Psychology

So, in a conversation I've been having with someone on the list, I had made the point that there had been an incident from my teen years that, even though it was a humiliating and painful experience, I still to this day look back on it with fond memories and even fantasize about the experience--changing it, if you will, into something more in line with a fantasy spanking and disregarding what had actually happened. Anybody with a psych background care to comment on why we do that? Why do we take events from our past and turn them from the horrible experience they really were into what I'm sure would have been even more terrible, but are, at least in my mind, more exciting and "fun"?

At least sometimes, that's exactly my writing process! I think lots of other authors would agree. So what you describe is common, perhaps universal.

Guy

I don't have a background in psychology beyond a couple of college courses, but I agree with Guy. I think it's common to embellish our memories to make them more palatable and more understandable. We can't change the facts (or really forget them) but we can make them easier to live with.

I'm hardly an expert, but it seems to be a coping mechanism. It's far easier for humans to deal with terrible, painful past events when we can process them in more palatable ways. And our memory embellishes even less traumatic events as well. How many of us reflect back on a childhood event or a past relationship and "romanticize" what they were like? In reality, things weren't quite the way we remember them, but in our mind it seems that way. That's why eyewitness testimony used for court cases can be notoriously inaccurate.

As to why you have fantasized about these events, I think it's understandable, especially given the nature of our specific kink. So much pain, pleasure and sometimes humiliation gets mixed into what makes us tick that it's not unusual to blend our kinky fantasies with our past "realities." At least in your case, Arcane, you rationally know those past events were horrible and not quite like you're now fantasizing.

Okay, that's my amateur opinion, for what it's worth. Next patient on the couch!

Arcane,

It's the old feeling of Should have Could have. I've done this many times in my life while growing up. What I should have done, and what I could have done. In our psyche we tend to take a bad thing in our lives and mentally make it better. It's also healthy in the mind. It's all water over the damn and no sense in getting ulcers over it. It can't be undone.

I don't have a psychology background either, except that I read Jung, Freud and Laing as a student out of interest.


Personally I can't think that I've ever done this. Memories like being bullied, having migraine headaches (since I was about 16 they continued to happen but much less often and eventually with less pain) or receiving one stroke of the cane on the palm for something I hadn't done remain unpleasant. My coping mechanism is that they're over and I don't see them as mattering TO MY PRESENT.

What I do find, though, is that writing in SL many of my attitudes reverse through my characters. It's not just a matter of things happening for fun that I'd oppose in real life. In particular, I suddenly become very concerned with class. Since I came from a relatively "humble" background and went to a "posh" university, you might expect me to be very conscious of class, whether to be for it or against it, but from university on I largely dismissed it as a game I just didn't wish to be involved in (class is not the same for me as issues like poverty and progressive tax: it's things like how someone brought up in a large country house and sent to a famous public school and a plumber who left school at 16 relate to one another). But I find that in my stories, class comes into it over and over again.

Well, I actually do have a collage degree in Psychology and to be honest all of the above answers are just as good an answer as anything I can tell you. Why is one of the most complex questions in the universe. Human beings are born with the most sophisticated information processing device in the known universe and there isn't any one simple formula for figuring out why our brains do everything they do. All the experiences we have can not be considered good nor bad unless you specify good or bad for what purpose. Pain, fear, and humiliation are not inherently bad. They're like red flashing lights warning us when we've entered a danger zone. They trigger various biochemical reactions like faster blood flow which can help us deal with the danger better. It's natural for us to relive past dangers in our minds because it helps us be better prepared for future dangers looking not only at what happened but what might have been. Because spankings aren't any serious health risk we always survive them so that reassures us the red lights are eventually going to stop flashing.

Certain parts of my childhood that are the worse parts, I have tended to look back with no poor feelings. They do not tend to bother me. What does bother me is the end result of how I felt through out part of my life.