all get hurt. Ultimately, as Jim Morrison pointed out, “No one here gets out alive.” Similarly, no one gets through life without being wounded.

         Yet when you think back to some of the wounds you’ve experienced, odds are that most of them are now more intellectual than emotional memories. I still remember when my dearly beloved maternal grandmother died when I was a child: I was inconsolable. I remember myself sobbing, but I see it as a disconnected picture, in black-and-white tones, from a distant past. While I still miss her (and my paternal grandparents as well), the wound no longer rips me apart inside.

         I still remember the first big love of my teenage years, and how she dumped me for a guy on the football team. I remember what I said and did, but I can’t quite get a grasp on the frantic pain that I know I experienced.

         I still remember when my best friend from my high school years, Clark Stinson, committed suicide. We had spent a summer living in tipis deep in the forest of northern Michigan on a spiritual quest when we were only seventeen. After high school he’d been drafted into the war in Vietnam. Clark friend came home from Vietnam for Christmas, put his revolver into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I remember that event in my life, but I don’t remember too. The excruciating pain is now gone, more than fifty years later—what is left is a wistful and sad emptiness.

         None of these experiences were processed using any particular technique or therapy; they all resolved themselves, like the skin heals over with a scab. No doubt there were processes I went through on the road to healing from these wounds—changing the stories I told myself, walking, discussing the event with others, and so on—but none were “intentional” attempts to resolve trauma. I simply healed, as we all do from most of the vagaries and vicissitudes of life.

         It’s when we get stuck—unable to get past or around or through the “present-feeling” memory of a wound—that we need a technique such as Walking Your Blues Away or Thought Field Therapy or EMDR or NeuroLinguistic Programming to process, break loose from, and move out ahead of past traumas. Or when we simply want to speed up the normal healing and grieving processes we experience in life as the result of loss, disappointment, pain, or fear. We know we’ve been successful when the pain and trauma are only intellectual memories than can be handled once again without searing our flesh or blinding our vision.