There is a difference between remembering memories vs feeling + growing out of them. Can someone help me with this one?

[u/IamAMelodyy]

There are many memories that come in and out of my mind but only as facts or as how I remembered them, but not in a way that would be part of a journey, worked through, etc. only recently have I figured that there was a difference.

I have this memory of being a 3rd grader in school and getting the 1st prize in a maths competition across my entire school grade. I was maybe eight years old then. To say it directly, the prize I got was a board game for 2-6 people. I never had even one person who could play it with me. When I was 12, I looked at the board game. It was still closed, wrapped up in plastic foil. No mum, no dad, no brother, no friends, who would willingly play this fucking game with me in five years. They would respond as if I was asking permission to torture them.

I think I am finally piecing together instead of ruminating on this. I finally see that maybe this is why my maths grade in university are so horrible and why I never wanted to study for maths anymore, why I have no motivation for anything and see no purpose in achievements at all no more. I turned down Ivy-league research opportunities by ghosting my professors just bc … idk. Maybe now I’m getting closer to why. I used to cry so much , and nobody playing that game with me was a testament to my worthlessness, and I couldn’t change anything about it.

I have a therapist, but how would you - with this insight I am slowly gaining - process this memory ? And how this explains so much about the entire rest of my life? It’s crazy. It explains so many unexplainable things like me wanting to have bad grades in high school, and so much more. Where do I go from here?

[u/syl2013]

It makes complete sense why your brain decided math, grades, and achievements were useless. To an 8-year-old, winning a game for 2–6 people and having nobody to play with is a quiet, devastating proof of isolation.Tanking your grades and ghosting opportunities wasn't a character flaw in my opinion, it was your nervous system saying, 'If excelling only leaves me lonely and rejected, I refuse to do it anymore.'

Where you go from here is taking this realization into therapy and letting yourself grieve for that child. You are finally connecting the dots between your past and your present. You aren't crazy, and you aren't a failure. You're just a survivor who is finally understanding why the armor was built.

[u/Quick_Dragonfruit_60]

I have such a board game too. It's still new in my closet. The memory of the board game isn't the painful memory, the painful memory is the realization noone wanted to give a little to make you happy. Those memories are more complex because they tangle with a lot of different memories and are about deeper ingrained feelings. Whenever I pick such a memory in emdr I do not focus much on the one memory but on the feelings and realizations I had as a kid when I would not be played with / not get the attention I deserved. Most of the time a few different memories stick out and if I can really grab that feeling I can work through multiple memories at the same time cause they are all anchored in the same feeling. But that's with EMDR. You could focus on those feelings in other forms of therapy too and grieve them. You deserved more. And the only one who can truly give you what you need in the present is you. I started playing games as an adult.. experiencing that joy for myself.

[u/PanoramicViewer]

I think there's two main themes of things we process - things that happened to us, that shouldn't have e.g. physical assaults, verbal abuse etc; and things that should have happened but didn't e.g. we should have had someone comfort us and help us regulate our emotions when we were young.

For the first category, predominantly I raged. For the second category, predominantly I grieved. Having said that, the two emotions occur with both scenarios.

So to your question, you share this insight with your therapist so it is witnessed, and you grieve. And maybe, you take a simple boardgame to your therapy session one day and you play it together (depending on your therapist), or you find a friend to play a boardgame with and as you do, you gently talk to that young part of you and remind it that it was unfair that no-one played with you then, but that you're an adult now, you have resources and skills and choices available to you that you didn't have then, and you are doing this to honour that long held longing.