Healing from Your Worst Memories

By Trevor Pacelli
Family and friends are essential in helping you remedy your traumatic memories; sharing those thoughts that are hardest to bring to light will lead you to the path of healing. Anyone on the autism spectrum especially should know this, as contrary to common stereotypes, those with ASD can feel sorrow and empathy.

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I’m no exception. I’ve suffered from feelings of intense unrequited love, especially since I’m almost thirty-two and have never come close to having another woman see me as a potential life partner. I also have traumatic memories of specific instances of not being included during high school. Here are my experiences, and how I have learned to deal with them.

Unrequited Love - Two of my friends from high school dated for seven-and-a-half years by the time they were married, yet I just couldn’t feel happy for them because I had significant feelings for her since long before they started dating. Everyone raved about how the two of them were the cutest couple ever, and to add greater insult to injury, she never had a boyfriend before she started dating this guy, and they hadn’t broken up to this day after nearly fifteen years of being a couple. They were essentially a textbook example of a perfect Hollywood romantic pair.

Their wedding was an internal disaster for me. While I managed to look like I had myself together throughout the ceremony and most of the reception, their first dance together broke me to pieces. Watching them so immersed in one another with pure joy while everybody else admired their contagious love on the dance floor piqued my suffering from unrequited love. I had to retreat into the bathroom stall while everyone got out onto the dance floor; I was left essentially crying with heavy breathing and heart pounding.

I walked out of the bathroom, and the others from my table approached me; they had seen me stumble into a near-mental breakdown before retreating into the bathroom and probably heard me sobbing. They told the bride’s sister about it, so she took me outside to talk privately. I told her how I couldn’t let go of my old feelings for the bride (the sister already knew all about it), and although what she told me wasn’t necessarily helpful, the fact that I told someone who could understand where I was coming from helped a little.

However, I was still going through a lot of internal pain throughout that next week, and even to this day, it’s still an issue for me. But lately I have found that confronting those hard memories rather than trying to starve them helps on the path to healing.

Left Out in High School - I came to this realization through another somewhat related high school memory that I was able to conquer. It may have sounded like a great thing at first that I was cast in the school play, but I was the only one in the cast without a single line of dialogue. While everyone else in the cast had more than two minutes on stage and something significant to contribute, I was on stage for less than thirty seconds and did nothing whatsoever significant. In hindsight, I wish I had dropped out of the play when I had the chance. But a few years ago, when was writing my book, What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, I wrote about this experience in the play to illustrate what it looks like when someone with a disability is included but not accepted. Putting my experience down on paper for my mom, the book's editor, to read, was a difficult ordeal yet was the necessary therapy I needed to move on.

How do I know this process worked? Well, my parents and I have season tickets to a local theater company, and over the past few years, the company funnily did all three musicals I did in high school. The first we saw brought back those hard high school memories over the next week, the most prominent being the play where I was shoved aside. With the second of my high school plays the theater company did, it was the same deal. But by the time we saw the last of those three plays, I had already written that section of my book, so I didn’t linger anywhere near as much about my awful play experiences, making me feel like I was freed at last from the memory.

So, if you or someone you know is on the autism spectrum, encourage them to use the tactic of writing down traumatic memories to help them process their feelings. Yeah, it’s going to hurt to put them down on paper, but it’s like surgery, you can’t heal to get to a better place until you first make the incision. I also recognize that for some of you, your worst memory is being molested or having a loved one die prematurely, and for those cases, healing from the hurt is a more difficult and involved process. However, exposing your emotions in the light instead of keeping them hidden is what I found is needed to stop the trauma from defining who you are.
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Trevor Pacelli is a young adult on the autism spectrum and author of books on autism, disabilities, bullying and a new middle-grade sci-fi adventure novel. ​