Coping mechanism to deal with a potentially painful past.

I was born on May 23, 1993 in the Victoria General Hospital. Between the ages of 2 and 5, I was dual-diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. During most of my years in elementary school, I only remember faint images and blurs. The most prominent emotions from those days invoke feelings of pain, and loneliness.


My own coping mechanism to erase those feelings of hurt involve mentally erasing the existence of my past; that I forget the actual events in those days. The only things that remain, unfortunately, are the emotional feelings that can never be forgotten. Making my life a one way video recording is my coping method to prevent my mistakes from badgering me for too long.


Unfortunately, people around me tend to remember longer than I do. I guess my question, then, is how do the rest of you cope, if your past has potentially debilitating pain within it?

I digest it. I make new memories. I don't erase my past.

The worst would be so forgetting who I am as where I'm from.

I. Just. Am.

I don't think forgetting is always the best way to go for a number of reasons. First and foremost, is is often impossible or nearly impossible. Second, for good or for worse, the things that happen to us are what make us into who we are. Third and this one is a bit shaky, if something bad did happen to us and we decide to forget it, we potentially lose the chance of stopping someone else from being in the same situation.

My solution is simple: comedy.

It may seem a bit off but I think we should (if we haven't already) update our views on comedy. It is no longer a clown with a flower that squirts water. It is much more important than that.

Anyway, the reason I say comedy is because trying to forget may work for a while but sooner or later we find ourselves in a conversation with someone who brings it to our memory, regardless of what intention he/she might have. Or, walking about in our day to day lives, we see something trivial that triggers it. So, I think the solution is to work those things out and try to find some humor and some irony in it. I have had quite a few situations in which I was embarrassed or sad about something that I wanted people to avoid, they more or less confronted me with it and I realized I could laugh at it.

Well, I guess I should have mentioned that I usually attempt to learn from my mistakes. Anything that didn't have a particular lesson or wisdom to be gained, was to be wiped clean from my memory. As an example, I'd remember that some people have nut allergies, so I exercised caution when I brought peanut butter-honey sandwiches to school for lunch. But I wouldn't remember the fact that I often spent my free time at school completely alone, thanks to my circumstances.

I was an extreme deviation from "average", and most people avoided me for that reason. The only advantage that ended up granting me was that I was almost never bullied during elementary school, and nobody attempted to do so from middle school onward (the fact that I was also a large kid with an imposing presence after entering middle school probably helped as well).

You need to understand coping mechanisms. They are there to protect us from our own feelings and emotions. They change our perceptions, change how we remember our past and even make us forget our past. This isn't a bad thing, rather it is a crutch to allow us to function adequately enough without too much trauma (it is a preserving mechanism).

The only issue with coping mechanisms is that they are not long term solutions, merely short term. I had something bad happen in my past and I changed the way I viewed my past to keep me sane and healthy enough until I could resolve my current issues. It took some time but I dealt with the issue and I now am working to remember the better thing's from my past rather then the terrible feelings from them. If you make coping mechanism's into a long term thing, they don't work and you will crash and burn, because the past will always be there (doesn't mean you have to carry it around forever).

You basically need to find a way to accept that "this event happened and regardless if I can remember it or not, I must move on and focus on the present and future". These feelings won't do you any good now and can only hinder your future experiences. You need to forgive and move on. If other's remember the thing's you did and bring up your past you ether tell them to stop or just not give a crap. They may live in the past, but that doesn't mean you have to.

That's the thing, by erasing my past, I speed up the rate at which I "move on". If I have nothing to remember or dwell on, I can simply live in the ever-advancing present and near, foreseeable future. I could dwell on the fact that I disdain my existence in general, and I dislike my mother for even bringing me into this twisted world of ours, but that would be a waste of effort and feelings. I accept that the past can never be changed, hence why I don't need reminders on events that have already transpired. You get what I'm saying?

You don't "speed-up", you're just fleeing.

Sadly, someday you will be caught again. And again. And again... Until you face your past and resolve your problems with it -- in order to upgrade toward the next stage : acceptance.

The worse the past, the better to resolve your inner conflicts and or malaises.

If I truly wanted to "flee" from my past, I wouldn't be living at home right now and I probably would have completely dropped out of school before my diploma. And I think we may be getting a little off-topic here; wasn't this supposed to be how other people cope?

You don't flee your present but you're fleeing your past.

Simple but sweet.

You should never forget your past. Allow your past to be a building block not the centerpiece that makes you who you are and will become. You create new memories, do more stuff, and just focus and where you want to go in the future. Someone brings up the past you say something like "the past is the past and not your view are on the future."

It is only my building block in the physical development sense, and simply remembering facts I've already learned. Even then, my views are constantly shifting from facts that get new details, or new things are discovered that refute current knowledge. And as I've said, I don't desire to think about what already has been. That is my way of dealing with it; to learn from it, but forget it ever happened.

Then you're forgetting what you learn.

I'm very sorry to "judge" you but what you do is, objectively, harmful : someday you'll get backfired -- in fact, each time you have faced and will have to face your own past.

Yes and no.

You're not speeding up the rate at which you move on like you think you are. You are only repressing and trying to forget what has already happened so you don't have to deal with it. It's not a bad thing to do when it initally happens, but by keeping it like this for so long you have never been able to fully move on.

The lingering emotions and feelings from your past relates to this fact. Even though you don't remember it (and don't wish to remember it) you are still dealing with it.

It's only when you face your fear's head on and deal with it completely that you can move on in life. That isn't to say you won't have a good life if you don't, it will just be a bit harder for you.

To fully move on from such things the big thing you have to do is tell yourself that this event happened (don't blame others or yourself, it's happened and you just need to let it go). You need to think about this less and less (the less thought you give it the better things will be; fill up your time with activities or event's that can occupy your mind and allow you dwell less on things). If your past comes up to haunt you either get away from the cause or just deal with it then (you can't fear the unknown). Lastly keep in mind that you want to become a better stronger person from all of this. It's one thing for us to tell you how to deal with things and move on, it's another for you to want to do it yourself.

Also just give it time, no need to rush things. You have to do it at a pace you are comfortable with and keep pushing a little at a time.

Do you have to cope? I'm asking this as a serious question, not to say you don't.

If I didn't try to cope, I'd probably become insane. Or permanently insomniac. Or a criminal. Or all of them.

One could argue those are just alternate methods of coping. What counts as coping/not coping?

I forgot to mention that it's come to the point where my negative emotion energy levels are completely self-sustaining; they build up without any need for actual external agitation from other people, or life situations. Left on its own, it would darken my overall mental state greatly.

A mechanism I've been using to "vent" excess amounts of this accumulated energy is to sit in my room, without external stimuli active, then I visualize an event in time or something that I would consider highly traumatizing, thus putting me into a "partial-overload". Since this overload is only partial, I don't completely lose control of myself, hence the energy is typically vented without problems, except one.

This method is quite painful to endure, as I experience the subsequent emotions that would be typically associated with these kinds of events, albeit at a greatly reduced intensity, but still painful. So I typically feel rather drained and fatigued when the process is finished.

There are people who has gone through terrible pain, so much that even you would barely imagine, even less bear, such suffering.

Even though, those people improve their recovery by facing than accepting the event(s), sometime with a delay but never by forgetting the past.


Your mind seems quite young or immature, somehow not completely built, as you state yourself having so much difficulties to manage your own emotions -- the worst is : it's about past ! On the spur of the moment some adults might loose their composure, but not about past : everyone graduate from this sooner or later.

Nobody ever finishes "building" their mind; it's an indefinite work in progress. And not everyone graduates from their "past" like you state. Some live with it the rest of their lives. To blatantly state that "everyone" gets past it just like that is a rather biased and inconsiderate statement to those who cannot "graduate" in that same time-frame, or at all.

Red herring argument.

Mind does have structures when built. It does not prevent against evolution, rather it smooths it. As how the brain itself is structured.




Yes, I even said "sooner or later", should you be quoting better. That means there are individuals who graduate "the later" -- or you can understand "never".



Everybody does. We're from our own past, it's chronologic. To deal with it is the only thing to do.



The fact that you have (actually, at the present time) difficulties to deal with your past is a problem, not a solution. You can't state the contrary or else you fall out of logic.

It's a must-do to manage our own emotions, in order to manage our lives.