How Do You Handle Unwanted Memories?

Summary: To handle unwanted memories in a manner that helps your mental health, you identify them, accept them, and then process them in a way that changes them from something you want to avoid to something that help you learn and grow.

Key Points:

• To handle unwanted memories, experts recommend not avoiding them.
• In order to not avoid them in a way that reduces emotional distress, the best approach is to talk through them, which mental health experts call processing them.
• If your memories are very disturbing and associated with significant past trauma, the most effective way to process them is with a skilled, compassionate psychotherapist or counselor with specific training in techniques that target unwanted memories.

When You Handle Unwanted Memories, Having a Plan to Process Them is Essential

There are important differences in how we deal with memories from the past that persist – especially memories we don’t like or want.  For instance, avoiding memories – which mental health professionals call avoidance – and repressing memories is not the best choice, and can lead to negative consequences in the long run. Avoidance and repression do not really leave your memories in the past and allow you to move on: those approaches simply set them aside. They’re there, waiting to surprise and possibly upset you at any point in the future.

In some cases, people deal with unwanted memories by suppressing them and denying they’re even there – but that approach can backfire. If you fail to process these memories in a healthy and productive manner, ignoring them or pretending they’re not there can lead to increased risk of mental health disorders such as anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, or alcohol/substance misuse.

One way to handle memories unwanted memories without denying or suppressing them is by compartmentalizing them. This means you put them away temporarily, to process or handle them appropriately – with professional support, for instance – at a later date. This is different than repressing or avoiding them. With compartmentalization, you identify them and commit – to yourself – to facing them later, in order to process them in a manner that benefits your overall mental health and wellbeing.

However, compartmentalization without returning for processing is not a healthy long-term strategy.

Think of it this way:

Avoidance/Repression:

This approach means, basically “Run Away!” With regards to your memories and experiences, this is almost never a good choice. Avoidance and repression typically do not involve a plan for healthy processing at a later date.

Compartmentalization:

In contrast, this approach basically means you prioritize the time and energy you have. With regards to difficult memories, you don’t always have the time and energy – or skills – to process the memories right then. Therefore, you acknowledge that, set them aside, handle what’s in front of you, and circle back later to process the memory/memories. Compartmentalization without returning to process a memory is not a good long-term approach: for a positive outcome, there has  to be a second step to compartmentalization: processing.

One important thing to remember is that your memories never really go away. As we age, we may lose them due to various factors – that’s a fact of old age. But if you’re an early- or mid-life adult, you can’t count on that: you have to deal with your memories somehow, or you’ll create problems for yourself.

How Memory Works

Disclaimer: what follows is a simplified explanation. Researchers spend decades attempting to understand the precise details of how memory works and how different types of memory form. This brief overview gives you a workable idea so you can understand what’s happening when you process your unwanted memories.

Research shows we store memories in three areas of our brains: the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex. The exact process of how memories are formed depends on several factors. For instance, short-term memories and long-term memories differ and involve different neural processes, and in many cases, memory formation is related things the memory is associated with, such as time, place, and the five senses.

We should clear something up here, too. Most people don’t quite understand how short their short-term memory actually is. By definition, short-term memory involves the ability to keep immediately important information in the forefront of your brain for about 30 seconds – that’s it. If you’re talking about yesterday, or even this morning, you’re talking about long-term memory. But if you’re involved in a task – like driving or doing a work assignment – your short-term memory is what allows you to keep all the right balls in the air, ready to retrieve right away, so you can accomplish the task.

Here’s a helpful way to think about the differences:

When you remember/forget why you walked into a room, that’s your short-term either working well or working poorly.

When you remember/forget what you had for lunch yesterday – or how you spent last weekend – that’s your long-term memory either working well or working poorly.

Which means the memories we’re really talking about here are long-term memories. The associations we mention above are related to the emotions the memory may evoke. This brings up another component of memory/memories: they’re stored in various networks with unique sets of neural connections, with each memory having its own specific set of connections associated with those networks. As opposed to sitting alone in a single location in the brain, like a memento on a shelf, they’re part of a specific neurological pathway and set of connections, which is why they’re connected to things like sights, sounds, and emotions.

Processing Unwanted Memories With Professional Support

Depending on the memory, how to process or intentionally forget a memory can vary. However, we recommend seeking a healthy approach, i.e. not repressing or avoiding them, but processing them in a way that helps your overall emotional and psychological well-being. At times, this may involve professional support, depending on how the memory affects your day-to-day life.

Evidence-based approaches to processing unwanted memories include eye movement desensitization and retraining (EMDR) and techniques that focus on the connection between memories and the body, called somatic therapies.

EMDR:

EMDR is a technique that involves a therapist and patient identify memories that cause distress the patient wants to process. The therapist asks the patient to hold aspects of the memory in their mind as the patient uses their eyes to track hand movements back and forth across the patient’s field of vision. This process results in a transformation of the memories. Patients report once painful memories become memories they accept and experience without pain or disruption, which means they’ve processed those memories in a healthy way, thanks to EMDR.

Somatic Therapies:

Somatic therapies, instead of focusing on thoughts, focus on physical sensations associated with memories. For instance, using body awareness, a therapist and patient call up an unwanted memory, identify any physical tension that occurs in response to the memory, and work on intentionally relaxing that area of the body. This helps soothe and calm patients, and alleviate the discomfort associated with the memory. An approach called grounding is similar: when an unwanted memory is present, the patient, with the help of the therapist, focuses on a feeling of connecting to the earth. This direct experience of feeling the feet connected to the ground and the body connected to the earth can help soothe and calm the patient, which mitigates the discomfort associated with the memory.

Those are two of the ways you can manage unwanted memories with professional support. However, support may not always be close at hand. That’s why it’s also important to understand how to manage these memories yourself, until you can meet with a mental health professional.

Processing Unwanted Memories Yourself: Compartmentalization, Acknowledgement, Reframing

If you don’t have immediate access to professional support, you can ease the discomfort of unwanted memories by compartmentalizing, acknowledging, and reframing those thoughts and memories.

As we mention above, compartmentalization means setting a memory aside until you can process it in a healthy way. Compartmentalizing is not repressing, suppressing, or avoiding, unless you never return to the memory to process it.

When you return to the memory, you can change its emotional impact by reframing it. Let’s say you’ve acknowledged and compartmentalized a memory. When you’re ready for the next step, it’s possible to recognize the memory is hard to face and causes you significant distress while simultaneously understanding that you can use it to learn and move forward. Sometimes, acknowledgment can give you power of the memory, rather than the memory having unrestricted power of your emotional state and overall sense of wellbeing.

Reframing takes processing the memory one step further. It transforms the memory into something you don’t need to avoid, but rather something that gives you deeper insight into who you are and how you relate to the world. It can help you integrate all the facets of your past experience and help you understand how everything connects.

You can use compartmentalization, acknowledgement, and reframing on your own, but you may have more success with external support. With regards to memories that cause distressing emotions every time, we encourage you to seek professional support. In some cases, you may need another person, ideally an experienced, compassionate professional, to create a physically and emotionally safe environment to reframe your unwanted memories.

The Importance of Seeking Support

When you have a tough time managing memories yourself, external validation can make all the difference. It bolsters the self-acknowledgment we refer to above. When someone else says they see and validate the emotion of those memories, and knows they’re painful for you, it can lift a huge weight from your shoulders. Then, you can work through those memories and get tips on reframing and restructuring them in a way that improves your mental health.

If you have persistent, unwanted memories, evidence shows that if you don’t process them effectively, they will most likely continue to cause problems. You can process some difficult memories by talking them through with friends or family. However, when unwanted memories are overwhelming, such as those associated with past trauma, the most effective way to process them effectively is by engaging in an evidence-based psychotherapeutic technique delivered by a skilled and qualified professional in a safe and controlled environment.