One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
As it turns out, all I really learned was how to not think about things. It was actually a useful skill, since that’s how I survived the trauma of my childhood. I got very good at emptying my mind in order to avoid thinking “sinful” thoughts whenever I encountered something that my parents told me I shouldn’t see. I also got every good at not thinking about the way they treated me, the way my brother treated me, and the way our entire family ignored the position I was in and the way I was treated pretty much constantly. I still use the skill to this very day, bitterness aside, because it’s sometimes useful to not think about something. To prevent an image from being conjured in your head. To be able to set something aside and return to the quiet nothingness of an empty mind–which doesn’t work all the time, mind you, but often enough that I keep my skills sharp.
The entire premise of this idea is flawed, though, regardless of the religious contradictions and the lessons I actually took from what they were trying to teach me. Things don’t stay in your mind forever. Sure, I might have occasional flashes of a horror movie that really creeped me out one time, but that image is gone. Time has covered it in static and the once-sharp lines of it has slowly blended into the image until all that’s left is an indistinct blur of motion and the lingering unsettling sensation that something is looking at me from a direction I can’t look back. Even some of the worst moments of my life, which stayed crystal clear for well over a decade, have begun to fade as I’ve processed my trauma and begun the slow, arduous process of healing. Hell, I can’t even picture in my mind whatever I’d accidentally glimpsed on the TV the first time my mother said that phrase to me. It has left my mind. Vanished by the slow grind of time or cast aside in favor of remembering something that feels more important or relevant. Nothing lasts forever, not even memories.
The only relevant thing that will last forever (or at least as much of “forever” as I’m around to be a part of) is the fact that they spent my childhood trying to teach me this lesson. I will probably remember the phrase for my entire life, but not as the caution they meant it to be. I’ll remember it as emblematic of the way my parents lived their life. Why confront something when you can avoid it? Why solve a problem when you can ignore it? Why consider something you might not agree with when you can shut your mind to anything that might change it? It has been over a year since my last family therapy session–and the entirely baseless accusation they leveled against our group therapist that convinced me they weren’t unable to learn but unwilling to–but I still find myself wondering how much they employed this idea in their own lives. It certainly explains a lot, if I consider the idea that they practiced what they preached and genuinely avoided anything that might challenge their faith or cause them to commit some kind of made-up thought sin. It explains how they could go to family therapy sessions, hear what my sister and I were saying to them, and still come out of the sessions thinking anything but that they were to blame for why the two of us found the group therapy process so exhausting, draining, and unpleasant. It explains their choice to never voice support and then act surprised when my siblings and I assumed we’d never get any from them. It explains why They never really sought to expand their understanding of the world beyond their narrow Midwestern region. This willful blindness explains a lot of my childhood, if I considerate it as the base state from which my parents operated.
As the world seems to grow worse and even the act of attempting to stay connected to its events treads into the Moral Injury side of PTSD, I find myself thinking about that phrase a lot and wondering just how much I’ve forgotten in the last decade of things seeming to grow steadily worse. So much has happened that it feels impossible to remember it all and I’m hesitant to even try. Why dig up something that would make me upset? Why go hunting for a mental image that will only distress me? If these things have actually faded and I’ve forgotten that I ever knew them, then maybe its better to let them stay in the void of the past than to dredge them up for the sake of a thought experiment or blog post.