“Every one of us has a different set of unconscious beliefs and assumptions about how things are, and the thing is that they’re not real. They’re constructed.
But because they’re unconscious, we don’t realize their conditioned nature. So when we encounter situations, we don’t encounter them freshly. We encounter them through the veil of what in psychology is called implicit memory, which means I’m looking at you, and I think I’m seeing you, but actually what I’m seeing is all the memories of my past, memories that come from the beginning of my life. It’s a memory, but I think it’s really happening now.
In trauma theory, they make a big point about how a war veteran is having a flashback and thinks he’s back in Iraq, and responds according to how he did or should have responded in Iraq. And he doesn’t realize that this isn’t Iraq. But the thing is this happens to all of us, all of the time. We’re always responding to situations based on memory, and we think we’re talking to our mother, we think we’re talking to our father, we think we’re talking to some important impactful person in our life, but we don’t know that we think that. And we think the person that we’re talking to is the person we’re talking to, but we’re not. We’re talking to our memory. Our whole life is consisting of one flashback after another. We’re not here. We’re gone.
And there’s a fundamental social consensus of normalcy, so that we all kind of get by as human people. And then when one of us steps out of the normal range, then we become noticed, and then somebody says ‘Oh that person is having a trauma response,’ or ‘that person is in a trauma field’ or ‘that person’s implicit memory is activated.’ But the thing is it’s going on with all of us, all of the time. So we’re never responding to the situation at hand."
Reggie Ray - Journey of Embodiment - January 1, 2016
