Skip to main content

The pain and irony of 'memory hoarding'

It was one of those moments when I knew I wasn't alone in my anxiety.

I was at an OCD conference and the speaker had just described something I'd experienced for years. I just never had a name for it -- and frankly, wouldn't even have known how to describe it in the first place.

But he knew what it was -- "memory hoarding."

As it's explained in an article from the OCD Center of Los Angeles, memory hoarding is "a mental compulsion to over-attend to the details of an event, person, or object in an attempt to mentally store it for safekeeping. ... People with memory hoarding OCD exhibit two major errors in information processing. The first error is the distorted belief that they will need this memory someday, and that it would be catastrophic if the memory weren’t 100% accurate. Second, people with memory hoarding also have the distorted belief that memories can be treated the same way as inanimate objects."

(Essentially, as I understand it, the second error is that unlike photos and recordings, memories change over time, as much as people with memory hoarding OCD may not feel comfortable with that.)

It's all me. All of that.

Bad events tend to stick in my memory with little difficulty, but with the good things, I guess I have a great fear of losing them, once the event is over. So I cling to the memory. So much so that I can tell I'm missing out on some aspects of the actual event while it's happening as I try to make sure I have every detail down for what just took place.

And perhaps most frustrating, and certainly most ironic, the more special the moment, the harder it is for me.

OCD tells me I need to remember everything about an event, or the look of a person, just as accurately -- emotionally, visually, in all ways -- today, tomorrow, 10 years from now. It has to feel like I'm back in that moment.

This one is particularly tricky for me, because, as much as I'd like to say, intellectually, that I understand this is virtually impossible, it's hard for me to accept.

Why can't I remember something 10 years from now like I do today? I remember being insulted in 7th grade almost word for word, why can't I remember every feeling I had when I was at the baseball game watching my team win in the bottom of the 9th inning?

To make it even more painful, as soon as a pleasant event is over, I do an inventory of my mind to see if all the memories are there. And when I can't remember something, I start panicking.

The other day I had a wonderful dinner with an old friend I hadn't seen in years. It went great, better than I  could have imagined after such a long time.

And what did I do on my drive home? I fixated on the elements of the visit that I couldn't feel emotionally just like I had an hour earlier. I got scared when I couldn't recall exactly how the conversation went, almost trying to replay it start to finish.

Knowing I'm not alone with this is helpful. And I'm working to overcome it.

But it's nonetheless painful and I regret attaching negative OCD feelings to what should be wonderful memories.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Could there really be benefits to having OCD?

It's not often, but sometimes to get a slight advantage on the bully that is OCD, I throw it a curve and think about the benefits of having OCD. Yeah, I know, there aren't many. And maybe it's stretching it to say there are any at all. But I came up with a few to throw in the bully's face. First, I believe having OCD has made me a compassionate person. There's no way to truly understand mental illness without experiencing it, in my opinion. I have empathy for others that I might not have if I didn't experience OCD first hand. I try hard to be non-judgmental. OK, I judge myself 90 percent of my waking hours -- but I do try hard to be non-judgmental of others. I give a lot of credit to my mother, who lived her life that way. But I also credit OCD. I have a better sense of what people may be going through because I know what I'm often going through. Speaking of my mother, she was excellent in a crisis. She was a nurse and a caretaker for her ill and a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Good letters, bad letters

I wrote previously about my OCD brain convincing me there are "good" numbers (9, 10, 17, 18, for instance) and "bad" numbers (4, 6, 8, 13, 14 and more). Similarly, OCD tells me there are good and bad letters. In the case of letters, it makes a little more sense. G and Y are good (G is the first letter in God, Y the first letter in Yahweh -- the Hebrew name for God -- so there's some logic to that). T is good (lowercase t is like the Christian cross, so again, it makes some sense). But OCD doesn't stop there: D is bad (devil starts with d, though it's sometimes good because God ends with d). H is bad (it's the first letter in hell, but then, it's also good, because it's the first letter in heaven). How I feel about these letters at any given moment, I suppose depends on how I'm doing in general. I don't really know why my perception changes. When I hand write "good" letters, OCD tells me they need to slant up and to the...
Post a Comment
Read more

A catastrophe just waiting to happen

One of my OCD issues is thinking, expecting, the worst to happen. It's the catastrophizing OCD. I've discovered it's why often when I'm having a good time, my mind goes to how that good time could turn devastating any minute. OCD says: Sure, things are going great, now, but when has that ever lasted? People have died, they've left you, tragedy has struck.... why would this be any different? My theory is I was predisposed to this kind of thinking (more later on the hereditary nature of my OCD) -- and all my OCD brain needed was a little bit of reality to activate it. There are many instances in my life that I recall a nice time turning bad in an instant. It's happened to everyone, probably, but OCD likes to cling to the bad and replay it over and over to give it more power. Two of those good-to-bad instances, in particular, stand out. I was about 3 and my mother, grandmother and I were hiding from my grandfather who was coming down the stairs outside my...
Post a Comment
Read more