We are our stories.
We change not by clipping off our stories as we would a hangnail.
[forward.com]
Memory, however, cannot be erased. A major transition, furthermore, demands not a severing from the past but a greater reckoning with it.
“A rupture creates a fragmented self,” the psychologist and author Dr. Eva Fogelman told me. “There’s the period before, the rupture itself, and the period after.”
Fogelman has written extensively on the effects of collective and individual memory, and, in particular, has worked closely with Holocaust survivors and their descendants. “A person needs to have an integrated self in order to function fully in the present,” she told me. Attempting to repudiate your past, individual or national, is therefore a denial of identity, a refutation of your potentially integrated self, an act of violence to your own consciousness.
and
This self fragmentation also occurs when we split off and deny painful emotions, hiding behind a bright smile.
If we use some method (a bright smile, a song, a toy) to distract a sad or angry child from experiencing those difficult emotions, this risk the child lacking any
name for his or her feelings, and will carry the message that anger or sadness brings rejection from care providers.
Persons who deal with painful emotions by cutting themselves often have such an upbringing.
We change not by clipping off our stories as we would a hangnail.
[forward.com]
Memory, however, cannot be erased. A major transition, furthermore, demands not a severing from the past but a greater reckoning with it.
“A rupture creates a fragmented self,” the psychologist and author Dr. Eva Fogelman told me. “There’s the period before, the rupture itself, and the period after.”
Fogelman has written extensively on the effects of collective and individual memory, and, in particular, has worked closely with Holocaust survivors and their descendants. “A person needs to have an integrated self in order to function fully in the present,” she told me. Attempting to repudiate your past, individual or national, is therefore a denial of identity, a refutation of your potentially integrated self, an act of violence to your own consciousness.
and
Quote
"...integrated selves are created by facing our pasts, never by denying them. Memory, I would come to realize, is not only our history. It might be of the past, but it is in the present. Held up, examined, confronted rather than suppressed, it can sometimes be painful, but it can also illuminate our paths to a more wholesome future.
This self fragmentation also occurs when we split off and deny painful emotions, hiding behind a bright smile.
If we use some method (a bright smile, a song, a toy) to distract a sad or angry child from experiencing those difficult emotions, this risk the child lacking any
name for his or her feelings, and will carry the message that anger or sadness brings rejection from care providers.
Persons who deal with painful emotions by cutting themselves often have such an upbringing.