Forget Or Learn To Live With It
Can we really forget what has hurt us? Do we do this or do we actually learn to place it somewhere else to live without it hurting? Forgetfulness may not be a matter of will, which does not take away so that we can help our memory lose its memory.
We have all gone through situations, relationships and moments that made us happy, but there comes a time when happiness is cut off, it is broken. Some people disappear, other times love ends or distance sets traps. What can we do to make these memories stop hurting?
Perhaps the first idea to take into account is that forgetting, “roughly”, does not work. The louder we shout that we don’t want a memory, the more it will appear in our mind in the form of circular thought. It was and will continue to be, although now with another form, but the memory is there, what would be good is to learn to be there but without it hurting.
It is in our power to give a new value to this thought, to integrate it into our life history without causing pain. A good internal speech is the following: “It made me happy, I learned from everything bad that happened and I keep the good memories in my memory. If I strive to forget, more will appear in the focus of my consciousness and the more power it will have to generate negative emotions. Everything that has been part of my time is now part of my history and therefore forgetting it – as someone I understand forgetting how to erase – should not be a point to work on ”.
Stop talking is not forget
No matter how much effort we make or how much we try to remove from our mind what hurts us, the most likely is that we will not succeed. Not talking about the pain, closing ourselves off to meet new people, not writing to another person to hold a grudge or not forgiving a harm they caused us is not forgetting.
Keeping issues that harm us pending or recurring is not forgetting, it is preventing them from being expressed in a way that we can control their effects. Sadly they are still there, packing them simply means keeping the memories in an unsafe place, since just touching them will hurt us again.
When we forget, it no longer hurts, we no longer remember, we can no longer experience what we feel at that moment, but it is not pushing it away, it is erasing it. As this is an impossible task (we do not have a button in our mind that will trash everything that is undesirable or unwanted), the appropriate thing is to strive to do what is in our hands. That translates into reflecting on the value of that memory, how we want to save it, what continues to hurt us and why it continues to do so.
We have the opportunity to work on experiences and not let them take control of us. We are more than memories, we are the ones who give meaning to our memory, we are more than thoughts, because we are, ultimately, the ones who shape it.
Now it is, but it no longer hurts
From the moment we do that reading and elaborate it, the memory will be in us. We will remember how time was with our grandparents, we will remember that first love that marked us so much, we will remember when we played or talked on the phone with our friends, visits to other cities, summer beers. These memories remain, and remain in me, stripped of association with other negative memories, therefore they will shine brighter.
It does not hurt because we have learned that making a “rough” effort to forget produces work with no other fruit than frustration. I do not want to forget the good, only what hurt me and that is a process that requires our intelligence, but also time and patience.
On the other hand, if it hurts us it is because it happened, because we feel it, because we are alive. Let’s not get it out of our mind, let’s give it a new value, a new place. Let it be, but taking away the importance that it has already lost, all that it takes from us, integrating it in a new way in our history.
