Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

When I was in college, I was attacked by strangers, knocked down on the ground, and kicked in the head. It sounds like something I would remember. But after a few months I forgot it, and it took me 34 years to remember it again. From one point of view, that seems impossible. But it turns out that such a response is perfectly natural. Since trauma cannot peacefully coexist with normal life, we find ways to deal with it, and one of the most common ways is forgetting. Forgetting may feel comforting in a way. If we’re not remembering the pain, perhaps it won’t hurt. A variation on forgetting is to be hyper-aware of it, but refuse to think about it. The memory takes on a rigid form that repeats over and over without deeper review. In either case, the incident remains in the same basic shape as it was when you first experienced it. Like an ancient mummy, the episode remains entombed in exactly the form it was in when you laid it to rest. Shrouded in bad ideas and rotten feelings, it emanates an unpleasant odor that occasionally wafts up from its grave.

Aside from the fact that we never completely kill it, and it comes back to life when we least expect it, one of the worst problems about this attempted resolution of trauma is that we bury valuable parts of ourselves along with the pain. A veteran who tries to forget a war may in the process push aside the innocence and pleasures of his childhood. A tragic death or betrayal of a spouse could bury years of healthy life experience and mutual support.

If you could disinter those remains, and evaluate them using today’s perspective, you would find nuances and lessons that could help you cope in a new, more resilient way. You could allow the events to become part of your story, making you feel more whole. However, it’s not easy to revisit those memories. They were unpleasant to start with. That’s why you buried them. And messing with them now feels like waking the dead. So, you continue to avoid them, and they continue to stink. This normal fear of falling backwards into pain prevents us from finding lasting relief.

While we can’t change the past, we can change our relationship to it. By telling the story, we see it from a higher vantage point, see how it fit in with what came before and after, and provide more insights into the other characters and beyond them to the stage they acted on. For example, when I was assaulted on the street of my quiet college town, my sense of safety had been violated. But now, decades later, I can see so much more about the forces that shaped this event.

The Vietnam War was creating a vast upheaval in our way of life. We were all on edge. I believed the war attacked what I thought the world should be, and corrupted my sense of safety and sanity. I knew American boys were getting hurt. I didn’t want to be one of them. So I protested. As I look back on that night, I realize now the boys from a rural town who attacked me were almost old enough to be drafted. They might have had older brothers or cousins already over there. My protests were supposed to protect all of them.

But they weren’t seeing it that way. They saw this war as necessary to defend their family against the encroachment of Communism. The war must be fought to hold back the forces of evil and to preserve the sanctity of their way of life. The campus protests run by long-hair communist sympathizers threatened what they held dear. To protect their world, it made sense for them to go out and find someone with long hair and beat him up. They were protesting the protests, standing up for what they believed, just as I had done, and were trying to protect the world as they knew it. In fact, their actions were the most honorable actions possible. Our lives were more intertwined than I imagined.

By writing about the night I was assaulted, I can turn it into a narrative. I walked along the busy street on a peaceful summer night with my Greek friend Elias, a soft-spoken math graduate student with short hair, and his girl friend Joan. We heard the boys coming up behind us, yelling. I turned and the ringleader tackled me and the other ones swarmed around me and kicked. Elias asked them to stop. His association with me earned him a split lip. Joan screamed, cars honked, a getaway car pulled up and the boys drove off. The intern at the hospital who was accustomed to treating survivors of barroom brawls had no idea how violated I felt. Not wanting to order tests, he brushed off my headache. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “You were kicked in the head.” It turned out I was fine, except for the aches and disorientation. And then it was dawn, and the police took me back to the scene of the attack to see if we could find my contact lens. (They weren’t disposable in those days). A few hours earlier, I thought the police were my enemies. Now, in my moment of need, these two men were down on their hands and knees helping me. I felt an unexpected flush of gratitude.

Putting it on paper lets me get it out of my head, and reduces some of its hold on my unconscious. On paper it doesn’t look as bad, and when I squint, I see it as an interesting story. And the most important benefit of the story is that I can see that even after bad things happen, life goes on.

Compared with some traumatic events my experience was like a visit to a botanical garden. Imagine an older brother of one of the boys who beat me up. Instead of getting kicked in the head by a sneaker, he was in a jungle on the other side of the world, month after month shooting and being shot at, seeing dear comrades blown to pieces before his eyes. For years to come, he would be assaulted by memories which return over and over with such force, they once again tear into his sense of safety and self. And so, he can’t get through the horror because each time he gets near it, it pulls him in and repeats.

Such events seem burned deeply into inaccessible parts of the brain, forever calling out, and yet forever hiding. And so we are terrified of being devoured by our own past. But as long as there is a tomorrow, there is hope of achieving a new perspective. And that new perspective will take the form of a new story.

When you convert your memories into stories, at first you are pulled back into the emotions of the event. But then, as you gain the knack of telling stories, you move beyond those initial moments of pain. Storytelling drags you along, through the trauma and keeps going, to the next day and the next, until eventually you find yourself on more stable ground.

Because of my mind’s abhorrence for those events, the memories went underground, or under something, some primal layer, like a wound that wouldn’t heal so I learned to ignore it. Decades later, I was traumatized along with hundreds of millions of others by airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. I wanted to help in some way so I took a workshop to learn how to talk to victims of trauma. In the practice session, to participate authentically I unearthed my lost memory of being beaten. As I told the story, I started to notice things about it I had not thought about in years. The mugging had made me extraordinarily sensitive about being different, so to protect myself from danger, I decided to stop being different. I stopped protesting.

After I remembered the trauma, I saw the thought process that scared me into silence and compared it to the ideal values I wanted to live by. I decided to reclaim my right to have different opinions and when appropriate to let others know those opinions. It occurred to me that it is inevitable that I am different. Everyone is different and unique. We can’t help it. Now, instead of being driven by the decisions of a scared young man, I am working on a more considered and more public approach to my opinions that allow me to have a more vibrant relationship to the world. Diving into painful memories has helped me grow to my full potential as an individual human being.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under 60's, Coming of age, Madison Wisconsin, Trauma, Vietnam War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.