Forgetting, contrary to what many people believe, is not withdrawing from a psychological battlefield having suffered many casualties, as if the natural thing were to retain all the information that one day seemed relevant to us. People evolve, and that means our propensity to evoke certain types of memories or others it does too.
Below we will see clearly why it is good to forget and why it is not a betrayal of our identity from the past.
Among the advantages that you will see below, some are emotional and some are rational This is normal, since memory works in these two areas of our mind.
1. It helps us prioritize in our lives
Forgetting is literally a process of prioritization. Except in cases where there is a neurological disease, what we remember best at a given moment is so because, in one way or another, it has to do with something that matters to us.
Thus, forgetting certain memories “paves the way” for us when it comes to choose between possible options in a decision making process The fact of having forgotten a person allows us not to even worry about how we should relate to them, for example. To understand it better, the human brain only allows us to consciously decide between options that really compete with each other, instead of wasting time discarding elements that are not going to solve anything for us.
Much of the process of overcoming traumas and bad times in general has to do with forgetting. This, however, It doesn’t mean we’re fooling ourselves, as could be assumed from pessimism. The truth is that, whatever we do, we never have a panoramic view of the events, ours is always a local perspective. This can be happy at times, or sad at others, but neither case fits better with reality because it is sad or happy.
Our options, then, are to be able to opt for a more positive way of life or another marked by unhappiness: in both, our vision of things will be biased. That is why forgetting negative aspects of the past is not a bad thing, quite the opposite. It allows us to occupy our minds in experiences that, if we have the ability to immerse ourselves in them, we will be able to direct our subjectivity towards something that helps us move forward.
3. Forgetting makes us more creative
When we forget, we don’t just “delete” information from our brain; What actually happens is that we transform it. In fact, every time this phenomenon occurs, part of that information that we had stored disintegrates from the rest and joins other memories or ideas.
The result is that, although certain memories cease to exist as they did before, new ones appear that are influenced by the previous ones. Thus our mental life is enriched and has more ingredients to work with since it does not work from “hermetic” categories linked to specific memories linked only to a specific context.
This advantage of forgetting is closely related to the previous one, and also has to do with Emotional Intelligence. Forgetting all the psychological pain that certain situations caused us in the past not only prevents us from discomfort, but also helps us distance ourselves from that type of content and evaluate in a more rational way what happened to us and the conclusion we can draw from it.
To understand it better, we can take into account the way in which the death of a family member influences us. At first, stress and sadness cause our entire reality to change, but as that wound closes, what remains is what is useful for us to learn and that we can apply to the rest of our lives: that it is important to value the moments together, that we are all human, etc. That would not happen if our emotions linked to that experience were constantly blocking any form of reasoning.
5. It can be useful to remember better
As we have seen, memory is a selective process That is why eliminating (or, rather, “dissolving”) memories helps us remember things more quickly. Because? Because it eliminates distractions or elements that may resemble that memory that we are really trying to recover.
For example, if we have read the name of two different people who have a similar surname, forgetting the one that has to do with the least relevant one allows us to make fewer errors when retrieving information about the other.
If our memory capacity allowed us to remember almost everything that happens to us, we would be very inflexible when it comes to responding to novel problems. The reason is that our record of memories would be so extensive that our attention would be oriented to that mental file, to look for what is relevant in it instead of making us focus on the problem in front of us.
The result would be that doubts would paralyze us in a way that would keep our ability to respond at bay. More information does not equal knowing how to use it well, and therefore, the more efficient we are in eliminating parts of information, the better.
