Elizabeth's Story Explained — Part 2 — The Many Aspects of the "Self"
Going home for Thanksgiving
Elizabeth: In last week’s post we discussed how traumatic memories are often experienced as relived rather than remembered and include all the associated emotions. We talked about my having gotten “stuck” in the Thanksgiving scene I’d written and was reliving, which was the source of my writer’s block. But we haven’t answered the question of how typing a few words got me unstuck. What was going on psychologically that made this happen?
Barbara: Well, when you typed those specific words— in parentheses— it sounds like you inserted your present-day self into that scene from the past in which you had been “silenced.” You brought two different aspects of yourself together on the page.
Most of us live our day to day lives with a sense of a “unified self.” But, just think of the difference between the “you” at 10 and the “you” at 40! Huge! Yet, remarkably we think of ourselves as the same person, the same “self.”
In fact, we have each evolved over time. We have gradually changed. We are complex individuals with many different facets that come out in different situations. I know that, for example, I might feel like a confident, articulate person in one meeting and then, befuddled and self-doubting in the very next hour.
Elizabeth: That idea — that these different ways of being can co-exist in your mind and be called to the surface at any moment — seems both amazing and obvious. I think we all experience this without realizing it.
When you go home at Thanksgiving, you don’t remember how you used to behave with your family, you just instantly return to being that other version of yourself, as though almost nothing had changed in the interim.
Barbara: Thanksgiving is the context for the ultimate family snapshot, isn’t it? It’s the archetypal stage for playing out family dynamics. We walk in the door and revert to who we were as kids. Each family develops its own way of being together; everyone plays their part. The behavior is what psychologists call “over-learned.” It’s been performed so many times that it’s become automatic.
Elizabeth: “Going home for Thanksgiving” is practically shorthand for finding ourselves trapped in the same old family script, feeling the same edginess and over-reacting on cue.
Barbara: Absolutely. Context is everything, as we discussed last week. There are two important ideas here, and they’re both operating at Thanksgiving.
The first, we said, is “state-dependent learning,” in which memories and behaviors are tied to the context in which they are learned or first encoded. You go to your childhood home and, even though you haven’t bought a Hersey’s bar in 30 years, you find yourself drawn to the old candy closet.
The other idea is “procedural memory,” which is body memory, like learning to ride a bicycle. You go home for Thanksgiving, whether in reality or in your mind, and even your posture may change to that of the child you once were. So, what do you think enabled you to break through this lifelong pattern?
Elizabeth: I think it was this: when I inserted the declaration of my present assertiveness into the scene in which I was hamstrung, it suddenly became clear that the two versions of myself were mutually exclusive. I could not be both talkative and silenced at the same time. The words I inserted were me speaking and so the silenced-me just disappeared.
Barbara: It seems that you suddenly got a new way of seeing your situation. Before that you had no perspective because you were trapped in it.
Elizabeth: I had a writing teacher (and, later, a friend), Gail Pool, who had a variation of this “stuck” experience and also found a way to a new perspective. She describes the problem in the preface to her memoir, Lost Among the Baining. In the first years of Gail’s married life, she and her husband went to live in New Guinea, where he hoped to do anthropological field work, and she hoped to write an account of their life there. She writes:
“The trip was a fiasco, both professionally and personally. … In the decades that followed, I tried to write about the experience many times, digging up my journals, still redolent of jungle rot, trying to hack my way through the bush. But nothing really worked. Either I couldn’t penetrate the jungle, or I couldn’t find my way out.”
Gail is describing a complete impasse. The 16 months in the jungle had been an overwhelming challenge — the Baining culture, the food, the language, the jungle bugs, along with complete separation from her previous life. The intensity of that immersive experience thwarted self-reflection.
Only when she and her husband traveled back to New Guinea 40 years later was she able to see the Baining and her earlier time with them through the eyes of the person she’d become. And then she could finally write her wonderful book!
Barbara: It seems that both you and Gail had memories that were intensely evocative, to a degree that initially prevented you from being able to stand outside of the experience itself — a place from which to observe, to reflect, and to write. You both needed to be pulled out of the stasis in which you were trapped, Gail by traveling to New Guinea to see the place from the perspective of all her lived years and you by inserting your current, assertive, observing self into the Thanksgiving scene.
Elizabeth: What I took away from this writing episode — the essential revelation — was that the character-me and the writer-me were separate.
Before that, whenever I typed ‘I’, I never conceived of more than one “me.” The ‘I’ on the page and the ‘I’ writing the story were the same. That was because, first—dopey as it sounds—the word ‘I’ was the same.
Barbara: Well, this is not dopey: there is only one word for I. Words correspond to concepts. There is only one you as distinct from other people.
Elizabeth: But, also, I didn’t distinguish the ‘I’s because I was experiencing each one separately and in the present. I had written a scene that felt so real to me, emotionally, that I wasn’t aware, in the moment, of its being a scene. I was truly in it. It was almost like when you’re dreaming and not sure that you are having a dream.
Barbara: I think you are describing something that can happen when a relived memory is experienced as being in the present. In that state the parts of your brain that are self-observing and appraise reality are also quieted. This happens during dreaming as well.
It seems counterintuitive to say that you experienced the writing ‘I’ and the character ‘I’ as the same, since the character is being created by the writer. How could they not be separate? But, when you were imaginatively reliving that traumatic memory as though in the present, for those moments, the character and writer were one. And, the memory was so powerful and disruptive that you had no more agency than the character had. So, when you grasped fully that the two were separate, you got back control over the character and over the writing.
Elizabeth: It sounds so strange because I was shocked to realize something I’d always known.
Barbara: Those sort of revelations can be all the more powerful for being something you actually always knew perfectly well. When the revelation comes, you know absolutely that the insight is right. You may ask yourself, “How could I have ever thought otherwise?”
Elizabeth: There is one more part of the stone screen experience I haven’t yet told you. Let’s talk about that next week.
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