08/06/2025
Did you ever want to forget a painful experience, event or even a person in your life? Think of your favorite memory and a rush of things probably come through your mind: where it happened, how old you were, who you were with. These things are referred to as “context.” All those same things (context) are exactly how you’re also able to delete things, feelings, experiences, people you DO NOT want to remember and, especially, feel!
Scientists have shown in studies the way that those kinds of context help support the memories in our minds. Each of them appear as a “knot” of sights, sounds and smells as well as stories, which together create context. Alternatively, using “context” is also a proven way of getting rid of them and literally deleting things/people/experiences that you’d rather forget! We can intentionally forget experiences and feelings if we just change the context that we think about them in, by substituting negative associations with the same “knots” of sights, sounds, smells and stories we tell ourselves. It is actually brain washing yourself. You can use this to both remember or forget things. The more you utilize this method to either enhance your memory or to delete painful memories, the better you will get at it.