Recurrent painful memories pull people backwards in time and can be deeply unpleasant for both the individual and those around them. Such memories can keep a person psychically stuck in past distress, causing new events to be perceived through the lens of earlier hurts. Repetition often arises because the person still feels vulnerable in the same ways, because key questions remain unanswered, or because present life lacks stimulation. When personal circumstances and internal responses have genuinely changed, memories feel like distant postcards; when core feelings persist, old events continue to feel threatening.
Being yanked backwards through time to those hurtful memories can be so unpleasant. Not just for us, but for the people around us; it can keep us psychically stuck in old distress, each new event seen as a trace outline of the past. So why do we keep going back? One possibility is that we feel not enough has changed.
Time might have passed, but in the respects that matter, we still feel as though we're right there. Still scared in the same ways those situations made us feel, still vulnerable to those same stressors, even uninsured against the same mistakes. If you feel as though a lot has changed since an indignity, either in you or in your circumstances, the memory feels more like a postcard from somewhere distant.
Collection
[
|
...
]