Many people say that they cannot
remember their childhood experiences prior to age 7 and memory studies by psychologists in
the field of childhood development and memory will tell you that this is normal.
Dr. Patricia Bauer, Professor of Psychology and Senior Associate Dean of
Research at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, has been researching the
development of memory in children since the 80s. She has found that children
begin to have a significant increase in the rate of forgetting memories of
their past life events after the age of 7, or the onset of what was termed by
Sigmund Freud as Childhood Amnesia.
For a long time, it was
thought that the reason many adults could not remember events from their early
childhood was because young children just did not have memory ability. But that
has since been explored in research and Bauer concludes children do have memory
ability but that memories from earlier than age 7 have an accelerated rate for
being forgotten once the child is past age 7 than the memories formed after that
age. Why the onset of this forgetting process is at age 7 is still in question
and has lead to further important memory studies of children.
What is important here to
us is that the memory research now being conducted on children concludes that
recovering childhood memories is important to the development of personal
identity and adult decision-making. This is a welcome validation of our work
developing and using the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings to recover memory, with the
affect of uniting body and mind in consciousness. The importance of recovering
childhood memories is an understanding that we as career counselors have used
in our clinical studies with people since the 70s, as we found that the seeds
of who we are and who we become begin in early childhood. If we can become conscious of
those beginnings, then we have valuable self-awareness information upon which to
base healthy and successful life decisions as adults.
We found in counseling hundreds of
adults something very shocking to many people who had no prior or very little
childhood memories. When we asked people to center their awareness on their gut
feelings to guide them and slowly to go back in time and remember when they
felt this feeling in their gut before, they would be able nearly 100% of the time to access early
childhood memories previously un-recalled. And those people who had previously
been able to recall childhood memories were able to continue to recall additional memories using this gut feeling reflection process.
We found that the key to recovering childhood
memories was to have people focus on their inner gut feelings and impact of experience
rather than the details of their lives. We would ask them to come in their awareness
to a place in their past when they had the same feeling they were centering on in the present (usually starting with a reoccurring feeling connected to an unresolved issue in
the present time of their life) and then they would allow the details of the
experience in the past to come to their mind. Each time a feeling memory would
come up in their consciousness, they were asked to focus on the feeling and
continue to go back further in time. It was as if their present feeling
awareness was attached to a thread that went all the way back in time to the
impact of early childhood. One just had to follow the feeling and see where it
landed. My colleague, Robert Sterling, often says that it seems that our
feelings are like sausages in a sting, similar impacts of events that are
connected.
Often, the early childhood memory in
this feeling memory string was completely surprising to the person as the details
of the event in childhood would be completely unrelated to the details of the
present life issue of the person. But if they focused on the feelings, it was
clear that the issue was the same in childhood as it was in the present and the
person was often still trying to work out this issue in the present that began
so very long ago.
Using the head brain to think back to
earlier childhood did not seem to access new memories but feeling back in time,
particularly centering on gut feelings of emptiness and fullness, would take
people back to feelings in relation to events in their lives that they had not
previously remembered. This was usually true in each successive session using
the Somatic Reflection Process. The common response after these somatic
reflections was amazement at remembering things they had not previously
remembered and how useful it was in giving them new insights and perspectives
into the present adult issue and decision they may be facing.
How this occurs, that is, how or why
neurologically the gut feeling is the key to recovering memory, we never knew
when we first developed and used the process in the 70s. We just knew that it worked and
that it helped people to resolve issues they had been carrying all their lives
and that the acquired knowledge of self through this somatic process on gut
feelings encouraged positive adult decision-making.
Although the details of our early lives do come to our consciousness as a result of somatic reflection, the value in doing the inner work of
reflecting on our gut feelings to recall our early childhood is not so we can
remember these details —where we went on vacations as children or
what we did there, the names of our childhood friends, the color of the walls
of our childhood bedrooms, or our favorite tree house. But what is important is that our somatic reflections assist us in remembering the
impact of life upon us, how it felt, what excited us in life and had value to
us, how it felt to be loved or alone or confined or free, what decisions we made about our world, and certainly most important was what we decided as children about ourselves
and who we decided that we were or were not. When we remember through our feeling awareness
these things, then we have valuable information that is the blueprint for making successful life decisions as adults.
Since we primarily worked with adults, we have not engaged the
use of the Somatic Reflection Process with children below the age of 10 years
old, so we do not know what the youngest age is that it would be useful to use to explore memory. We suspect that reflecting on gut feelings with young children would be the key to educating the body-mind, our multiple brains, whole person, and to developing intuitional intelligence. We do know that if used with adults to recover childhood memories, the
Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings is both a key to and validates the
recent findings that children do have the ability to form memories and that these memories are formed around the impact of their experience rather than around the details in their lives, a bottom-up rather than top-down formation. We also know that
these memories are recoverable and the consciousness of them is valuable, perhaps even essential to good emotional and
physical health and longevity.
If you would like to
learn more about our work with the Somatic Reflection Process, we invite you to
read our book What’s Behind Your BellyButton? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and GutInstinct and please do come join the conversation on this blog and/or email
us. The following is a short excerpt from our book that we think you will enjoy
reading that relates to the key to recovering memories in childhood: The Impact of Experience, from Chapter
3:
“Today is felt to be the
most complicated day in our lives and rarely in trying to deal with the issues
of today, are we aware of the impact of the past on those issues. As we try to
sort through the details of what is going on around us, we are often unable to
see a clear positive path into the future. It seems no matter what we do to
take action on the issues the same empty feeling persists or reoccurs and the
actions seem only to further complicate the issue, leaving the emptiness to be
dealt with later on.”
“It
seems to be quite natural for us to try to figure out what is bothering us—to
understand what is going on. Usually, as long as we keep the reflection to
ourselves, we continually see the details and fail to find the meaning of the
issue. Even though we reach out to a friend and ask for attention around the
details of the issue, we may gain little or no insight into what is bothering
us. Often the attention we get is sympathy for having to deal with the details
of the issue. We become quite confused about ourselves and we get hostile at
the one to whom we have asked for help and have gotten sympathy. Such an
experience with another person focusing on details, serves only to leave us
feeling more empty and alone.”
“As
we comb through the piles of details of the past, we know in our feelings that
the details weren’t the meaning of the experience. Somehow through the external
judgments we used in the assessment of the experience, we become too confused
to understand this clearly. As a child, we often move into action with our
instinctive feelings, often with no logical motive. Others who observe our
actions are privy only to the details and often make judgments about us from
what they can perceive, without an understanding of our feelings.”
“If
we enter experience from our instinctive feelings, we must assess the meaning
of the experience from the original feeling needs involved. We must exclude
other external logical judgments if we wish to understand clearly what our
behavior means. Only by such a reflective process—reflection with the inner gut
feelings—is the confusion eliminated.”
“When
we can push the details of the experience out of our awareness, we can turn
into the awareness of ourselves and reflect on our inner feelings. It is when
we can do this that we are able to see the relationship of the confusion of the
present to the issues and the feelings of the past. It is only through the
process of reflection on our feelings, triggered in the confusion of the
present, that we can begin to understand the sources of the feelings that are causing
the confusion. By dealing with these past feelings, we may begin to arrive at
some understanding with what we are dealing in the present moment.”
“These
feelings accumulated from our past, rather than the details of our lives, seem
to be the accurate record of the impact of our life experience. Until we
perceive these early childhood feelings as acceptable, the patterns that
develop with time constantly interfere with our understanding of ourselves in
the past. Not until these feelings are validated by another person as
acceptable human feelings can we let go of the past and put our full energies
into present experience.”
“Fear,
guilt, hostility—with an underlying emptiness feeling—triggered in by our
present experiences are signals telling us that there is a need to reflect upon
the past issues up through time in order to free ourselves from the past
unresolved feelings about ourselves. The surface logical feelings of guilt and
fear signal to us a conflict between what we think and what we feel about ourselves.
A conflict or lack of communication is going on between our gut feelings and
logical thinking brain. On the basis of our feeling awareness, the reflection
up through time shows us the necessity for the actions we have taken.”
“The
instinctive feeling of emptiness is signaling our logical mind that there is
unfinished work to be done. There is an inner and outer conflict to be resolved
and a reckoning of our two brains, the beginning of which lies festering in our
past experiences. Once we find the source of the original disturbance, in the
often distant past, reflecting back through time identifying the occasions when
the feelings of emptiness matched the feeling of the now—the same feeling and
likely reoccurring at several different ages; we need to clarify the purpose we
were trying to achieve by the action and what need we were trying to fill. Then
we need to work our way back in time in reflection touching the same occasions
of emptiness we found before, and clarifying each instance all the way up to
the present. It is then that we have become aware of much about ourselves and
our environments, which we have been unaware before, and now we can realize the
necessity of dealing with experience from our inner center of intelligence as
well as the outer sensory judgment of others.”
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