I don't think there's a certifiable pattern to human coping, not in the traditional sense, anyway. Coping, for instance, comes to mind, and the idea that emotional wounds, like physical, heal with time, until they're neat little scabs to be picked.
Since our brains are oh so excited about grasping new concepts by analogizing, I think it is intuitive to feel that our mental processes are similar to the physical, and to think that with proper care and time, mental wounds heal. But I'm more of the mind that other things happen.
1) We have new experiences that replace older experiences.
2) We value the current time frame over the past time frame
3) We tell ourselves ever evolving stories based on ever evolving memories about what it was that caused pain, and indeed, we
4) redefine the pain as something else, either a bedrock of personality or a slip knot of death.
Maybe those things are coping. I always thought of it as "coming to peace" with an experience, whatever it is.
But I don't think we have closure. I do think we settle on narratives that tend to stick.
And to come up with narratives, we have to put words onto our experiences, which isn't always completely natural, however urgent or relieved we might feel to have them splayed out in front of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment