Keep Pain in the Past. Dr. Chris Cortman

only the first step of healing from your pain in the past. Trying to skip this step is as ill-advised as trying to skip first base on the way to second.

      Linda and the Chicken Wire

      Linda came to me many years ago with this simple request: “I just want to feel something. I am completely numb and feel absolutely nothing.” At the time, I was unaware that Linda was blocking out the significant child abuse that had occurred when she was age four. She had been the victim of what is now called “human trafficking”, as she was sold to various men in her community for sexual services while her single mother was working, and had entrusted her care to a great aunt and her boyfriend. As she began to remember some of the horrific incidents and the specific places and faces of the offenders, Linda became understandably upset. She did not want to continue with this process of healing from her terrible memories. In fact, she was in the process of remembering an incident where she was looking through chicken wire. Day after day and even in her dreams, she had a disturbing sense of being small and looking through holes in a chicken wire fence. Whatever that memory contained, Linda was not up for it. It was disturbing enough for her that she decided to take a break from treatment. That break lasted for five years before her depression intensified to the point that she decided she needed to finish what she had begun. During these five years, she remained stuck in a place of remembering looking through that chicken wire. When she returned to treatment, this was precisely the place to which we needed to return. She was finally capable of finishing remembering the story of being locked in a little crate from which she had looked out through chicken wire. By remembering and grieving through that terrible event, she never had another image, dream, or disturbing thought about the chicken wire again.

      The healing process lasted for years—Linda had an unusually large number of abusive events to work through—until each one of her memories were remembered. But at the end of her treatment, two days after her final session, Linda called me to say she was experiencing feelings she had never had before and realized that these were feelings of happiness. She said it had taken her seventy years of life, and more than twenty years of therapy, to finally experience what it meant to be happy, but that had required flushing out all the ugliness of her childhood abuse.

      Remembering rarely takes this long, but I relate Linda’s case because it demonstrates how not remembering keeps people stuck. Despite doing her very best to run away from treatment, Linda could not escape the image of the chicken wire until she decided to face and process the memory. Only then did it go away forever, as it was finally finished.

      Exploring Memories

      What if you can’t trust the accuracy of your memories?

      I know there are many of you who are skeptical as to whether the mind can repress memories for decades and then recall them in detail. While much debate has taken place on “recovered” versus “false” memories, it’s not really an issue from a therapeutic standpoint. After more than thirty years of full-time practice and 70,000 therapy sessions, I have seen dozens of people who have repressed segments of (or entire) memories, all of whom were successfully treated when the memories were allowed to surface. The byproduct of a repressed memory surfacing has without exception been positive. Not one of my clients used the material to blame others for their lives; no one attempted to take anyone to court and sue them. The memories were ultimately digested and processed in such a way that they could now be integrated into the recovering person’s life. I have read about people creating “false memories,” but in my outpatient practice this has not been an obstacle to treatment.

      Still, you may be skeptical: How do you know if you can completely trust the veracity of your memories? Generally speaking, we do not create false memories, as much as we confuse other data in our heads with what actually happened. For instance, Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist renowned for her work on repressed memories, wrote that based on her research, people do not make up a scene of being molested, for instance, but may confuse the color of the shirt the perpetrator was wearing with a different color that he had worn on another occasion.36 Our memories may not be 100 percent factual, but they are crucial to recovery even if some details are not perfect.

      Science has demonstrated that our memories are indeed fallible, which is a problem if you’re trying to prove something in court. However, when it comes to treatment and recovery, perception, not fact, is king. It is perception, never reality, that creates emotion. Whatever you remember happened is what needs to be brought to the surface. Ultimately, the facts do not matter in this process; when it comes to healing, the emotions contained in the memory must be remembered, expressed, felt, and released.

      I have spent hours with people remembering scenes from devil worshiping cults, wherein they describe horrible things from infanticide to daemonic or angelic presences. Did these things really happen? It is not up to me, the psychologist, to determine what from these memories is real. They are the memories and perceptions of the client. It is the expression and release of these memories that allows them to finish with the memory and complete their healing process. Remembering and working through their stories provides them with peace and healing about their respective childhoods. And remarkably, I have never needed to go back and redo a finished memory years later. What is finished remains finished for the rest of their lives. The healing takes place. While I make it a general practice to believe my clients, I don’t ever need to validate their memories with anyone else, not with the perpetrators and not in a court room. Our work is strictly for the client’s own benefit and never for forensic purposes.