Integrating autobiographical memories

quote:Imaging studies of brain functioning report reductions in amygdala and hippocampal regions, perhaps reflecting the difficulties in regulating emotions and integrating autobiographical memories.
Explainer: what are personality disorders and how are they treated?

Interesting how I have spent several years integrating my father's autobiographical memory and my own.  I see my task as having been in a mode of shamanic healing. A lot of the project involved coming to terms with historical rupture, but more than this, in coming to a realization that the contemporary (or "modern") interpretations of my life were fundamentally false historically, politically and above all in their emotional cadence.

I'm not sure whether I need to add, here, for my safety, that I am in fact  a very normal and well-behaved African personality.  I'm just not, and nor have I ever been, an integrated Westerner or "modern".  And why should I have to be?  My autobiographical memories have been seemingly not all that relatable in Western terms, since they were born out of more intense emotional energies in Africa.

I am by now deeply emotionally satisfied with the latest versions of my memoir, which seem to me to have achieved a balance in telling the truth not just about experience but concerning the historical rupture that made communication nearly impossible.