How good are you at forgetting?

Yes, forgetting is a skill.  And it’s just like any other skill – it can be improved with training and practice.  But, day to day, we rarely think of it as a skill worth developing.

Well, think again.

Memory, of course, is forgetting’s polar opposite, and is widely praised as a human skill.  But when was the last time you heard someone declare this New Year’s Resolution: “This year, I’m going to learn how to forget.” 

A new book titled “Memory: Fragments of a Modern History”, and an article published last month in Scientific American, explore the delicate relationship between memory and mental health. It charts our centuries-old love affair with memory and focuses attention on research over the last two decades that challenges the long-held Freudian view that mental health is always improved by remembering.  Indeed, in certain cases, a person might be better off learning to forget. 

The most dramatic examples, of course, deal with violence – veterans returning home from war, women subjected to domestic violence, crimes perpetrated against our fellow man.  In cases like these, some experts insist that learning to forget is the healthier approach.   Both the book and the SA article explain that beginning in the 1990s, neuroscience researchers began to challenge age-old concepts about memory.  This new wave of research led to a fresh approach for dealing with traumatic memories.  And research over the last 20 years appears to support many of these approaches – with experts providing patients with techniques to help them forget. 

Three such techniques include: thought substitution (pre-planning a thought to focus on when the negative memory arrives), memory suppression (learning to block the thought) and activation (taking a specific pre-planned action – say, pressing a button on a computer – when negative thoughts appear; said cognitive psychologist Tracy Tomlinson, who was quoted in the Scientific American article: “Action interferes with recollection”).  Each method has been shown to be effective over time, through repetition and training.

But is forgetting a cop-out?  After all, isn’t it important that we remember the past, both to honor it and grow from it?  Perhaps.  But perhaps not in all cases. Certainly, knowing what’s worth remembering and what’s worth forgetting is important, and calls upon our ethical standing.  But, used judiciously, learning how to forget can probably go a long way to improve a person’s mental health. 

And that might be something worth remembering.