When Images Haunt You

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

Perhaps you are on the road to healing, you have begun working on the exercises in this guide, and you feel you are making progress toward forgiving your partner for the offense.

Then…out of nowhere…an image of the affair pops into your mind. It’s graphic. It’s overwhelming. You can’t get rid of it. And every time it comes up, you feel like you take three steps backward in your healing process. You get pulled down into the whirlpool of all those old, painful emotions once more.

The good news is that there are a number of fairly straightforward exercises you can do to undermine this process. I will describe one of the more effective ones you can do on your own. You can start taking control of these images and getting rid of them by consciously altering the importance they have in your mind.

You see, the way you store information in your mind is actually quite significant. For example, if you have a sad memory, you might see that memory in your mind's eye with grey colors. It might be in slow motion. Perhaps there is a mournful soundtrack that plays along with it in your mind.

On the other hand, if you have a happy image stored, it might be faster and full of color. It could be right in front of you in bright daylight (in your mind).

Metaphorically, we store things in our memory in ways that classify the memory. If you change the way the memory is stored, you change the classification of the memory. That, in turn, changes the impact it has on you.

Take a moment to consider an example that might be a little closer to home for you. Let’s say your spouse had an affair and you’re plagued with images of the affair. You feel like you can’t really escape from these images. They haunt you. You can’t get rid of the memory because you know that it (or something very like it) probably happened in reality. What do you do?

Well, you can alter the way the memory is stored in your brain and change the impact it has on you. One way to do this is to manipulate the memory consciously using the visualization technique I'll give you in a moment.

If you have recurring images in your mind, whether they are real or imagined, you can alter the way the memory is stored to reduce the power it has over you. By reducing it’s power, not only do you make it so you no longer have the emotional response to the memory that you once did, but you also make it easier to let go of the image, which in turn causes its occurrence to diminish over time.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.

For more information about forgiving your partner and working through the past, please visit http://www.howyouforgive.com/

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