8 years ago
5
Would you purge bad memories from your brain if you could?
Imagine you’re the manager of a café. It stays open late and the neighbourhood has gone quiet by the time you lock the doors. You put the evening’s earnings into a bank bag, tuck that into your backpack, and head home. It’s a short walk through a poorly lit park. And there, next to the pond, you realise you’ve been hearing footsteps behind you. Before you can turn around, a man sprints up and stabs you in the stomach. When you fall to the ground, he kicks you, grabs your backpack, and runs off. Fortunately a bystander calls an ambulance which takes you, bleeding and shaken, to the nearest hospital.
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Nope. Learning from my mistakes makes me a better person.
Exactly. Then again, I don't know... I guess there are certain memories that may be better off forever forgotten, i.e. witnessing a murder, any sort of rape, or generally terrible memories that take years of therapy to get over... I guess there are certain things that are better off never being remembered. This is a tough one for sure.
Thankfully, I have not had an experience that was so bad that I would rather forget it than learn from it. Or, if I did, I blanked it out.
Being beaten bloody by my stepdad? Nope. Made me be a better father to my kids.
The guy who molested me when I was a kid? Nope. If nothing else, it made me able to understand people who had it far worse than me.
Watching my father beat my mom so bad that he put her in the hospital several times? Nope. It made me a better husband and person.
Being busted for weed and having my life turned upside down? Nope. It made me look at our system and caused me to get educated and made me the proud Progressive that I am today, as opposed to the clueless Repubtard I was up until then.
My wife cheating on me and leaving me for a year? Nope. It made me look at my actions and get sober. My kids are 26 and 27 and can not remember ever seeing me drunk and being a fucking asshole.
Those are pretty much the worst memories that I have, and I learned from all of them.
Me, no. We pass this way just once. Just once and we step no more on this path.
I can understand the benefit for people who suffer a terrible trauma, but I wouldn't want to block out anything I've experienced. Those memories helped make me who I am today, good or bad.