THE MAN I CAN'T REMEMBER

THEME: DOING THE RIGHT THING

The most important human endeavor is striving for morality in our actions.  Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it.  Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.  ~ Albert Einstein

A man changed my life one day in his office. I was one of eight or nine people he probably saw that day, certainly not the most dramatic or deeply felt for him, a university-based counselor of many years’ experience. I only saw him once, but our encounter showed me my path and gave me a nudge to follow it. I owe him a lot, but I can’t repay it because I don’t remember his name.

As my college career wound down, I was suddenly faced with the eventual dilemma of any English major –how would my ability to crank out a paper on imagery in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” translate into a career? Too bad I waited to contemplate that question until late in my final semester, but I’d been living in the moment, not in reality. The moment contained much drama and tumult, as the Viet Nam War raged and so did protests and marches. The working world seemed very far away.

I was unfamiliar with indecision. I’d always known what my next step would be. Now, I was about to step into the abyss. Why had no one warned me that I’d have some serious career decisions to make? Yikes!

That distress sent me into the college counseling center and across the desk from the man I can’t remember. I don’t recall what he looked like, but I do know that he spotted my counselor-like nature and sent me over to talk to his old pal, the head of the Department of Counselor Training. From there, I entered the program and walked out two years later with my Masters degree.
          When I began, in addition to enormous relief at having direction again, I had lofty thoughts about reducing suffering in the world. If I could provide an authentic human connection with people who felt alone in their worst days, it would be worth doing. And I had some indication that I’d be good at it.

I’d had a rare glimpse of that possibility because the YMCAs I frequented in high school and college were piloting encounter groups, where a small group of strangers would come together, attend to the dynamics of the moment, and develop new skills to connect and become self-aware. The hope was that such groups would help with community building and personal growth, and ultimately societal change.

As I sat in my first groups as a fifteen year-old, I was a spectator. Too shy to speak up, I learned to listen and watch. Pretty soon I was able to take the emotional temperature of the room and of each participant. I could sense how the session was going, who was on the verge of an outburst, who was detached, who was suffering. I had no idea that I was in training for my eventual career.

After the first session, shamed that I had not spoken up, I struggled to come up with what I would have said if I had been able to. That question became my focus in each subsequent group. Once I finally became able to identify what I could have said, I began a long project to improve my timing and be able to come up with it and out with it in the moment. If one of the leaders’ goals was to help participants conquer their own limitations, they had a success story. I was still shy, but I was no longer tongue-tied.

I began to watch the leaders to attempt to figure out which one would say what next. I began to see the spaces where they could. When I stepped back, I could see the amazing fact that if you put strangers in a room with a common mission of communicating from the heart, differences went out the window and community happened.

I wanted more of that. I just hadn’t figured out where to get it until my encounter with the man in the counseling office. My friends were about to run off to teach math, help deliver babies, surf in the Pacific. I would learn how to save the world, one person at a time.

It wasn’t long until I learned I’d have to modify that goal – I would try to help one person at a time improve their functioning. It would be a matter of helping them find their own resilience, not saving anybody. I could only support and witness them as they overcame their suffering. I got adjusted to my limitations, and set aside the grand ambition.

Others didn’t stop so short. Beginning in the 1990s, I began to hear of medications that had the potential to eliminate traumatic memories entirely. And later, techniques that promised to allow the memory to persist but removed the crippling emotions that were attached to it. Now that so much more is understood about memory and how it is formed and stored, and about trauma and its effects, various points of intervention can be identified that weren’t available in the past.

For instance, I was taught in graduate school that once formed, memory was fixed. Now it is known that recalling a memory opens a door to modifying it, or even erasing it. According to the theory of reconsolidation, each time a memory is retrieved, it changes and becomes possible to alter.

I was also taught in grad school that the brain was fixed - it could deteriorate but not improve. Now it is known that brain plasticity allows it to regenerate, form new connections, and even become freed from its traumas.

As more wars have created more victims of PTSD, and their suffering has become well-known, the stakes for figuring out how to use these new understandings has gone up. If we ask our service members to kill and risk their own safety for our cause, while we sit in our living rooms watching sports, should we l least offer to remove the scars that remain?

Early on, scientists discovered that a beta-blocker medication called propranolol interfered with the initial storage of a traumatic memory. Later, it was found that the same medication may also be able to interfere when the memory is called up even years later.  Studies continue with other medications that may be even more potent and have the potential to expunge toxic memories entirely, although they may take other nontoxic memories with them.

Another technique called EMDR, for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, involves no medications, but eye movements guided by a therapist trained in the procedure. It is often successful in blunting the traumatic emotional content of a memory. Other similar noninvasive methods are also in use.

While these interventions are being further developed, several questions present themselves:

Who should receive these dramatic interventions, and when? For example, should a rape victim wait for an intervention until after the trial is over so that her testimony will include the expected display of emotion?

If we become able to erase the terrible events that happen to us from our memories, what does that do to our personhood?

And the ultimate ethical question, should we go ahead and implement every intervention that we become able to do? If not, what will hold us back?

Who will decide which of these measures is appropriate for which individuals? How bad does it have to be to justify the complete erasure of memory?

 The man I can’t remember and I didn’t have to ponder such large questions. He went to work helping me find the answer to my question about what I want to be when I finally grow up.  He asked me good questions: when I’d been the most energized, who I knew that I especially admired, what I thought I could be good at, what I would be proud to do. He didn’t try to erase my discomfort, but did put the right questions in my head, and it turned out I had the answers. Then he handed me some tools to act on those answers, and said goodbye. I sure hope I called back to thank him.
             Future helpers will have a far larger arsenal of tools to work with than he did. They will regularly meet with people in far more distress than I, who may end up forgetting far more than their counselor’s name.

CBH – O4/12