One of my birthday gifts this year is a subscription to StoryWorth, a prompt-based writing platform. So far, it is a weekly trip down memory lane, requiring retrieval of memories that are most likely distorted by time and underuse.
As I’ve written these stories, I’ve presented them as first-person accounts – which they are – but I have some strange sense of detachment from the action, as if I’m telling a story as it happened to someone else. Indeed, in my mind’s eye, I see myself as an outside observer might; watching me live the moment I am recalling, especially the memories from when I was very young.
Most of my childhood memories are recalled in this way: I am outside of myself, a keen observer of behavior and attitude. It is not until my late teens that the memories I recall are seen through my own eyes.
I had originally thought that I was not really remembering, but recalling stories I had been told about those specific incidents. That seemed to be the most logical reason to “remember” in the third person. So I decided to investigate (which means, really, to ‘Google it.’) Remembering the past in the third person is an actual thing.
Peggy St. Jacques, a neuroscientist and psychologist, has studied the phenomenon of how autobiographical memory retrieval in the third person affects the vividness of the memory as well as their emotional impact. Not surprisingly, “observing” memories reduces the vividness and emotion associated with those memories. This method of retrieving past autobiographical events in the third-person is seen as a means to assist people who suffer from PTSD. She concludes one of her papers with,
“This may be an effective way of dealing with troubling memories by viewing the past from a distance and reducing the intensity of the emotions we feel.”