Remembering Self vs Experiencing Self*

Different parts of our brains activate under different kinds of use. There are parts that are most active when we are engaged with the present moment in a relaxed way. Here lies the experience of the “experiencing” self. And then there are parts that turn on when something in the present moment activates a memory from the past. We then move into the remembering parts of our brain and we are no longer having an experience of the present moment but rather of a past moment in the present. We become the “remembering” self.

Being a remembering self is helpful if something in the present moment actually threatens our survival and our remembering self knows it. But not so helpful if the present moment holds no actual threat.

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It isn’t just the feeling of a threat to our physical survival that can push us into our remembering selves. It can be anything where in the past the ego felt its survival threatened…colleagues giggling as you make a presentation at work 10 years ago, a friend in grade 6 not inviting you to their birthday party, an ex-boyfriend who flirted with everyone else but you. And then every work presentation, every social occasion you miss, and every boyfriend who glances the way of another human becomes a reason for activation and we lose our experiencing selves. We miss out on the phenomenon of the unfolding moment to have yet another experience of the past.

We now understand that the function of memory is NOT to be an accurate recording device of events. Memory is for making meaning of events, to help us form and keep an identity, and ultimately to help us to survive.

How memories are made is based on two main ingredients.

1. What we are paying attention to or noticing in the moment
2. The associations that we make, likely automatically arising first from some deep unconscious place, of what we are noticing.

Memory is like the glue of our experiences and in that way it can anchor us and resource us, but it can also keep us stuck. In the work of Family Constellations we aim to loosen up the glue a bit, and to see if there are new ways to hold old experiences together that might give us more freedom from our history.

We can change how we remember. This does not mean changing the facts…the facts remain, but memories are so much more than the facts of what happened. Memories are how we put facts together, the result of what we noticed and the associations that we made of what we noticed. And so by reseeing things from the past we can put our noticing attention on other things and maybe include other associations. That is why in Constellations work we don’t aim to replay the actual experiences, that kind of doesn’t matter. What matters most is how we hold those experiences.

This isn’t about dishonoring how you have experienced and held the past, or about saying that what your remembering self has to say about it isn’t important. This isn’t about excusing people from wrongdoing, not at all. But rather about paying attention to things that might not have been noticed in the moment, making new associations with what happened, and releasing ourselves from the old narrative that has bound us and come between us and our experiencing selves.
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Freedom.**

*NOTE: Thank you to the incredible "This Jungian Life" podcast for the language and greater understanding.
** Also see A View from the Stars: Suffering & Freedom, Seen through the Family Constellations Lens - hum