How to forget a relationship. How to forget bad memories

There are enough problems and difficulties in life that we have to
decide every day, and there is not always time left for joy and
strength. But at the same time, each of us has our own past failures.
or even violent situations that can poison for years
life.

If it happened in the past divorce, he will definitely play his role
V new love. If you ever Got fired, you still have a long time
You will be nervous at every complaint from your superiors. If
had to work hard to earn bread and didn't have enough money, You
It won't be long before you decide to make an expensive purchase.

The most difficult situations include loss of loved ones, accidents and catastrophes, serious illnesses and addictions, including loved ones. You can’t do this without the help of a specialist, but many bad memories can be erased from your memory on your own.

Method 1. Memory diary

Whatever one may say, there are stories that cannot be forgotten at all. Due to the fact that a lot of time was spent on them, people dear to us took part in them, and in general - it was in our lives, and she was alone. But you can separate all this from the present and return, as if you were watching a movie, where the hero is similar to you, but a different person.

Set aside a separate time for suffering about the past. You can describe your feelings in a special file or blog and allow yourself any anger, bitterness, tears and sadness. Experiencing this from the heart, you will soon lose interest in old stories, because it’s impossible to watch the same movie every day and not get bored.

Method 2. Farewell ritual

On Maslenitsa we say goodbye to the cold and long winter to welcome the joy and freshness of spring. The same cold and inhospitable periods happen in life, and you can and should say goodbye to them for the sake of a beautiful future.

To say goodbye to bad things forever, you need to collect everything that you are terribly tired of- you can do this symbolically by putting in a box photographs of your ex-husband, cheap things that you had to wear due to lack of money (even if you are still afraid to buy something decent), employment contracts from old work and other reminders. Leave it all in a visible place and visit your old life with the understanding that this is in the past.

Method 3. Substitution of events

No, this does not mean that you should deceive yourself and convince yourself that nothing bad happened. But it happens that we remember a difficult story only because it is the most vivid memory. This is really a property of memory. However, all that was left of her in reality was this terrible picture.

You need a different story, equally bright, but positive. To do this, you will have to try, achieve a difficult goal with a bright result (buy a car, do the splits, do crazy repairs), in general, do something extraordinary for yourself. Would such a person want to remember some old failures - he already has something to be proud of and something to rejoice in in his new life.

Method 4. Stop lights

We return to the old thing because we want to replay it again - not to make mistakes, to finish what we didn’t say, to correct something - in a word, to live the same story again. However, the very attempt to find oneself again difficult situation already seems strange.

The problem is that we consider ourselves guilty of those terrible events and cannot realize that and with good people bad things happen. Is it worth returning to them? What is lived is lived, and we behaved as best we could at that moment. Sometimes it’s enough to just stop yourself in the place where you wanted to relive the past. Come up with conditioned signals for yourself - pinch, spit over your shoulder, say something out loud.

Method 5. Real return

Closing the page and completing the story sometimes helps if allow yourself to return to where it is impossible to return. The forbidden fruit is sweet and we are drawn to the bad past, because it is so sad to think that time cannot be turned in the other direction.

Make sure the sadness isn't worth it. Call ex-husband and understand that he is the person you divorced, not the one you fell in love with. Interview former colleagues, and they will immediately tell you that since you were fired, everything has only gotten worse. It's good that all this is already in your past.

Method 6: Final analysis

You have to be moral towards this method ready man or use it in combination with something else. Saying goodbye to the past essentially occurs at the moment when you calmly accept everything that happened to you, not as horror and a nightmare, and especially not as a cross that you are obliged to bear, but as an event that has explanations and which gave you experience.

Everyone has their own bumps, but in other words, without our past we wouldn’t be who we are, and a bad past doesn’t make you worse, but it sure does can do better - smarter, more experienced, stronger, kinder and softer, or, on the contrary, more stable, in order to protect oneself. Accept and love yourself again- this means living in the present moment and enjoying it without looking back at the bad past.

For many people, the problem of developing memory and skills memorization and assimilation of texts is more relevant than the ability to forget the past and get rid of unnecessary information.

Today you can find a large variety advertisements in newspapers, on television and on the Internet, the headlines and announcements of which are full of promises to improve and restore memory. Anyone today can independently and easily find a mass useful information About, how to develop memory. But for the effective functioning of our memory, it is necessary not only the ability to reliably remember, store and, if necessary, reproduce the necessary information. It is also important to be able to forget it.

In mnemonics (methods and methods that facilitate memorization) there are special techniques designed for deliberate forgetting. And indeed, why, if there is involuntary and voluntary memorization, can forgetting only be involuntary?

So, the set of methods and techniques for learning to forget is called flying technology. The origin of this word goes back to Greek mythology. Lethe - the river of oblivion located in underground kingdom Aida. Souls arrived in kingdom of the dead Having tasted the water from this river, they became oblivious and no longer remembered their earthly existence. This is where the expression came from - to sink into oblivion, meaning disappearance and oblivion without a trace.

What is the use of flying technology and its laws of forgetting? In what cases are they necessary?

First of all, in answering these questions, it should be said that forgetting is not definitely negative quality human memory, since the functioning of mnemonic processes without forgetting processes will be inferior. It would be appropriate to recall the words of the outstanding Soviet psychologist Alexander Romanovich Luria - “ Many people are working on how to find ways to remember better? But no one even thinks about the question: how best to forget?»

In this article we will look at the most effective ways, which help a person forget the past, which has a traumatic effect on his psyche, and we learn how to forget information that has lost its relevance.

Forgetting techniques can be used in at least two cases:

• In order to suppress unpleasant memories, especially those that have become obsessively repetitive.
• In order to erase from memory unnecessary information that simply clutters our brain.

Forgetting method #1 - Suppression

This flying technique has a psychotherapeutic orientation; with its help, you can forget memories that are traumatic to the psyche.

Often the memory of unpleasant events haunts people, and they begin to fear that these traumatic memories will begin to “pop up” again, and the more they fear this, the more fears become more intrusive. To relieve obsession (involuntarily obsessive thoughts), you can use an exercise called “burning letter":

• Memories that make you suffer and experience unpleasant sensations, describe them in detail and transfer them to a piece of paper. Then take this sheet, crumple it up and place it in some fireproof container, set it on fire. As you watch the paper burn, think about how your experiences burn, how they crumble and turn into ashes. All negative memories burned away! Throw the ashes out the window and scatter them to the wind!

The point of the “burning letter” exercise is that it helps not only to forget information, but to become the master of your memories. A person experiencing unpleasant feelings from past events can thus forget them. Of course this one forgetting process may be unpleasant, but often it gives the desired effect: the person does not turn on defense mechanisms, does not suppress memories, but on the contrary, by describing these events, it gets rid of the memories associated with them.

Since ancient times, fire has played the role of the first psychotherapist for humans: looking at the flame, a person, in fact, underwent a psychotherapy session, cleansing himself of heavy thoughts and throwing off the weight of primitive stresses from his shoulders. And if a person has a good imagination, and he is able to vividly imagine that not just paper is burning in a fire, but also memories that traumatize his psyche, then even if he wanted to, he will not be able to reproduce them.

“TV” is another exercise often used by psychologists and psychotherapists in their practice to rid the patient of memories that weigh on him:

• Try to transfer your negative experiences as vividly as possible onto the big TV screen. Remember everything down to the smallest detail. Then take the remote control, and mentally turn off the sound, watch a “silent movie”. Then, in a similar way, deprive the visualization of clarity, contrast, and, finally, brightness. Eventually, the image fades and disappears completely. The main thing is not to rush! To make the process of forgetting more effective, you can mentally unplug the cord from the socket or throw the TV out the window. If the negative memories are not so tragic (let's say, just unpleasant), then with the help of this exercise you can translate them into the genre of comedy. Imagine these events recorded on video camera. Mentally start recording in reverse side, scroll it at high speed, use slow motion, put funny music on the picture, introduce a comedian into the “movie,” etc. If you learn to direct your memories, it will be easier for you to manage them. Moreover, where there is humor, there is no place for neurosis.

These exercises may not help you completely get rid of memories, but they will teach you not to be afraid of them. And this is very important, because eliminating the fear of negative memories, we eliminate the cause of their involuntary appearance.

Forgetting method #2 - Deletion

Other forgetting technique is designed to remove unnecessary information from memory that has lost its relevance and clutters up the “archive” of memory. For example, you can free mnemonic matrices from already applied information material in order to fill them with new content.

Simplest forgetting method called " flight technical cloth».

• For example, we filled a memory matrix with a series of images created from words. Then, focusing our attention on the first cell of the matrix, we take a wet rag and erase the image (shaped group) located in it. The first cell remains, we continue to see it clearly, but now it is empty, the space is free and now new associative compositions can be placed on it. Next, we sequentially, cell by cell, go through the entire matrix and, using a similar method, erase all the remaining images.

It should be noted that this method not entirely convenient if the mnemonic matrices have big sizes. After all, it will take a lot of time and effort to consistently erase information from each individual cell. In such cases, it is appropriate to apply the laws of forgetting of Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky, a Russian-Soviet journalist and professional mnemonist, who, speaking with intellectual performances in front of a huge audience, was forced not only to remember large sequences numbers, words, incoherent syllables, etc., but also erase all this from memory before the next performance.

• « Worried that the individual sessions do not get mixed up with each other, I mentally erase the board and, as it were, cover it with a film that is completely hopeless and impenetrable. When the session ends, I mentally remove it... I’m still talking to the audience, and at this time I kind of crush this film with my hands, hearing how it crunches.“- Shereshevsky shared his secrets. So he deleted information immediately from the entire field of the mnemonic matrix, and not from each individual cell. If this method did not help to effectively forget information, Solomon Veniaminovich resorted to seemingly paradoxical methods of forgetting: “ In order to remember, people write down... It seemed funny to me, and I decided to do it my way: since they write down, therefore, they do not need to remember. This means that if I write it down, I will know that I don’t need to remember it... And I began to apply this law of forgetting in small things: in some errands, in surnames, in telephone numbers».

Trying to remember important information, most people tend to write it down. And the more often we write down what we want to remember, the less we use our memory. This is a direct path to memory atrophy, because without receiving enough load, it works less and less. As a result, people come to the sad conclusion that they have a bad memory, although they themselves are often to blame for this.

Try not to use notepads and notebooks, trust your memory, load it so that it can work fully ( exercises for memory development), and then she will stop letting you down. Only mark something on paper if you need to forget it!

The process of mastering the skills of forgetting (as well as memorizing) proceeds in a manner consistent with the laws of Hegelian dialectics. IN certain moment the experience of voluntary forgetting leads to a qualitative leap that allows one to forget unnecessary information only through willpower without application special methods forgetting.

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Chances are, we all have memories that people would like to forget. A disturbing incident, an embarrassing situation, humiliation, insults from a loved one - it could be anything. And no matter how hard you try to forget it, the memory resists.

There is no need to suppress all unpleasant thoughts. There are times when you need to reflect on what went wrong so you can learn from your mistakes and move on. But when the only effect of your thoughts is to prolong the pain, you need to get rid of them and move on.

Recent research suggests that people can program themselves to forget things on purpose. Here's how to forget what you don't want to remember.

Drive away bad thoughts

Making a conscious decision not to think about bad memories can help erase them forever. When you are reminded of something you don't want to think about, don't let your mind think about it.

Forget all the details associated with memories

To get rid of bad memories, forget about the details, people, and emotions associated with them. Details may include smells, sounds or images associated with an event you do not want to remember. For example, if you don't want to think about a traumatic event, remove the details associated with it from your mind. It could be the song playing in the background or the faces that were looking at you at the time.

Do this daily

Suppressing unpleasant memories is difficult. Any thought that is suppressed tends to ricochet. For example, if you want to block the emotions associated with a car accident, your brain looks for any thought about it to block it. This makes it, so to speak, more accessible. That is, when you don’t block it, the thought rushes back and again haunts you. Thus, you need to block memories on a daily basis. You need to regularly push them out of your consciousness.

Don't focus too much on blocking thoughts

Blocked thoughts tend to come to life faster and more strongly when you give them too much meaning and attention. Recognize the fact that suppressing thoughts is very difficult, but you must continue to work at it, while trying not to overdo it.

Avoid triggers

Certain images, objects, smells or places may trigger bad memories for you. Remove objects or images that are preventing you from forgetting something you don't want to remember from your mind. Avoid places or meeting people that remind you of your painful past.

Distract your mind

Another strategy you can try is to replace the bad memory with something good. If the thought of a past failure continues to haunt you, try thinking about how you succeeded at something in the past. Don't let bad memories affect your mood. As soon as they wash over you, start thinking about something good.

Associate something positive with a bad memory

Learn to associate negative thoughts with positive ones. It will help you overcome bad feelings. For example, think about your bad moment while enjoying good movie, or do what makes you happy. A positive association will make your negative memory less painful.

Become aware of the memory

Another theory suggests that full awareness of the memory and negative emotions associated with it will help you cope with painful emotions. Feel angry, sad, or hurt. Squeal, scream, cry. Let go of your emotions to reduce their power over you.

Use a release ritual to erase your memory

This is a mental exercise, a kind of ritual to free yourself from negative emotions or memories that have settled in your mind. Write down every detail of the memory that you want to forget. Allow yourself to write openly, knowing that no one will read it. Then you need to burn the sheet of paper. When you see that the paper is on fire, you mentally release the memory. Alternatively, you can also tear or shred the paper into small pieces, this also helps a lot.

Practice mindfulness

Learn to focus on the present moment instead of thinking and worrying about your past, which cannot be changed or predicted in the future. Don't go through your day on autopilot. Notice and pay attention to small parts, sights, smells and sounds. Regular meditation practice will help you to be mindful and appreciate every moment of life.

Live your life to the fullest and create good memories

Always be around people who make you happy. If possible, travel and meet new people. Communicate as much as possible. This will help you form new ones good memories which will naturally make your bad memories disappear.

Don't sit idle

Invent yourself a new hobby or physical activity. Devote yourself to creativity and take part in arts and crafts activities. Spend your energy creating something new, or try yourself as a volunteer. You will be constantly busy and have less time to spend thinking about bad memories.

Talk to someone about it

Talking to a trusted friend or family member can help. Their advice, opinions and similar stories can give you a different perspective on things and help you forget what you don't want to remember.

By following all these tips, you will be able to erase bad memories from your memory and gain complete control over your life.

A memory is not a one-dimensional thought or idea. It is the sum of impressions from specific events in your past. You remember not a point in time, but many sensory details.

For example, if you try to remember a pleasant day spent at the beach as a child, more than just the image of a river will come to mind. You will remember how warm the sand was, the smell of the wind and the taste of the ice cream you bought at the kiosk across the street.

Any of these sensations can become a trigger. When you buy an ice cream that tastes similar to the one from your childhood, you will be transported back to a hot day on a river beach.

Thus, memories are inseparable from context.

2. How to manage memories?

Context is the most important factor for anyone who wants to learn how to manage their memories. After all, with its help you can consolidate a memory. The wider and brighter the context, the more strongly we remember the event.

Let's go back to the memory of a hot day at the beach. It is advisable that you detail, setting, emotions and feelings. Then the context will be formed.

If you remember the easy flow of river water, the warm sand of the coast, the hot asphalt of the path next to your umbrella and the creamy taste of ice cream, the memory of this day will remain very vivid and full for many years. The broader the context, the more varied the experience. This is what we recall when we remember a hot day spent in childhood.

So if we know how to use context to create a memory, can we find a way to erase our memories?

3. How can you erase memories?

A forgetting strategy may be to allow yourself to forget certain details of an event in order to destroy the memory completely.

To test this assumption, scientists conducted a study in which two groups of people took part. They had to learn words from two separate lists while looking at photographs different landscapes to create context for the memory.

One group was told to approach the task very carefully: memorize the first list of words and only then move on to the second. Subjects from the second group were asked to first learn words and then forget them. Then the volunteers had to repeat what they remembered.

The brain activity of the experiment participants was studied using functional MRI. It turned out that the subjects who forgot the learned words had a much lower level of activity in the part of the brain that is responsible for processing images. This group of participants simply let the words and images slip from their minds.

When the brain tries to remember words, facts, images, it is constantly working to create context. When the brain tries to forget something, it initially rejects the context and abstracts itself from it. Therefore, memories are created with difficulty and do not last long.

If we return to the example with the beach, we can say this: in order to forget this day, you would have to specifically try to forget the taste of ice cream and the hot sand under your feet.

4. Is it possible to delete a memory completely?

Does this method always work 100%? Of course not. It’s impossible to say that scientists have discovered a magical way to forget, like in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” We know too little about the brain and do not know how to erase memories.

Forgetting is very useful. We can use it to help us cope with a traumatic experience or painful event. Forgetting is necessary to clear the brain of unnecessary information.

In the experiment, participants remembered and forgot simple things: words and pictures. A real memory consists of dozens of details and sensory impressions, so erasing it is not so easy. But this research is the first step at the beginning of a very intriguing and alluring path.

It looks like we can figure out how to forget unpleasant and unnecessary things. More importantly, we will learn to remember happy Days and moments to last a lifetime.

Every person has had things happen in their life that they don’t want to remember. Numerous betrayals and disappointments, illnesses and deaths of loved ones, complete failure in a career, shame and misunderstanding - you want to throw all this out of your head and never remember it again.

But our brains are designed in such a way that some particularly vivid memories are often negative character, remain and constantly remind of themselves. This can have a negative impact on the present and prevent you from moving on.

In this case, you want to forget the past forever and start thinking about the future. It’s interesting that it’s impossible to predict which memories will fade over time and which ones will torment you for a long time.

Consciously forgetting the past

To get rid of unpleasant memories, it is first important to “ don't get hung up" On this. The more we try to forget something, the more we think about it. Therefore, to get rid of bad memories, you should simply not think about them.

If events are related to certain people and places, it is important to change your place of residence and limit communication with certain people. In other words, it is important to protect yourself from everything that may remind you of the troubles that happened.

If we're talking about about a difficult breakup between lovers, it is important to hide or throw away everything joint photos graphics and gifts. Try not to visit places where spending time together was especially frequent. Don’t think that because of this you will have to limit yourself to such things for the rest of your life.

Restrictions are needed only for the first time, while the memories are still reflected by the aching pain in the chest. Over time, when emotional feelings about this give way to indifference, you can safely take out the hidden things and visit the above public institutions.

When it hurts a lot, we distort memories

How to forget your bad past forever? The answer may be disappointing, but it is impossible. Completely forget yours past life is possible only in case of amnesia, but this option is unlikely to suit adequate person. If memories persist, it may be worth rethinking them to understand what exactly is causing the resentment and bitterness of disappointment.

But in order not to go deeper into a depressive state, it is important to look for positive or neutral moments in these memories, and try to concentrate all possible attention on them. This will allow you to turn unpleasant memories into positive emotions in the future.

Memories are all that remains with us from the past. Two same event different people can remember to the point of the opposite. It all depends on the emotions that a person experiences at the time of the incident.

And if you constantly remember certain things, slightly distorting them, then over time it will seem that the distorted version was actually real. This feature of our brain is worth taking advantage of if you want a certain event to be positive in the future.

Coolness as endurance training

How to forget your negative past forever or turn it into a positive future? To resolve this issue, you can try using composure. That is, mentally experience an exciting situation, but see yourself as an indifferent third party. This is the only way to calmly look at it from the outside and try to reduce the negative aspects that haunt you.

If the experiences are so strong that even mentally thinking about the current incident causes unbearable pain, then you can safely praise yourself. Forcing yourself to relive the memories again is a very important step towards eliminating negativity.

This is a kind of subconscious training to sharpen willpower and perseverance. Over time, grieve at mental experiences will get bored, and the brain will push the exciting situation into the background.

Forgetting unrequited love

All people are capable of experiencing sincere feelings, and many open up to each other in these feelings. Accordingly, any person at least once in his life experienced a sad feeling of betrayal on the part of those people to whom he opened up.

How to forget a past and such an unhappy love? If the emotions were not strong, then the person is almost immediately distracted by extraneous things in the form of work, hobbies and entertainment. Some even manage to build new relationships right away.

But what to do when the attachment to the betrayed person is so strong that there is no desire to move on?

The following steps for removing the “needle” from the heart are more suitable for the female half of the population, although some men can also use them:

• Firstly, you can mope for several days, drown in depression and memories, look at photos together and shed tears over gifts (girls love to strangle toys given by former friends with bitter hugs - after all, they are not to blame for anything);
• Secondly, when you get tired of crying about your own worthlessness and uselessness to anyone, the time will come for especially persistent self-care. Masks, gels, creams, manicures, pedicures, makeup and hairstyles - all this will help you remember who is really the victim of the situation, and who urgently needs a comforting hug. But in order to find a willing chosen one, it is important to look the part.

The bad past doesn't leave you alone

It happens that in the past actions were committed that led to catastrophic consequences in the form of a nervous breakdown, loss of friends or the affection of loved ones. Deeds have already been done, and the past cannot be changed. But how can you forget significant mistakes from your past if they last for long years won't they leave you alone?

It is important to reconsider the situation and understand your mistakes so as not to make them in the future. Then you need to try to change yourself, if this is important for the location of loved ones and important people. At the same time, we must not forget about our own psychological state.

It is not uncommon when, as a result of such mistakes and subconscious changes in oneself better side, self-confidence disappears, and is replaced by numerous complexes.

If in the past there were serious problems in society, then in the future a complex of isolation may remain. This is normal defensive reaction the body - to protect itself from communication so that there is no risk of repeating the mistake.

You can’t reproach yourself too much for your actions. We need to calmly consider the shortcomings that led to negative consequences and carefully replace them with other behavioral traits. You shouldn’t completely give up communicating with people, because man is a social being, and without communication with the public it will be very difficult.