so right now i'm reading about lesbian musicians and waiting to make myself a cup of tea.

and i'm thinking about something chelsea shared with me yesterday. for those of you who have not been updated about my life (and there are many, since i hardly blog now), i'm assisting a professional costume designer this quarter. she is immensely talented, and i've got this whole slightly creepy 'please-be-my-mentor' admiration thing going on. i want to Be Her when i grow up basically. she's quirky, and funny, lives with her sound designer boyfriend she met in college and her apartment is lovely and filled with various teapots and she has a small but cosy studio to work in. of course i'm presuming i know about her life when really i don't, i just know what i see, but still... everyone needs something to aspire to.

anyway it has been wonderful assisting her and thrifting with her, i've learnt a lot, not just about costuming but about various little projects going on in chicago and lots of random but intriguing information. for instance, there was this amazing production that happened called 'Noir' and the designers basically presented it as a noir film on stage. meaning they made sure it was lighted in such a way that all the characters, even their skin tones were in shades of gray like a noir film! the costume designer even found pieces of candy that colored the insides of your mouth a dark gray/black and had her actors eat them before the show. to see, photos here (http://www.buildingstage.org/photos/index.php?album=noir&image=noir7.jpg). it's absolutely stunning.

yesterday she told me how she likes to listen to NPR while drawing, and she listens to some bio/life program in particular which is geared especially towards non-sciencey people, so they can understand it. and the podcast was about erasing specific memories from a person, and so far a rape victim has used it to overcome her PTSD, and apparently it's working. the process is very much similar to Eternal Sunshine, where you are made to evoke certain memories and then zapped at that precise time. can you believe it? in a way it's like strengthened prozac almost, since i feel prozac works like a lock ... it locks up things that scare you and make you anxious, and even when you try to access them, you can't. i've tried thinking about the things that scared me and i find i either can't do it intensely, or i am so detached from them it's like those things happened to a person other than myself.

but at the end of it all, is erasing memory really a good thing? i guess it is just fascinating and sad at the same time how much of us is tied to our memories, which are ethereal and inaccurate things sometimes.

+ posted by M @ 12:19 AM

Comments:

Have you tried hypnotherapy? The trick is to manage our perceptions of our memories; this is what relegates them to distant occurrences that no longer affect us.

The subconscious mind imprints traumatic memories like a hand in the sand; long after the hand pulls away the imprint remains. Also, the subconscious experiences everything in real time. Meaning, that imprint doesn't fade. The role of the subconscious is to keep us safe and it goes a little overboard around traumatic memories.

Hypno bypasses the critical mind and helps the subconscious release and clear its imprints; it's a way of retraining the brain to see memories with the correct amount of distance and perceptions.

I had PTSD for over 25 years with horrible nightmares and flashbacks I could not control. And then, hypno made it all go away.

I write a healing PTSD blog now that has tons of hypno info. In case you ever want to try it out you can read up on the technical aspects of hypno, why it works, plus my personal experience with it. We don't have to be a slave to our memories!

# posted by  Anonymous : Tuesday, February 03, 2009 9:57:00 PM

 

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