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But even fewer of us are brave enough to put our emotional scars on display. Evidence of previous wounds--the thick, white lines that crisscross our psyches--are carefully overlaid with other forms of concealment. A stoic manner, personal or professional success, whatever defense mechanisms we choose to employ all help us bury the scars deeper. As the years go by, they eventually become almost invisible to us as we go about our day-to-day existence. We ignore them as relics of another time, confident we have distanced ourselves sufficiently from them that they no longer have the power to cause us pain.
We can maintain this illusion, deceiving even ourselves until an event or a person somehow catches us unaware; rips off the painstakingly built layers of protection, and exposes long-buried memories and vulnerabilities to the broad daylight of our consciousness.
There is some debate in the legal and psychological communities as to whether the phenomenon of recovered memory is valid. Childhood abuse survivors, in particular, have been known to suppress memories of their trauma so deeply they are in complete conscious denial of the events until something triggers their recollection much later in life.
I have absolutely no doubt that burying bad memories beyond the reach of our conscious mind is not only possible, I think for many people it is a key survival mechanism. The problem, of course, is how one moves forward after these memories re-surface. Is it possible to exorcise decades-old demons to the point where we can agree with Little Bee that "we must see all scars as beauty...because...a scar means, we survived"?
I hope so.
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