Emotional Memory is part of every Mind’s Existential Journey. Inception starts with Surprise as the primary Emotion. Novelty as its sense of Expression. Love connects us to Experience; Fear disrupts and disconnects from the Experience. Hope motivates and Despair demotivates the drive to seek Experience.
Each Emotion experienced registers its mark in the database of Mind’s Memory Bank. The Memories accumulate as Events multiply. Good Events, Bad Events, Scary Events, Threatening Events, Joyful Events, Sad events; Memory data gets categorized and stored.
Reason analyzes and Introspects, and Data Analytics becomes a Ruminating feature by Late Adolescence and Youth. Incompatible and Confusing Memories which ‘does not make sense’ are sidelined by Reason from Current Awareness. This creates Pot Accounts (Compartments) of Emotional events, and tendencies to behave with Selective Memory.
Reason and Selective Memories lay down Rules for Emotional Perceptions. These Rules dictate which impressions to be suppressed, which set of impressions to be repressed to Memory Dump. Reason pre-selects (Bias) some emotional memories to be tagged as live tiles to the Mind’s Browsers. Mind thus gets formatted to operate on Pre-judice, Polarization of Views and Narrow Interpretations.
Mind then perceives facts (Outlook) in parts (parcels), finds it difficult to assimilate and Integrate with Core Memories (Insight Data) and stores (Cache) the ongoing experiences as superficial or shallow data. The disconnect between current experiences and previous memories block Learning. Experiences do not get converted into Deep Learning or Skill Upgrades.
Mind and its Personality gets reduced into a vicious spiral of Emotional Reactivity and Sentimentality towards Circumstances. If stuck in this pattern, Situational Hyper-reaction conditions the Personality Attributes and Histrionics gets programmed to Repeat.
What do we Seek? Why do we Seek? How do we Seek? Do we Choose Sensibly? Do we have an Inner Compass to Guide Sense enabled Experiencing? Are we just forming layers of Incompatible Memories, to find our Self Buried under the pile?
Emotional Intelligence is a Dual side Razor; Awareness can Expand with Natural Intelligence or Shrink to Artificial Intelligence.
Wisdom Realizes. If Reason Paralyzes…Mind Remains as ’I’ Robot !!
Emotional memory and it’s connect to database is interesting. How about the pot accounts? How does one get rid of repressed memory? You rightly said many times, we do not want to visit that bad past or memory, but it is there, unerased causing pain and disease!
Emotional memories reside in conscious, subconscious and unconscious portions of mind’s database. Repressed memory is part of the unconscious mind. Repressed memories can be erased at the base state of the mind (root menu) with a strong intent. Few of the ways to achieve the base state are: Deep Restorative sleep, Soulful music and Deep Meditations.