Instructions
Owen Pearn (Owen Parachute)
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Reserve an hour or so and sit down quietly by yourself.
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Make a list of the events you can remember in your life where you felt negative emotion (fear, terror, panic, anger, rage, guilt, loss, despair, helplessness, hopelessness, shame, humiliation, embarrassment, abandonment, etc).
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Email your list to me. DO NOT send me a document or spreadsheet and don’t worry about formatting. Just copy and paste straight into an email:
Top photo via Dariusz Sankowski / Unsplash
memory - A fantasy inspired by the past.
Matt Haig (Humans: An A-Z)
More Instructions
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For each event, write your age, a very brief headline, the feelings you remember having at the time, and the strength of the feelings on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 = small feeling, 10 = overwhelming feeling). Examples:
- age 7, sister was mean to me at birthday party, angry(8), abandoned(9).
- age 15, accidentally killed a fairy, guilt(10)
- age 22, abducted by aliens, helpless/hopeless(9)
- age 28, panic attack at home, terrified/scared(10)
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Do NOT spend more than an hour or so on all this. Whatever you have after an hour or so is fine - whether you have 5 events or 500, just email it to me then.
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If, at any time, you freak out or get overwhelmed:
- STOP,
- WIGGLE YOUR TOES,
- GO SMELL THE FLOWERS.
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To keep an event private, give it a codename that means everything to you and nothing to anyone else. Examples:
- age 15, the towel incident, shame(10)
- age 16, highway 36, fear(10), guilt(10)
- age 17, XJ24, rage(10)
- age 18, Gary, sad(10)
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Tips for remembering events:
- Start before birth and at birth. What’s going on with parents? Are parents around?
- How siblings felt about you, how they treated you.
- First experiences, list what you can remember.
- Any sexual abuse, your first sexual experience.
- Emotional or physical abuse, assault and traumas.
- School experiences, issues with teachers, classmates.
- Major moves, changing schools.
- Deaths of pets, pet injuries, pet losses.
- Romantic relationships, especially first boyfriend, girlfriend.
- Pivotal points in life with parents, siblings, kids, bosses, co-workers, friends.
- Divorces, relationship breakups, broken friendships.
- Deaths, miscarriages, abortions, loss of job, loss of health, loss of dream.
- All hurts, anything you felt bad about when it happened.
- All major medical illness, chronic illness, other medical problems.
- All bad experiences with therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, life coaches, social workers, caregivers, doctors, nurses, hospitals.
- Accidents and injuries, physical traumas.
- Fears, phobias, (eg. fear of heights, fear of balloons). List the experiences which support each fear.
- Worries and fights about money.
- War traumas, uncontrollable combat memories.
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Yes, it’s normal to end up with lots of events on your list!
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Ingrid Bergman
Video: 118 How to make Your Peace List | No Psychological Reversal — Eutaptics FasterEFT
(10 mins)
It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position.
Søren Kierkegaard (trans. P. Jorgensen)
