[awkii]

I have aphantasia, and today I learned that I also have SDAM.

There are benefits. For example, I find that I have no issue forgiving people. It's more work for me to harbor a grudge. I don't relive the burden of that initial pain of betrayal when someone close to me harms me, so it's easy to forgive and literally forget.

Fun fact: My dreams are very rarely visual.

[switchbak]

How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.

[scruple]

I also have aphantasia and I do believe I have SDAM, too. I also had a traumatic childhood and am a combat veteran. I think I've always been this way but that's a hard question for me to truly answer and is one that I grapple with a lot, actually.

> How about the pain of reliving old memories? I could do with a little less of that right now.

I don't relive the past the way it seems most people do. I know what it's like to feel hurt or feel stuck but I don't generally feel emotions about things in my past. That's good because I've endured a lot of bad shit but also sucks because my wedding day is kind of like any other day to me, as was the birth of our kids. I guess I know all of the good and all of the bad things that have happened to me -- though I don't really carry them with me the way some people seem to, they're part of me but I don't spend much if any time ever thinking about them -- but I don't feel any particular way about any of it. I know that I love my wife and kids more than life itself, I know these facts and I know the timelines but there's not much else there. I know these things but there's no emotional weight to them.

[Oreb]

Me too. I’ve had some very traumatic experiences the last few years, and the emotional scars will never heal. I’m not the same person I was before, and I never will be.

Some people these days are hoping to combat aging and make potentially infinite life extension possible. I find that idea far more terrifying than death. Infinite lifetime would mean that experiences more emotionally and physically painful than I can even imagine would happen countless times. Slowly I would become so messed up by all the accumulated traumatic memories that I would no longer be able to function at all. I would only consent to an infinite or radically extended lifetime if I could also selectively erase memories I don’t want to keep.

[dmos62]

I have many times thought about how scars and tattoos have a lot of similarities. From a certain perspective, a tattoo is simply a bit more intentional. A tattoo is like saying, "I belong to this group and it shows". I think of an emotional scar as a tattoo that is 100x bigger than a regular tattoo: it's so big, that you can't see it, it's like not being able to see an image when you zoom in too much. And, even though you might not see it with the naked eye, you can feel it, it's something on you that says "I was there", "I experienced that", "I used that to become the person I am".

And, then you might recognize that all of our personalities are constructed out of these scars, it's just that most of them we're not aware of and most of them aren't painful to think about. A time comes, when you notice that your association with a given negative memory becomes more neutral, there's a bit more distance between you and it.

I can say for myself that every experience I labeled as negative, I was haunted by, turned out to have a positive outcome at the end. There are hardships that "haunt" me now, and I don't know how it will have been a positive influence on me, but I believe that it will, and that helps.

I hope I don't come across as pushy with my viewpoints. I resonated deeply with what you said, and felt the need to share.

By the way, a practical tip, I find that if I prompt an LLM with something like:

> I'm going through [a difficult time]. Help me reflect. Ask a question or give me a prompt, I'll respond, and so on. Act like a friend.

That has been for me surprisingly effective for releasing debilitating emotional stress.

[bravesoul2]

How do you know you have emotionally forgiven (as in let go) even if you have forgotten?

This is a rhetorical question... No need to answer for you situation but I wonder.

[Nevermark]

> It's more work for me to harbor a grudge.

Sounds like functional forgiveness, as apposed to decision or emotional arc forgiveness. "Letting go" being a very strong default, that would require special maintenance to avoid doing.

I am this way in the long run. Regardless of the situation, at some point I just realize I completely don't care.

Once I know someone operates in a problematic way, I spend some time figuring out how they tick. People really do operate differently internally, and understanding the variety of cognitive damage that nature and nurture can inflict goes a long way to being able to be objective about people's shortcomings.

Then I use common sense to avoid any recurring problems, without negative feelings. I may not want to be connected with someone anymore, but if I run into them, or we are thrown together for some practical purpose, I can be amiable, without any conflicted feelings.

[tgaj]

I think it's more about not remembering the feel of being hurt by someone - like he knows that this person did something bad to him but he doesnt't remember emotions connected to that event, that's why it's harder to hold a grudge.