These are some of the quotes that have gently moved me in a good direction.
"Your task is to find the good, the true, and the beautiful
in everything, even and most especially the problematic."
– Richard Rohr
“Everything that happens is potentially sacred if you allow it to be. Once we accept that God is in all situations and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes occasion for good and for God.
“This is the day Yahweh has made memorable, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118:24
- Richard Rohr
May you learn to see yourself
with the same delight
pride, and expectation
with which God sees you in every moment.
– John
O’Donohue, For Solitude, To Bless the Space Between Us
“Exclusion might be described as the core sin. Don’t waste
any time rejecting, excluding, eliminating, or punishing anyone or anything else.
Everything belongs, including you.”
– Richard Rohr
I can allow my past and my wounds to be my teacher. I can find good in any situation. I'm learning that I can even rewrite my memories, if or as needed. The research fascinates me.
The speculation, based on some research trials, is that we rewrite our memories every time we recall them. Emotional memory may not be permanent after all.
First, a bit about how memories get laid down, from a Smithsonian article:
Recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons. Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain (the human brain has 100 billion neurons in all), changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses. A synapse is like a bustling port, complete with machinery for sending and receiving cargo—neurotransmitters, specialized chemicals that convey signals between neurons. All of the shipping machinery is built from proteins, the basic building blocks of cells.Both building a new memory (consolidation) and tucking away an old one (reconsolidation) presumably involve building proteins at the synapse.”
Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, in a 2000 study with rats, found that anisomycin, which blocks the synthesis of proteins in the brain, could reduce fear associations. If memories are consolidated just once, when they are first created, he reasoned, the drug would have no effect on the rat’s memory of the tone or on the way it would respond to the tone in the future.
But if memories have to be at least partially rebuilt every time they are recalled—down to the synthesizing of fresh neuronal proteins—rats given the drug might later respond as if they had never learned to fear the tone and would ignore it. When Nader later tested the rats, they didn’t freeze after hearing the tone: it was as if they’d forgotten all about it.
Though his research is done on rats, he believes it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way.
Effects of propranolol
It turns out that propranolol, a drug that blocks the effects of a norepinephrine (adrenalin, enhances emotional learning), disrupts the way a memory is put back in storage (reconsolidation).
Merel Kindt, U. Amsterdam, and colleagues, reports in a study published in Biological Psychiatry December 2015 that propranolol (β-adrenergic blocker) was only effective when the drug was administered upon memory reactivation. It's effects were rather like retrieving a previously written document, erasing some of the text, and then writing something new in its place.
Alain Brunet, a psychologist at Douglas Mental Health University Institute, has run clinical trials involving people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In his 2008 study, PTSD patients took a drug
intended to interfere with the reconsolidation of fearful memories. The drug,
propranolol, inhibits a neurotransmitter
called norepinephrine.
The
patients had each experienced a traumatic
event, such as a car accident, assault, or sexual abuse, about a decade earlier.
They began a therapy session sitting alone in a nondescript room with a
well-worn armchair and a television. Nine patients took a propranolol pill and
read or watched TV for an hour as the drug took effect. Ten were given a
placebo pill.
Brunet
came into the room and made small talk before telling the patient he had a
request: he wanted the patient to read a script, based on earlier interviews
with the person, describing his or her traumatic experience. The patients, all
volunteers, knew that the reading would be part of the experiment. “Some are
fine, some start to cry, some need to take a break,” Brunet says.
A
week later, the PTSD patients listened to the script, this time without taking
the drug or a placebo. Compared with the patients who had taken a placebo,
those who had taken the propranolol a week earlier were now calmer; they had a
smaller uptick in their heart rate and they perspired less.
In 2014 Brunet published a larger study of PTSD patients. Those who took
propranolol once a week for six weeks while reading the script of their
traumatic event showed an average 50 percent reduction in standard PTSD
symptoms. They had fewer nightmares and flashbacks in their daily lives long
after the effects of the drug had worn off (study looked at 4 months post). The treatment didn’t erase the
patients’ memory of what had happened to them; rather, it seems to have changed
the quality of that memory. “Week after week the emotional tone of the memory
seems weaker,” Brunet says. “They start to care less about that memory.”
That we can change the quality of our worst memories gives me hope. Possibly some of this science explains, in part, a mechanism that God/Love uses to heal us?
I'll take some healing, or rewriting of memory toward more positive, however it comes.
