So one bit of social technology we’ve regressed on lately is repressing memories. Which is a shame, because it’s a great way to elide social tensions or contradictions, often a lot more efficient than the currently popular approach of attempting to rejigger everything to eliminate them, breaking important shit in the process.

(I guess the metaphor would be industrial lubrication, where the problem of metal parts rubbing against each other and causing heat and damage isn’t resolved by separating the parts - whose contact is often the functional part of the mechanism - but by enabling the opposing forces to slide right off instead of accumulating, improving durability.)

And the best part is it requires no external energy source and creates no waste - when you die, as you inevitably will, it all decays to nothing.

(Okay, if you believe the Freudians, it gives rise to weird quirks, fetishes, paraphilias, and psychosomatic afflictions. But come ON, it’s 2015, this is tumblr, “weird quirks, fetishes, paraphilias, and psychosomatic afflictions” are in.)

But why curse the darkness when you can light a candle? So, here, let me share with you an excellent trick for repression I stumbled into when I was a kid.

The way it works is like this: humans can only maintain a limited number of mental “threads” at one time, usually around 7-8. So, when your painful memory intrudes from nowhere, immediately start shoving things into that stack until it’s full and new entries pop the old one out.

And these don’t have to be complex things, I remember some of my go-tos were the silhouette of the state of Kentucky, rainbows, and the number 7. Not anything about rainbows or the number 7, just the fact of them.

By doing that right quick you could clear your short-term memory before it had a chance to “set” in long-term memory, and keep from making associations to other concepts that could trigger further uninvited recollections.

Now, if that were all, it would still be a decent trick, but there’s more. I noticed that as I neared the limit of entries in the stack, they became… abstracted. If we’re carrying through with the computing metaphor, maybe my mind was doing some sort of compression or memory swapping to try to stretch capacity. In effect, it got to a point where as long as I maintained this balance I could examine the painful memory as if it were sealed in a cube of lucite. Reflect on it, rotate it to view from various angles, intellectualize about it, without actually feeling anything about it.

From what I understand, this is close to the concept of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, where you can rationalize through your trauma under the protection of an impenetrable shield of chemical love. Anyway, totally worked 100%. Every time one of those memories came up I’d lock it down, sand a bit of it off, and toss it back into the void. After enough cycles it’d be either polished to nothingness, or by then so distant from where I was “at” to permanently dismiss as irrelevant. At this point I can look back on the stuff I used to shudder at and just laugh, or at least shake my head.

I mean I suppose it’s possible that some memories are too strong, I didn’t actually resolve all my issues and still have some dark secrets buried so deep I’m consciously unaware of them. But that’s still not an argument against efficacy, is it?