THE MIND'S AILMENT: ON REPRESSED MEMORIES (THE BASICS)

More than seventy percent of the world's population have not come across the word 'unconscious repressed memories'. Fifty percent of them might have experience it but are ignorant of the fact that what they have experienced is called unconscious repressed memories. For both parties, this piece of information will help a lot.

This is a sensitive psychological topic and it's awareness is very necessary because someone close to you might be a victim. Before you can address unconscious repressed memories, you have to acquire a basic knowledge of it. Repressed memories can be either conscious or unconscious or maybe subconscious. The last two being that the person does not have full awareness of what he or she is doing. According to the article of Lawrence Patihis and her colleagues from the department of psychology and human behaviour, University of California, repressed memories can be said to be something, so shocking that the mind grabs hold of the memory and pushes it underground into an inaccessible corner of the unconscious. When we say unconscious repressed memories, we mean the victim cannot remember the traumatic or shocking event because of the victim's mind defense against the painful content. It is the unconscious process of pushing memories far from the conscious mind's reach. This also suggests that unconscious repressed memories occur mostly when there are bad experiences or traumatic events. A girl was having a conversation with her elder sister who asked where she went ten years ago when the issue of her being sexually harassed by the oldest kid in her compound came up. She replied, 'I do not have an idea of what you are talking about and I certainly don't have an answer for you'. In this situation, she might not be aware of the fact that she had been sexually harassed when she was six years old. She had totally forgotten whatever went down at that time. A man was molested by his teacher when he was a child. Now, he is working with the FBI and a report of child molestation is reported in a school with the same teacher being accused. He comes across his childhood friend who was also molested by the same teacher who told him to pursue the case with his whole heart because he was also molested by the same teacher. He has no idea of what his friend is talking about till he goes to this teacher's house and he sees different tapes on children molestations, including his own tape.

Trauma is an event that causes great distress. Almost two-third of the the world's population have gone through different traumas, once or more than once in their lives. Events that they wish to forget forever. The thing is that the mind is built to absorb and process things. When there is a process, there would be trash, that is, the ones that aren't useful. The way we process events have the ultimate control of our minds when it comes to taking actions. The way person A processes information is definitely not the way person B processes information. Due to a very traumatic event, I might choose not to deal with it at all, I just want to forget that it ever happened. I want be normal again. But, what people fail to understand is that, in life, as long as you relate with other people, there would be situations where people would say something that would trigger memories of haunted events. There would be conversations that we cannot escape. There would be experiences that we would just have to learn to live with.

Researches and shared personal experiences have made it somewhat certain that the ultimate and gradual way of managing and dealing with unconscious repressed memories on getting to know that you have gone through something bad is to share it with someone. Never go through the process of remembering and replaying the events all alone. Make sure someone is there to stand by you and talk to someone you trust about it. Hypnosis can also be used to gradually aid it and get it out but it has its own side effects which is creating existing pseudo-memories. Disassociation with personal efforts can also be used to forget traumatic events memories even from birth.

     In conclusion, this piece of information moves towards helping people understand repressed memories and try to walk their way through it because learning the basics of anything gives you an edge when it comes to actually working on that thing. Your sister, friend, brother or cousin might be going through this.