Forcing your brain to repeatedly reconstruct your painful memory will allow you to rewrite your memory in a way that reduces the emotional trauma. Basically, this means that you practice intentionally shutting down your painful memory as soon as it starts. After doing this for several weeks or months, you can theoretically train your brain not to remember. You basically weaken the neural connection that allows you to call up that particular memory.
Exposure therapy is a type of behavioral therapy widely used in the treatment of PTSD, which can be particularly helpful for flashbacks and nightmares. While working with a therapist, you safely confront both traumatic memories and common triggers so that you can learn to cope with them. Exposure therapy, sometimes called prolonged exposure, involves frequently retelling or thinking about the story of your trauma. In some cases, therapists bring patients to places that they have been avoiding because of PTSD.
A multisite clinical trial of exposure therapy among female service members found that exposure therapy was more successful than another common therapy at reducing PTSD symptoms. Propranolol, which is also used to treat performance anxiety, stops the physical fear response: shaky hands, sweating, racing heart, and dry mouth.
Recent double-blind trials in 60 people with PTSD found that a dose of propranolol given 90 minutes before the start of a memory recall session telling your story , once a week for six weeks, provided a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms. This process takes advantage of the memory reconsolidation process that happens when you recall a memory. Having propranolol in your system while you recall a memory suppresses the emotional fear response.
Later, people are still able to remember the details of the event, but it no longer feels devastating and unmanageable. Psychiatrists will often prescribe this medication off-label. You can inquire about local psychiatrists in your area and see if they use this treatment protocol in their practices.
Memory is the process in which your mind records, stores, and recalls information. It is an extremely complex process that is still not well understood. Many theories about how different aspects of memory work are still unproven and debated.
Researchers do know that there are several different types of memory, all of which depend on a complex network of neurons you have about billion located in many different parts of your brain. The first step in memory creation is the recording of information into the short-term memory.
The basic functions of memory are encoding, storing, and retrieving. Encoding is the process of learning information. Then, our brain stores information, either in short-term memory or long-term memory. While short-term memories don't last long in the brain, some are passed along to our long-term memory, where there is limitless space. Retrieval is the process of recalling our memories. Sights and sounds in our environment can trigger our brain to retrieve a long-term memory, even if we'd rather not remember it.
While we tend to forget mundane information, our brains are more likely to store information that is attached to strong emotions. For instance, a series of studies found that participants were more likely to recall information that was tied to either negative or positive emotions better than they were able to recall neutral information. Many techniques to 'forget a bad memory' stem from gradually disassociating the memory from its negative emotional basis.
Researchers have long been seeking ways to help people intentionally forget. While it is not likely that you'll be able to remove unwanted memories from your brain, you can employ strategies to prevent the memory from disrupting your life.
There are steps that you can take to lessen a memory's emotional impact and make it less intrusive. Remember that it takes time and practice to fade a memory, so don't become discouraged if it doesn't happen as quickly as you'd like. As you follow the steps to forget a memory, it's helpful to delve deeper into the work behind forgetting. There are practical tips you can follow that make your unwanted memories feel less intimidating and much more manageable.
Does the unwanted memory tend to crop up in specific situations? Or are there certain things, people, or settings that remind you of this memory? Once you understand when the memory comes up most often, you can start taking steps to address the issue. While it might be tempting to simply try to avoid those triggers, finding realistic ways to cope when you are faced with your triggers is often a more effective and realistic solution in the long run.
Letting go of memories can be difficult for many people, but it can be particularly challenging for people with social anxiety.
It may feel as though you've built up a "memory bank" filled with all of the social situations you remember as being shameful and embarrassing. Cognitive behavioral therapy CBT is a form of therapy that works to change the negative thoughts that contribute to psychological problems.
You can utilize some of the strategies used in CBT on your own to help change how your respond to your memories. One form of CBT known as exposure therapy can be particularly effective when you are dealing with a memory. The idea behind exposure therapy is to gradually and progressively expose yourself to the thing that you fear.
For example, if you have a memory of being bitten by a dog as a child, you may have developed a fear of dogs. By gradually exposing yourself to dogs in a safe and controlled manner, the memory that triggered your fear will gradually become more bearable. Using relaxation techniques can be another effective tactic that can help reduce the negative impact of memories.
Such techniques may include deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, meditation, and guided imagery. Pairing these strategies with gradual exposure to your triggers can also help you learn new ways to calm yourself in response to those memories.
You could also try to practice mindfulness when memories come back to you. Mindfulness involves focusing on the present moment without worrying about the past or future.
Instead of allowing yourself to become engrossed in the memory, try bringing your attention to something in the present moment such as a sight or smell. Grounding yourself in the present moment can take your focus off of the memory and minimize its effects on your emotions.
Perfectionism can sometimes make memories seem more distressing. If you have a need to always be seen as perfect, the memories of past mistakes can make it difficult to move forward.
Thus, if our goal is to reduce the risk of the memory coming to mind, we are better off getting as far away as possible—physically and mentally—from the original event, perhaps by daydreaming about a far-off vacation.
Research on directed forgetting has substantiated this claim. We could also attempt to establish new, more positive associations with reminders of the original event, or, instead, retrieve substitute thoughts in place of the embarrassing memory.
In the laboratory, we have seen how practicing memory suppression can help block retrieval of the original, unwanted memory and inhibit the likelihood of remembering it later. This also has been shown to reduce the future accessibility of the targets of memory suppression. However, this particular strategy in contrast to the thought-substitution is associated with a systemic downregulation of an area of the brain called the hippocampus, which is known to support both the retrieval of old memories and the formation of new memory associations.
Aristotle thought of forgetting as literally erasing memories, like melting an impression off a block of wax. I think this is wrong. Memory prioritizes what comes to mind. To be useful, we need the most useful memory, not all the others.
In lab studies on directed forgetting, we tell people to study something and then forget it on purpose. Psychologists Lili Sahakyan and Colleen Kelley argued that directed forgetting occurs because we deliberately thing of something else, which changes our current mental state. When people ask me about forgetting on purpose, they often have something terrible in mind that they want to forget. The cerebrum, or forebrain, makes up the largest part of the brain, and it is covered by a sheet of neural tissue known as the cerebral cortex, which envelops the part of our brain where memories are stored.
Items in short-term memory, such as a telephone number remembered for a few moments, will often be forgotten by the brain unless there is constant repetition. Long-term memory is typically involved in retaining information for lengthier periods of time, like remembering the birth of your child. There is increasing debate over whether we actually forget something, or if it just becomes more difficult to remember.
Declarative memory, 'knowing what,' is memory of facts, experiences and events. Although your brain does typically automatically store your experiences into a form of memory, there are times where your brain "walls off" a memory of a traumatic experience -- for its own good.
According to McLaughlin, if the brain registers an overwhelming trauma, then it can essentially block that memory in a process called dissociation -- or detachment from reality. For example, if you've recently gotten "lost" in a book or daydreamed at work, then you've experienced a common form of mild dissociation.
A severe and more chronic form of dissociation is seen in mental illnesses and rare forms of dissociative disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder, which was once called multiple personality disorder.
The same way the body can wall-off an abscess or foreign substance to protect the rest of the body, the brain can dissociate from an experience.
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