It is self-apparent for most of us that personality evolves as experience accumulates. Else, how could we make statements like, “John was changed by the war” or “Pete became a different person after he married Carole.”
Experiences often change us; some highly affective novel experiences are transformative. Another self-apparent observation—most of us highlight impactful experiences in our memories via clarity, which preserve stories about what we have learned whether what we have learned can be articulated or not. Many have described what we have learned as the narrative we create.
Whatever your belief about a narrative, it is adaptive from an evolutionary perspective to remember and give priority to experiences that have moved us either very positively or negatively. The strong affect functions as a marker that denotes we have been impacted disproportionately by that experience.
My research is organized around a central question: If an autobiographical memory is infused with both history and personality, how can we isolate and deconstruct what is related to personality; and how can that information be used most effectively to assess and treat clinical patients?
To illustrate the assessment component, I cut and pasted the first part of Ben Franklin’s autobiography (Bruhn 2006) into an extended Part I of an Early Memories Procedure (EMP, Bruhn 1989) to provide an illustration of how this method works even in memoirs. Many who read this paper with a creative set of eyes will imagine powerful applications of this methodology, which is the primary reason I did not publish this paper 15 years earlier.
Here I will discuss ‘load bearing’ memories (Section 9), which, when changed, almost instantly reorganize how other significant events are constructed. Load bearing memories show us how perception, and ultimately personality, can be profoundly changed when key elements in autobiographical memory are reconfigured.
