If the person with whom power relates causes you to sin, cut off the communication and cast them from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. We are to live and respond in the faith which is as floating on the Albatross in a White Squall. Dependency is a drag! A martyr! A disaster! This is the experience we have with a dependent personality. Every endeavor to relate seems thwarted. Every effort to respond comes to naught. Every attempt at ministry goes astray. One is bogged down, engulfed by the other’s needs. Let me put the problem differently: one does not know what the dependent person is experiencing. He or she withholds information necessary to the development of a mutually satisfying relationship. Thus, one finds oneself doing extra work. The harder the responder tried to respond, the less satisfied the other seems. A little help mysteriously expands into the demand for a lot of helping. A little care somehow gets transformed into endless caring.

What begins as meaningful support turns into an irritating Albatross, Gil Martin (played by Ryan Phillippe) engulfed in a White Squall, trapped in a room, on a skinning ship, and one cannot figure out what has gone wrong. Be patient with yourself if you are not readily curious about other people. There are powerful reasons why you have not been able to protect and develop your natural capacity for curiosity. You will be able to get to the root of some of these obstacles as you work with remembering. In the meantime, praise yourself whenever you do notice that you are questioning or wondering about other people’s lives. One possibility overlooked in our discussion of forgetting is that memories may be lost as they are being formed. For example, a head injury may cause a gap in memories preceding the accident. Retrograde amnesia, as this is called, involves forgetting events that occurred before an injury or trauma. In contrast, anterograde amnesia involves forgetting events that follow an injury or trauma.

In the film The I Inside Simon Cable (Ryan Phillippe), after a near-death experience, awakens with amnesia and the ability to travel back and forth in through time. This thriller is a lot what retrograde amnesia can be like. It takes a certain amount of time to move information from short-term to long-term memory. The forming of a long-term memory is called consolidation. Simon Cable wakes up in a hospital bed, confused and disoriented. He soon discovers from doctors that he has amnesia and is unable to remember the last two years of his life. Simon Cable investigates what has happened to him and slowly pieces together the enigmatic past. You can think of consolidation as being somewhat like writing your name in wet concrete. Once the concrete is set, the information (your name) is fairly lasting. However, while it is setting, it can be wiped out (amnesia) or scribbled over (interference). Simon Cable finds himself leaping through time between 2000 and 2002 as his past returns to him.

Recent memories are more easily disrupted than older memories. Apparently, consolidation is already complete. That is why Simon Cable, much like other people with head injuries, lost his memories before the accident. His heart stopped for two minutes and he was dead. When he came back to life, it was a puzzle and he was struggling to remember what happened. Many parts of the brain are responsible for memory, but the hippocampus is particularly important. The hippocampus seems to act as a sort of switchboard station (an apparatus for varying connections between electric circuits in other applications) between short-term and long-term memory. Humans who have had hippocampal damage show a striking inability to store new memories. Described as typical, one year after a head injury damaged his hippocampus, a 42-year-old man, continued to give his age as 41. He also reported he felt as just though the head injury had just occurred. His memory of events before the head injury remained clear, but he found forming new long-term memories almost impossible. (He suffered, in other word, from anterograde amnesia.) #RyanPhillippe 4 of 5

When his family member moved to a new apartment a few block away, a cross the park, he could not remember the new address. Month after month, he read the same magazines over and over without finding them familiar. If you were to meet this man, he would seem fairly normal, since he still has short-term memory. However, at the time, if you were to leave the room and return 15 minutes later, he would act as if he had never seen you before, and run off. Then he would see you months later, and be looking sad, but then notice you and perk up like a flower, and walk home. And people are wondering what happened to this guy, before Christmas of 2015, you guys spent every day together and he went from looking angry to happy, and then he just disappears. Then all this drama erupts in his personal life, and he totally shuts down and acts like he does not know anyone. Years ago, one of his favorite uncles passed away, but he suffers the same grief anew each time he is told of the death. Lacking the ability to form new lasting memories, he lives eternally in the present.  If you will receive yourself in the fires of sorrow, God will help you make nourishment for other people. (www.thedeedle.com)