Educated Psychic: The Strange Workings of Memory

As a psychic consultant, I’ve counseled hundreds of clients who suffer problems. Memory plays a huge role. Kinds and types of memories, the quality and accuracy of them, are mixed. There are clients who cannot get beyond memories of early life trauma, events that color or control their entire lives. Others gain perspective as they reflect on memories both good and bad. Either way, memory is highly selective often triggered by associations both positive and negative. How human mind works is not always easy to understand.

In my own case, both as a professional psychic and as a private person, I notice patterns. Except for deeply negative, painful childhood memories of traumatic experiences that formed the basis of my core psychological conflicts throughout my entire life, I spontaneously tend to call up and emphasize memories of good things. I sometimes wonder why I don’t dwell on the negative. Am I just a naturally positive person? No, I don’t think that is the case, but oddly, I seem to automatically recall mostly the times of productivity and progress, of joy and happiness.

On the other hand, once in a blue moon, I am surprised when something triggers and I recall the horrible feeling of some awful down time when debilitating psychic pain seemed unbearable. Times of indecision, loneliness and confusion especially. Times when I got off-track in my life. Or was moving through a time of transition such as when I chose to follow the psychic path and left classroom teaching. Fortunately I don’t usually dwell on those painful memories, but they do add perspective to the patterns of my life. Everything wasn’t always onward and upward. At times I took a nose dive and crashed before picking myself up and continuing. Some people stay down. Fortunately I’m not one of them.

I’ve known people who make the memories of their difficult times central in their lives. Others succeed in spite of them. Still others, and perhaps in my own case, succeed because of their will to overcome challenges. There is the old true saying, “Thank God for our challenges for it is through them that we grow”. When very young, painful experience can serve to wake us up and make us aware of what is going on in our lives. How we respond or react depends on other variables such as temperament and ego-strength. Why is it that some people remain limited and thwarted because of painful experience, and others of us take root in spite of our pain and set about overcoming?

Can we learn to control which memories we allow to dominate?

Perhaps the difference is a matter of inborn temperament and a psychic predisposition to compensate in a positive manner for what we find lacking in the life. Perhaps some of us are naturally born to become aware, take hold, and find ways to overcome what might defeat another less determined, less capable person. Some choose to give themselves the excuse that they never had the chance others were born to. While some of us seem to always know that we will not end up like others we see around us, or perhaps grew up with. So what makes the difference? Is it something genetic or learned, or a combination? Is intelligence a factor? What we spontaneously remember most, I believe, defines us.

Both trauma and joy burns images and feelings onto our memory tracks. Fortunately some of us attract people and situations that stimulate right choices and lead to progress and growth. But there are those who seem to choose or allow limitation, and their lives wither on the vine. I am lucky to have been born with a progressive, hopeful nature, and not as a person who let misfortune and pain paralyze me. It is a puzzle, but I notice that I do tend to remember the good times far more than the bad. And as a psychic counselor, writer and teacher, I try to help others do the same.

 

Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A. Please see my website that includes books, blogs and psychic services at http://psychicconsultingbyemail.com. For more information about psychic readings my e-mail address is pschicmind.vandervoort231@gmail.com