How come your brain goes, ‘Lock it in Eddie’, when it hears a story but it can’t remember where you put your car keys?
What’s the good of it? You’d think that something that gets rave reviews about its amazing capabilities would develop more helpful life skills, wouldn’t you?
Ah … but there you have it.
Even if you try really hard, you can’t remember all the incidents of lost keys, misplaced wallets, purses left behind, phones left down the backs of chairs or losing half the coins for the shopping even though they were annoying and upsetting at the time. Your brain has other things on its mind.
A different event. Different effects.
But the day you were lost at the fete, fair or pageant has stuck with you like the red toffee you stuck to Mum’s white blouse. Even though you were a dopey wide-eyed daydreamer, you still blame Mum, Dad or Grandpa for your trauma. ‘You should have had hold of me! I was looking at the piglets and you were … ‘
And the day you lost your own child or grandchild haunts you out of nowhere as you drop off to sleep some nights
I have friends who lost their child on an Italian railway station. As they gathered the other children and Grandma they lost count of everyone and he choofed his way off to Swizerland. That’s a story they tell with great gusto and shouts of ‘Should have left him there …’, ‘He did it on purpose!’ from the other kids.
And there’s ‘erself and me …
We were new parents and we often recall the time we lost our 18-month-old in a department store. We called and looked for 10 minutes and couldn’t find him anywhere. Store detectives and management all joined in. Then the little blighter popped his head out of a towel cupboard which had a fun sliding door that rattled.
That wonderful brain …
So what’s going on with that suet pudding in your head? It’s complex and simple at the same time. Your brain stores big emotional hits and disregards the scraps. It keeps the biggies in the ‘ready-to-recall’ place, sometimes stewing over them to do you harm, and sometimes letting them set like a bowl of home-made icecream ready to be brought out for fun.
And what does this mean for you and me?
I guess we need to have a clean-out now and then to trash the unhelpful and traumatic stories and highlight the fun kind, the love kind, the self-image-boosting kind.
I discuss this with a bunch of good stories in the Storytelling Works webinar I run from time to time/
If you’d like to be invited – it’ll be FREE – reply to this and say, ‘Invite me to the next webinar when you’re ready please’.
