Munnin: Why memory matters when you've been manipulated.

"Huginn and Muninn fly each day over the wide world. I fear for Huginn that he may not return, but I fear more for Muninn."— Grímnismál

Every morning, Odin sends two ravens into the world.

Huginn, whose name means Thought. And Muninn, whose name means Memory.

At the end of each day they both return, bringing him news of everything they have seen and everything that has happened across the world while he waited.

Most people assume Odin would fear losing Huginn (thought) most. After all, what is a god without thought? But the ancient poem reveals to the reader something unexpected. Odin fears losing Munnin (memory) more.

I lost my memory along the way as I moved through a long-term relationship steeped in manipulation and control. Regaining confidence in what I remembered happening and being able to separate what I knew from what I had been told to believe has been a difficult process. One of the things that helped most was learning to stop looking at individual incidents and start looking for patterns.

Manipulation often works by clouding our memory of what has happened or, maybe more importantly, by making us question whether we remember it accurately at all. When we lose confidence in our own memory, each incident becomes easier to treat as an isolated event. But when we trust our memory of what actually transpired in those individual situations, we can begin connecting one experience to another. When we thread those individual moments together, a pattern emerges, and once we can see the pattern, it becomes much harder to deny the truth of what we experienced.

A manipulator or narcissist needs us to believe their version of what transpired. Thought is important as it helps us understand what happened, but I'm with Odin, I have a seriously insane fear of losing Memory since without it we cannot see the meaning behind all the different things that happened.

Without memory, every experience stands alone and looks like this:

• Every broken promise seems like an isolated incident that we can rationalize away.

• Every lie becomes an exception we make an excuse for.

• Every manipulation feels like a misunderstanding, leaving us feeling like maybe we are the problem.

Memory gathers all those moments together and that is what tells the real story. One that cannot be denied or dismissed. This is why manipulation so often attacks memory first.

When someone rewrites history into a version you never experienced or insists a conversation never happened, that you're remembering it wrong, or that you're too sensitive, or that you simply need to let it go, we often learn to question ourselves before we question them.

"Leave the past in the past."

In effect, this asks us to abandon some of the very information we need in order to understand what is happening in the present. And abandoning the past is so dangerous for our future.

I used to hear those words, "Leave the past in the past" (and others like them) and believed they were meant to help me move forward. I thought they were about grace and forgiveness, about not holding grudges or allowing old wounds to dictate the present. At times, I was even led to wonder whether my own past trauma was causing me to perceive something as more hurtful or significant than a "normal" person would. Whatever "normal" is.

That possibility was particularly dysregulating because it gave me one more reason to look inward when something felt wrong. Instead of asking, What is happening here? Why does this keep happening? I found myself asking, Is the problem actually me? Can I trust my reaction to this at all?

But eventually as I came out of the fog and confusion and stopped abandoning my own instincts, I understood what those words had come to mean in my relationship: stop using the past (memory) to make sense of the present. Don't compare what is happening now with what happened before. Don't connect the incidents and whatever you do, please(!!) don't notice the contradictions or look for a pattern. Because noticing is what exposes a narcissist.

Memory becomes an act of reclaiming ourselves. Each memory we learn to trust restores a little bit of the ground beneath our feet and we gain the ability to say: I know what I experienced, felt and what I saw.

With memory we no longer need someone else to tell us what was real and hope they are being honest.

Manipulators don't tell you to forget the past because it's healthy. They tell you to forget because your memory is the one thing they cannot control.

Reclaiming Muninn is one of the most important parts of healing. And if feels really liberating when we reclaim it.

I write things down. When I list out my reality, the things that happened, the very things someone wanted me to forget, the things that were erased to protect them from accountability, I write in red. It seems like a small, trivial thing but those things listed in red represent something so powerful, they say: this happened. I was there and I remember. It reminds me of all the red flags I didn't piece together to tell the whole story. And I refer back to that list when doubt creeps back in.

Learning the language of manipulation helps us name what we are remembering. And naming everything reveals a pattern. And the pattern gives us back the story. And the story, our own true story, not the edited version is how the scattered pieces of memory become something coherent.

It slowly becomes something we can finally trust.

Maybe Odin feared losing Memory more than Thought because thought alone can be fooled. Thought can rationalize events that took place. Thought can be argued out of its conclusions. Thought can be gaslit.

But memory, the things we lived, embodied, written in red, that is so much harder to take.

Thought alone can make us clever but Memory makes us wise.

What this does to your body

Memory is not only a psychological function. It is a physiological one.

When memory is repeatedly invalidated and you are told over and over that what you know to be true did not happen your nervous system enters a state of chronic unresolvable conflict. It is simultaneously trying to trust its own signals and respond to someone telling it those signals are wrong.

That conflict shows up as:

• Hypervigilance

• Rumination

• Brain fog

• Anxiety with no clear source

• Digestive dysfunction

• A feeling of being permanently slightly unreal, as if you are watching your own life from a distance.

When you begin to trust your memory again and when you write things down, when you name the patterns, when you stop handing your story to someone who rewrites it, your nervous system begins to exhale. Over time, you feel a sense of safety again.

And safety is part of healing.