Lab Report #20: Who's Afraid of Their Memories? 👻
findings from playing with our personal ghosts
Dear Ludic Liberators,
This month’s Lab was unprecedented. Only one person (besides myself) joined our monthly experiment in collective liberation! As an event organizer, I was naturally a little bit disappointed (average lab participation across the past 21 labs has been 10 people; median = 11). But as a researcher, I found this to be very interesting data: something about this particular invitation turned people off! Fascinating! Perhaps it was the invite to play a virtual board game (I couldn’t tell if this would be exciting or boring to others, but as it was, the tabletop game simulator was very slow and cumbersome to use; a failed experiment). Perhaps it was the topic? Really? “MEMORIES”? Is it too generic? Too wholesome? Could it be too… scary?????
I don’t know enough about other people’s lives and reasons to say for sure. Do you want to help me by answering this anonymous one-question survey ? I would really appreciate it! But I do feel like I got some clues into this mystery during our two-person Lab, which was still extremely fun, revelatory, and experimental! As a researcher, I was actually really excited to have ninety minutes to learn from another person about the games they play with their memory; this is what in the research world is called rich data 📝🤓. Plus, this particular Lab participant had a very thoughtful and intentional relationship to their past, which is perhaps why they were not too scared to play with its contents. And you know me… I’m excited to play with anything anytime 🤡
Something we uncovered as we experimented with memory games, is that memories don’t just arrive to us neatly and appropriately, like well-mannered house guests to a classy dinner party. Rather, they often spill into our consciousness in a flood, like the perfect storm of embarrassing family members encountering volatile neighbors, with someone tripping on crusted cat vomit we forgot to clean up, knocking over a pile of unopened bills stacked in a way obviously designed to avoid them. Basically our collected memories are like an episode of the reality show Hoarders (or how about Desperate Hoarders of [insert your hometown here]?) so it’s understandable that playing with them in front of strangers might seem, well, a little risky!
As we played with our memories, the Lab participant and I noticed ourselves curating and editing them for each other – picking out not the first one that surfaced on the moviescreen of our mind (because what would revealing this lead them to think about me???), but a third or fourth one, something more “normal,” “nice,” “presentable” about ourselves, with complexities smoothed out and problems omitted. And even though those second or third order memories are our actual lived experiences, sharing them instead of what surfaced first may still feel like putting on mask, simply because that moment of remembering something and not sharing it instantly creates the sensation of shame.
Our memory-scapes make perfect playgrounds for Existential Hide and Seek. We see something, we hide it/from it. We want to be found, we don’t want to be found. We are afraid to seek, thinking we might find something broken or scary. So we hide from ourselves, forgetting it was our turn to play the seeker! The game grows weird and twisted, with all of our internal parts feeling abandoned and confused.
Throughout the past week, I received many cosmic winks on the theme of memory. An old friend sent me photos of a gift I made for him 17 years ago that I had no memory of making, but was undeniably my work. Another friend who lives far away reminded me of a sweet exchange between us that I completely forgot. Both were evidence that at some point I was entangled with these friends more intimately than I am now.
Sometimes I worry that the past-ness of a relationship means that although I was once found by another person, this is no longer the case. Now, without an active, ongoing relationship, I am surely forgotten, hidden, invisible to them. But maybe this is not actually true. Once found ( and I mean really found, really seen by someone ) you cannot be totally unknown to each other. You can become concealed, by time, distance, attentional priorities. But concealment is isn’t the same thing as erasure.
Another form of concealment is the wrapping around a gift.
What if the game we played with memories was continuously wrapping and unwrapping them as presents for ourselves? How sweet would that be!
Of course, not all memories are lovely and wonderful. There are all the other memories, the bad ones, the ones that don’t feel like gifts at all. What about those, hmm?
My lab partner was very helpful here. They had some past experiences that were especially challenging to have lived through, but they said that rather than repress or hide them, they intentionally worked at processing them – writing them down as reflections, analyzing them, sharing them with the world. We played with the metaphor of memory metabolism for a bit. Unmetabolized, difficult memories may get stuck in our unconscious digestive tract, giving us chronic memory reflux – an unpleasant condition characterized by unwelcome flashbacks and emotional discomfort.
If your memory games tend to resemble the popular Trying to Survive the Bad Memory Tsunami or Distracting Myself from the Heartburn of Regrets (both currently trending on Collective Unconscious Netflix), I invite you to try some of the following Ludic Liberation games instead:
Memory Metabolism: Play with metabolizing a memory that’s been haunting you! There are many psycho-spiritual metabolic modalities that can be used to inspire your play:
Focusing - internally focusing on a “felt sense” of an experience by giving it a shape and a name and then gently asking it the question “what about this feels ____?” to help it shift or clarify in some way
Story-editing - a technique described in the book Redirect by social psychologist Timothy Wilson. Basically it involves writing down your memory and then editing it, not to have a different, unreal outcome but a more resilient/positive meaning for your life
The Work - Byron Katie’s method of self-inquiry, I wrote about it and my own version (called Resetting Existential Preferences) here
Feeding Your Demons - a Tibetan Buddhist practice of imaginatively facing and transforming your inner demons by feeding them what they need! Really powerful and honestly FUN!
Somatic therapy such as somatic experiencing - I have not studied these much myself but I do believe that the Body Keeps The Score and that some of our stored stresses can be metabolized through practices like movement and massage
The basic dynamic is to externalize your memory in some form (even into an internally-imagined “monster” or “demon”) and play with interacting and manipulating it. The goal here is to disidentify from the memory and reclaim the power you have to relate to it in the way that serves you. The memory is not you. It’s something you carry with you 👜.
Declutter Your Memories! Remember when I compared our memory to an episode of Hoarders? Well, wouldn’t it be fun to clear out some space and make some order? That does not mean you have to “erase” your memories from your brain like in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Instead, you can try the game of Putting Your Memory In Context. If a memory seems to pop up in your mind unexpectedly like a random household item without a proper home, constantly making you trip up with the reminder that at some one time you were less graceful, kind, mature, brave, etc. than you would like to be, pick that memory up and put in the context closet of its specific story. Probably in that moment, under those environmental conditions, in that stage of development, affected by those particular stressors, you did the best you could, and you learned something from the experience. Rather than letting the memory float around in a plastic bag like a piece of permanent evidence against you, let it stay in its historical context! You can also physically let go of things that remind you of emotionally burdensome memories. Space clearing is famously cathartic!
Enjoy Your Memories! One prompt we played with in the Lab was “Something I love to remember is…” You can actually intentionally cue up a memory and actively indulge in it like a delicious inner dessert, by stretching out and savoring its sensory and affective ingredients. I like this Taking In The Good practice from psychologist Rick Hanson as an inspiration. It can be conveniently remembered (!) with the acronym HEAL: (H)ave a positive experience (or memory); (E)nrich the experience by lingering on it longer than you normally would; (A)bsorb it into you body, letting it sink into and saturate every cell; and (L)ink it to something relevantly negative (this is optional, and while powerful may make the enjoyment feel more like therapeutic work, so you can also just do the first 3 steps). For example, I’m lucky to have collected a number of fun and fulfilling (though not necessarily long-lasting!) romantic adventures throughout my life. When I’m feeling lonely or romantically dull, I like to cue up a sweet and satisfying memory and cuddle up with it like a soft and luxurious blanket. Because of how I play with it, rather than making me focus on the absence of the person or sense of romance in the present, cuddling up with the memory reminds me of my embodied capacity for abundant love, intimacy, and romance. It’s a completely private sweetness that doesn’t break any relationship rules or create drama or attachment! It’s simply a game of enjoying my own past :)
What games do you play with your memory? What new games are you excited to try? Comment and let me know!
Wrapping and Unwrapping my Memories of You for Eternity,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer
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