Memories: Remembering or reliving

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I have been thinking of memories lately.
I have noticed that a lot of people view their experiences differently over time. For instance my grandfather once told me that when he was a little boy, there was one street he used to dread on his way home from school. Some other boys would sit in the trees there and throw chest nuts at him, which scared him at the time. But as he told me about it, he’d laugh it off. And I reacted to that and said ”That’s not funny; it could’ve been dangerous and they scared you!”
I could never do that.

When I think of something that has happened to me, even if it is way back in the past, it’s more like I’m reliving it than remembering it. If somthing made me angry then, it makes me upset now; if something made me laugh then, it makes me smile now. If these feeling are more mellow at all, they are only lower on the same scale, never gone. If something made me cry at age 3, the memory won’t make me laugh at it now either, almost 3 decades later.

Is this a me-thing or a spectrum thing?

I experience this as well, though can't speak to whether it's a spectrum specific phemomena.

same here...I have had some bad memories from high school and junior high.Now in college, I am being frozen out of groups in my class...It is causing me to relive the memories of malicious exclusion from my younger years along with the gossipping, namecalling, teasing, and bullying.Sometimes..it plays though my head some nights and I am pretty much brought to tears...I mostly sniffle and wipe the tears....can't make any noise since my landlady's room is across the hall.

I think it's just part of the normal variance that different people show. I imagine there are NT's out there who also do this. As for myself, my memory is totally reactive, i can't access my own memories.

I was pretty old when I discovered that most of he world was very different from me. Now when I relive memories I can see them through the lens of what I know now that I didn't know then.

At the time everything I did seemed like the best choice, completely rational, and I very calusly did not care what other people thought any way - even in high school.

Now I work with kiddos with autism. I see them doing the things I did and I see how maybe others might have felt about it, (even though they still don't freqently get my sympathy). My gift to the kids is that I totally get them.

Sometimes it is actually a bit problelmatic. Just today I had a talk with my mother that ended up in a quarrel. I mentioned that it seemed like those on the spectrum might remember longer back than other people. My mother then pointed out that she had a memory from when she was 3 and her parents sold her wagon. She hadn't liked it.

I pointed out that then she should've been more understanding of me. About 29 years ago I had outgrown my baby chair that I sat on when eating. Once when my grandparents visited the adults made the decision to have my grandparents take the chair with them and put it in their cellar, as they had more space. (This part I didn't really get back then but I understood that they were gonna take my chair away from me and I clung to it and yelled and cried. My mother let go of the chair and thinking the chair was safe I was put to bed some time after. When I awoke the next day it was gone to my grandparents and I had another tantrum.

Now I pointed out that I never could understand why she had to trump it through, what was the big deal, why was it such a hurry? Why couldn't I have kept it another day or so and gotten used to the idea? I said to her and she just said "I wasn't gonna discuss that with you" (in that special tone that is ensured to have any offspring go off every time). When she saw that I was really bothered, she just said "It's only been about 30 years!" (sarcastically).
Not the point! She just doesn't get that in my mind that (and every thing else that I remember) is as clear and close as yesterday. And that something upsetting me then still make me feel the same today. She just made up excuses and was upset over me! No understanding at all. That was an hour or so ago and we're not talking at the moment. Oh that will pass. But moments like this wear me out. To me it is yesterday and I relive it as such, to her it's ancient history and something she has a memory of but no emotions connected to. In my mind that feels like the entire thing repeating itself; being overruled at both age 3 and 32.


This is truly a blessing and a curse.
It’s a curse when I deal with family members I love and I can’t reminisce with them because what is a nostalgic memory to them is as emotional to me now as it was then. No matter if 20 or 30 years have passed. The worst part is that they just don’t understand.
It’s a blessing when someone does something sh***y to me and I will always remember and never waste time on them again. When I am through with a person I am really through with him/her.

Those of you who relive it more than remembering, do things like this happen to you, too?

I only really remember my memories, never relive them (unless they are severely distressing ones), and I have a lot of memories I wish I would just forget

More like 'reconstructing'. The brain alters our memories over time to fit in more nicely with the current situation.

i have a terrible memory, it seems most of the time i can only remember the fact that i did something, but not actually doing it. (as in i remember that ive moved house twice, but i cant actually remember doing it).

But back to what the first post was about >.>, i think that just as they get older, most people see things differently and they "outgrow" those feelings.

for instance when you're little you could be terrified of the dark, but as you get older you know that theres (mostly >.>) nothing to be afraid of. when you think of the fact that you used to be scared of the dark it shouldnt make you feel scared, but amused that you were scared for no reason

I've been able to remember stuff as far as when i was around 7-9 and i'm going on my 23s. <.<

I think there are different types of memory, I can voluntarily recall an incident from the past and look at it objectively and laugh like your grandfather did then there are the times when something will trigger the reliving of the experience where I feel everything I felt the first time these are overwhelming totally involuntary and very intrusive and tend to keep happening over a period of hours or days. The second type is an AS thing I think. I also found recently that it's just as easy to relive the good memories and feel everything too which is nice.

Henriksson said

Isnt it called emotional memory, when your emotions are tied closely to the memoey. I guess I experiene it often in feeling bad about somthing I may have called. Often I might try to bring up something that may have hapend or maybe get a little bit of revenge for how I feel I may have been treated and felt at a time, but I can't stand how I am always told it is in the past, or even making me feel guilty for bringing it up and others try to twist my memory. Lately I have also had flashes of of kind of memory it kind of feels like I have a flash back, in where I know where I actualy am but it feels like my mind and emotions feel like they were like in another time.

I always tell people that I re-experience my memories in all six senses. I used the analagy of an eight track tape recorder. It is as if someone had already invented smellavision, and feelavision and installed it into my head. Even every mental response, every emotional response, and everything I intuited from people around me, or from where ever they were at the time also gets recorded, and plays back with the memory. My memories play back like a recording. In fact I re-experience things on a regular basis. I call it reprocessing. Something that I read, or heard, or a conversation I was privy to earlier in the day, sometime when I have some alone time, will play back in my head, and I will reconsider my assumptions and observations, and things will occur to me, that did not occur to me at the time the things originally occurred. I also have two sets of environments associated with reprocessed memories. The environment that was in place when it occurred, and also the environment that was in place when it was reprocessed.

My memories play back in my imagination, and I can rearrange the memory in imagination. When I am trying to remember where I put something, I can imagine myself leaving the item someplace, or I can remember leaving it for real. For some reason I am able to distinguish what is memory, and what was a recreation. Memories and recreations both occur in imagination, but memories feel different.

I read somewhere, that for people who think in images, memory starts storing much earlier than for people who think in words. I have memories from before I learned to speak, from before I knew what the things that I was looking at were called. When I play one of those memories back now, I can observe that this is brown, and that is called a bell, but that information is not in the memory, they are observations from the memory based upon current knowledge.

I get like that, sometimes.