The correct way to deal with bad memories

First of all, I’m not a fan of deleting memories or forgetting the past concepts, this is why I didn’t use How to forget bad memories as a title for this article, even if it draws more attention and it is the dream of many of us to be able to erase memories at will. That’s because I believe that deleting memories for good is impossible and trying to forget bad memories leads nowhere but to more pain and suffering. I will explain this idea later in this article.

Another thing that I want to mention is that if you are someone who suffers from complicated psychological disturbance due to an extremely severe bad experience, please stop reading articles on the internet, and go visit a counseling psychologist to find out if you have a post-traumatic stress disorder and start your psychotherapy.

In this article, I will only talk about how to stop suffering from memories of most common negative experiences such as a failure in an exam, an embarrassing moment during an interview or an unexpected end of a relationship with someone who was close to you, etc.

What does it really means to forget memories?

As I said before, I don’t believe on memories removal, once you experience something it is permanently stored in your brain, and the only way to definitely lose memory is to damage your brain’s cells. You will say: “hey what are you talking about? And how can you explain that I forgot everything I learned during history classes in High School?”

Don’t you see that you are using the verb “forget” and not the expression “I lost memories about”? Nope, it is not only because it Is easier to say I forgot, what is actually happening is that you are not completely sure if your memories are really gone or still there hiding deep in your brain. And that is the case actually; you still have those memories somewhere,  yeah everything you learned in history classes is being stored in your brain.

So why you can’t remember? I prefer to stay away from directly talking about all the scientific models explaining how memory works, we don’t need that. The general idea is simple, try to imagine your brain storage as an endlessly vast desert, and there is sand everywhere, and you are in the middle. And all over the place, there are infinite numbers of boxes, which are your memories. But the sand is constantly moving and pushing those boxes away from you or completely burying them underground where you can't track them anymore.

This is how you actually forget memories. They are still there but they are far from your reach or completely out of your sight. But there is always something that can happen to bring them back as long as your brain is still completely functional and not damaged. And what about memories you keep remembering huh? 

It’s simple, there is something holding them and protecting them from getting buried by the moving sands. You can imagine those stable memories as boxes attached to you by ropes. Now if we go back to our topic, the bad memory you are suffering from, is actually one of those boxes that are attached to you, and what you should do is not to crash the box (it is made of titanium, you can’t sorry) you simply need to open the node attaching the box’s rope to you.

How to open the rope node?

First, you need to know the nature of this rope, to know what it really is. The rope attaching the bad memory to you can be in most cases a trigger from your current environment or a mix of sad emotions that you don’t want to let go.

The triggers

Let’s start with the triggers. What you need to do is to identify the things that bring back the bad memory to you. It can be a place, a person, a conversation topic, a song, or an object like for example a picture or a t-shirt you were wearing when you experienced the negative event. You should get rid of everything that keeps the bad memory repeating in your brain, or just reduce the number of those triggers. By doing that you are actually starting to open the rope node.

The emotions

Now let’s talk about your emotions and feelings. You found out that the friend you trusted too much, loved too much, and did many things for, was just exploiting you and making fun of you with his friends when you are not around. Yeah, it feels so bad that mix of deception, confusion, sorrow, anger, and other heartbreaking feelings. But the most important feeling you have is the pity you have for own self.

Here is how to deal with that problem. Whenever you start remembering those sad memories, don’t try to stop it, just let it play and watch. But make sure to not focus on the emotions you have now, or the emotions you felt during the negative experience. You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and making an emotional and tragedy drama movie from every memory that comes up to your brain. Just watch the memory as it is without any intervention, and distract yourself with the scenario and the environment decoration from feelings and emotions.

It will be hard for the first time, but if you keep going and manage to completely think about your bad memories without focusing on your emotions; your suffering will stop, the memories will become boring in no time, the rope node will be completely open and the box will go away with the sand.

I want to add that a bad memory is not bad 100%. The negative experiences you had, did a great job on forging your personality, making you stronger, and wiser when dealing with new negative experiences or when completely working on avoiding them. So I repeat it again, don’t be irrational and seek the deletion of your memories, be strong, face them and deal with them.