Flashbulb Moments: How Memories Shape your Life

In this mini-episode, I talk about
• defining flashbulb moments as memories that stand out in bold relief 
• noticing how siblings can remember the same event differently 
• sharing a childhood story about breaking an elbow and feeling unseen 
• connecting essential nature with environment and learned coping patterns 
• questioning the conclusions we draw from one painful moment 
• considering other truths and remembering times care did show up 
• inviting you to reflect on your own flashbulb moments and what they still drive 
If you want to learn more about Essential Nature and how we connect that to the beauty of nature itself, you can check out my book below. You can find it through your favorite indie bookstore on bookshop.org (this helps small bookstores benefit). It can also be found on Amazon. 

Check out pics of our new little puppy on Facebook and Instagram at MaryRothwellOfficial. 

Transcript

Welcome And New Puppy Alfie

Mary 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. So if you listened last week and I had several people comment to me about this already, you heard that we are getting a puppy. We now have the puppy. We got him yesterday morning, which was Saturday morning, at about 7 6 45 a.m. We had to be there to meet the truck. It was a big trailer with many cats and dogs from different adoption agencies. And it came from Arkansas and we live in Pennsylvania. So anyway, I totally now understand the videos that show the kids getting puppies for Christmas and they start crying because it was very emotional. He is the sweetest thing. His name is Alfie. And if you do not follow me on social media and you really are a puppy lover or you want to see the antics of Alfie so far, you can find me at Mary Rothwell Official on both Instagram and Facebook. I will be posting pictures and you can see how Alfie is doing.

Sleep Deprivation And Cat Drama

Mary 1:23

So anyway, um I'm a little sleep deprived because he was not crate trained. So last night we took turns sleeping on the floor with him, and of course taking him out to go pee. So we're a little kind of you know groggy today. It's a lot for the oldsters to get such an energetic little bundle. Um, but anyway, so we are totally in love with him, and I kind of think he's in love with us too. So it's been, you know, one of those things where sort of, as I said last week, it kind of defies logic. Why would we do that? You know, we just moved, we have, you know, we have a love of travel, we have elderly cats who, by the way, are very pissed about this whole thing. But I will tell you that story another day. Um all of them have lived with dogs before, but they seem to not remember that. So they're crotchety and they're unhappy. But it is just a joy so far. So I encourage you to do the thing that doesn't make sense if you feel like that is something that you want in your life.

What Flashbulb Moments Mean

Mary 2:33

Okay, so what I wanted to talk about this week is flashbulb moments. And if you listen to my guest interviews, this is the question I ask at pretty much the beginning of every interview. And it's the idea of these moments in your life that stand out in bold relief. So if you remember the days of actual flashbulbs before we just turned the flash on or off on our cameras, on our camera phones, you know, the flashbulb would would kind of blind you, but it illuminated a moment. So a flashbulb moment in your life is something that had a great impact. And I think sometimes we may remember them a little differently than other people. So for instance, there have been times where I've talked to my siblings about something that happened and their memory of it is different than mine. And I think that's very normal because we have a lens, we have a perspective. But this is really a memory or actually many memories over your lifetime that inform how you interact with the world.

A Five-Year-Old Broken Elbow

Mary 3:52

And I'm gonna give you a really personal example from my own life. Um, and these can be positive or negative. I have a ton of positive ones. And, you know, when I say negative, I'm always a little hesitant to use that word, but they're things that we remember as having an emotion that's difficult: sadness, hurt, anger. Um, so the one that I am thinking of or have been thinking of recently, because it came up in a conversation, when I was five years old, I was swinging on a swing set and I jumped off. And I didn't know at the time, but I chipped my elbow bone. I broke my elbow. And what I remember about the aftermath of that, my dad was mowing. He didn't know what happened. But my mom was going around the property and she was planting flowers, which is interesting in that I remember them being pansies, and I love pansies, but I was crying and I was holding my elbow, and she was not paying attention. I was following her. And it's when I think back to it, it's really heart-wrenching. But to put it in context, and I'm sorry if you can hear those cars, I'm gonna try to cleanse this a little bit, but it's for some reason there's a lot of loud motors today in the city. Um, but my mom grew up in a home with 11 children, and her dad was very abusive. And so my so I think from that, my mom had a part of her that was it was difficult for her to access certain things in parenting. She always had everything was clean, we were well taken care of, we knew we were loved, she just wasn't demonstrative, but she had trouble with this gentleness that is needed sometimes. And my dad was the opposite. I mean, I can give you examples of how he probably softened some of the effects of my mom. But I remember being five, I remember being in pain, and I remember that she didn't act on that for quite a while. And if you've ever seen the meme on social media of the woman carrying the washer up the steps from the subway, and it says something about being self-sufficient, that really is me. It's been me for most of my life because I can tell you many other things that, as I always talk about with essential nature in my book, Nature Knows, Essential Nature is how we're wired, and then how our environment informs how we show up in the world. And so for me, I interpreted things throughout my childhood as okay, I'm gonna need to be the one to take care of me. There's not gonna be somebody else to take care of me because think about that five-year-old brain. You know, you want to just hug that kid and take that kid to the doctor, to the emergency room. And that's not what happened. Eventually it did, but it didn't happen instantaneously. So again, am I remembering it wrong? Am I blaming my mom? I'm not blaming my mom. I think she just didn't have the capacity for certain things. I think it's just this is what happened. And I can think back on it and feel the sadness of that.

How Memories Shape Our Choices

Mary 7:41

But I think when you think about your own flashballed moments, I would reflect on what do you think makes it stand out to you? Why is that the thing, or these across your lifespan, these things that you can think back on and it can be just a minute in time. This was probably less than 30 minutes of my life, but I have such a memory of it. And when I put it in the context of my essential nature and how I interact with the world, it makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, can I think of times when my mom did show up consistently? Oh, 100%. My dad, 100%, not all the time. But I think again, that's part of the way we're wired. We may pick out things that upset us, hurt us, anger us, make us sad. Somebody else may have the same experience, but it won't land the same. So for your flashball moments, that is information for you. And I think when you reflect on that and allow yourself to experience what the emotion was and think about how is this informing what I decided to do with my life, whether it's how you interact in a relationship, what you do in your personal life, in your professional life, um, where you may carry your hurts. But again, there are also joyous moments that are flashball moments, things where we figure out this is the thing that means so much to me. And I have a lot of nature moments that are like that, people that helped expand my mind. Um, I have a memory of my mom. She would hide presents around the house on our birthday, and she would say, Hey, can you go down to the laundry room and bring the towels up? And in the towels there would be a little gift for my birthday. So, you know, it's that sort of um opposite sort of way that my mom showed up. It was kind of unpredictable. So we won't go into attachment styles, but I think for me, it was the times where I felt like, okay, she isn't showing up for me. Of course, in a five-year-old mind, I didn't have that depth of understanding. I just knew, oh wow, like my need is not going to be met here, or this really hurts and she's not taking care of me. And so for you, reflect on that. And I think if there are areas where you tend to repeat be like maybe behavior patterns or choices that don't serve you well, that could very well trace back to some flashballed moments. There might be a different way to see that. And again, for me, I can say, I could say, take that one time and say, my mom didn't care about me. It's way more complex than that because I can think of many, many situations where she did show care. And so that could be the other part of this, that you've drawn conclusions about your worth based on one situation. And I've had this with clients so often, they'll remember one time, one pivotal moment, one flashball moment, and they draw conclusions from that, that I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough as a kid, as a daughter, as an employee. But if we reflect, and I'm not saying this is the case all the time, because sometimes there are relationships that are just really unhealthy. But that's not the majority. The majority are just flawed people that we've interacted with. And when it's our parents, then we can again draw those conclusions based on certain flashbulb moments. But I think maybe we can soften things if we think about what else could be true. What are some other times that maybe I got a different message? Because I feel like the flashbulb is also much brighter when it is a situation that was hurtful or that we construe as negative. So I think it's just something to think about. If you would think back through your flashbulb moments, and it doesn't need to be five years old, I have flashbulb moments from last year. But when we have a child's mind, those are so important because they really, when we're trying to make sense of the world at that simple level, we can start to program our amygdala and program our mind and our reaction in ways that ultimately maybe don't serve us. It was just one nugget of information, and we may have extrapolated that out to mean much more than it did. So I'm hoping that that kind of made sense. I would love to hear from you if you have questions or you have a moment where you realize, oh, this was a flashball moment for me. And with my guests, for instance, a lot of them are doing amazing work in the world because of those flashball moments. And I think when I think about my own situation, well, the reason that I decided to start my career as a high school counselor, I'm sure had to do with having an alcoholic brother and you know having those experiences as a Gen X kid that I wanted to soften for other kids. And I think I had an understanding of sometimes what pain comes from certain homes. So that's my thought for the week, Flashbob Moments. So

Book Recommendation And Closing

Mary 13:41

if you want to learn more actually about essential nature and how we connect that to the beauty of nature itself, you can check out my book. It's maryrothwell.net forward slash nature knows. I would encourage you to order it through bookshop.org. That way a small independent bookstore will get the profit. It might take longer to get there, you may pay shipping, but it really depends if that's your gig. That's another way versus Amazon. Of course, it is on Amazon also. So check out my book and check out the pictures of Alfie. I may even have some videos up there so you can see how he is growing and progressing. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant Violet that you are.