Re:Depression, Self-Identity and Reality: Living in a Story ...
by ljm on Sunday December 23, 2018 @03:22PM
(#18748111)
You might well be doing yourselves a disservice by not sharing the bad, but that definitely doesn't mean that Facebook is the right place for it.
Going deeper, I don't think we can just look at memories either being good or bad here. They'll all have different emotions attached that you might use to evaluate the goodness of the memory, but that goodness is going to change as soon as your perspective shifts. And keeping the unpleasant memories entirely to yourself may do more harm than good.
For example, I have memories of some truly awful experiences that left me deeply emotionally scarred; traumatised. I don't enjoy recalling those at all, but they have allowed me to protect myself and better understand my boundaries. Eventually my grip on those memories will loosen up because my survival instinct no longer depends on avoiding that experience, because I will have learned how to deal with it.
There are other memories I have that I truly cherish, but not because I call them good. I cherish them because they also amount as evidence to help me move on. I could easily go into any of those and flip them into painful memories: maybe instead of connecting with my best friend I start to think about what else could have happened. And the same with finding positive interpretations of a painful memory.
At the end of it all, I wouldn't want to reflect on my life from my death-bed and have absolutely no memory of anything I struggled with. That's usually where the beauty begins.
Going deeper, I don't think we can just look at memories either being good or bad here. They'll all have different emotions attached that you might use to evaluate the goodness of the memory, but that goodness is going to change as soon as your perspective shifts. And keeping the unpleasant memories entirely to yourself may do more harm than good.
For example, I have memories of some truly awful experiences that left me deeply emotionally scarred; traumatised. I don't enjoy recalling those at all, but they have allowed me to protect myself and better understand my boundaries. Eventually my grip on those memories will loosen up because my survival instinct no longer depends on avoiding that experience, because I will have learned how to deal with it.
There are other memories I have that I truly cherish, but not because I call them good. I cherish them because they also amount as evidence to help me move on. I could easily go into any of those and flip them into painful memories: maybe instead of connecting with my best friend I start to think about what else could have happened. And the same with finding positive interpretations of a painful memory.
At the end of it all, I wouldn't want to reflect on my life from my death-bed and have absolutely no memory of anything I struggled with. That's usually where the beauty begins.