How many times a week you feel crossed? Someone honked you; your boss is picky; you got an unfriendly reminder that your lab bill is due. Maybe your mother-in-law is a pain, or you didn’t get that promotion — and instead spent the Wednesday morning chewing a nasty email.
You get it, I know. Life happens; we get into trouble, bad things of all shapes and sizes show up in our daily errands. But while some of them only last a couple of hours, a particular class of misfortunes seems to linger longer, demanding a good chunk of our mental energy and disposition.
Unresolved bad memories are a cancer. They show up in your head when you least expect them, spoiling a family dinner and an important business meeting alike. Before you know it, your vibe has shifted completely, and the objective reality can do little to bring you back.
I recently became convinced that random unpleasant memories were hijacking my mental state. I had become a depressed, grumpy, and neurasthenic person, and my own company was bringing me no joy. That’s when I started this daily reflection process to understand why I chose to hold on to unpleasant memories. More importantly, I wanted to learn how I could systematically eliminate those clinging thoughts, step by step.
There is an extensive literature in philosophy, neuroscience, and biology that has studied this. While I claim no scientific method here, I spent a lot of time thinking on the subject and came up with seven key steps to appease bad memories.
Step 1:Block
When one of those nasty events take place, I sometimes find myself obsessively thinking about it. I cannot stop replaying the scene in my head, in an almost masochist fashion. My outrage kicks in, and there is nothing left to do but think, rethink, think again and sleep on it.
Believe me, I get it that you want to think it out, but the first thing you need to do is develop an ability to stop thinking about “that” once “that” comes in. When you are in an obsessive loop, there is little chance of emerging from it with constructive ideas, and instead, you will likely feel more and more crossed.
When you block the obsessive loop, you give your mind the break it will need to engage in far more complex processes down the line, and while it is not easy to do it, if you persist, you will prevail.
Try giving yourself a certain amount of time to obsess and, after that, just keep insistently telling your head to “don’t think about it.” It will be annoying, but trust me when I say you will run out of fuel to keep on the internal struggle — and that is when the thought will start coming back less and less frequently.
Step 2:Forget
Now that you have done the annoying blocking work, step 2 will come progressively — and naturally. With time and persistent blocking, you will soon forget the deed. Forgetting means you don’t think proactively about it — it’s dead and gone.
If someone brings it up, you might remember it still, and that might feel unpleasant. Should that happen, don’t stop at the forgetting step and proceed with the journey below.
Step 3:Understand
So let’s say you were going about your life, forgetful of that dreadful incident, but then someone or something made you think about it. The stinging uncomfortable sensation came back, and you want to get past it.
It’s time now to start working on the next step: understanding. Try to see beyond the anger and instead think about why it happened. If someone did something to you, make an effort to see their motives — were they trying to harm you? Perhaps they are naturally reckless and inconsiderate? Or maybe they thought hurting you was absolutely necessary to reach their own goals? If there wasn’t a particular person that crossed you, searching for reasons is also a worthwhile exercise: was it just bad luck? Did you mismanage any risk? Maybe this is a result of a behavioral pattern you have been repeating in your life?
I heard multiple times that searching for reasons is useless, but I think there is a place for that in a broader healing process. Pointing potential causes helps us to understand what happened, which gets us ready for the next step of recovery.
Step 4:Forgive
I have long admired people that, either through faith, rationalization, or witchcraft, know how to forgive. In my personal experience, forgiveness is the state where we stop the blame game. The deed itself may still hurt, but we have abdicated the power to find things and people guilty.
Forgiveness is perhaps the most challenging step of my 7-step process, and I still have things in my heart that I honestly don’t forgive. I wish there was a manual to breakdown how to forgive. In my experience, after the Understanding piece is done, forgiveness has come with time and distance. It may be faster for some things and a long road for others, but once it’s done, I feel the final 3 steps are almost straight-forward.
Step 5:Accept
I realized that I feel at peace with things when I just stop asking the question “why this happened to me”? When painful events become a neutral part of my story — much like the seasons of the year — I no longer feel pain even when I’m reminded of them. Those things linger there, as ordinarily as anything else.
For a good 5 years, the memory of my grandfather’s passing hunted me. I was furious about his cancer, I hated his doctors for not saving him, I hated myself for not being there when he was sent to the ICU. Little by little, I arrived at the obvious conclusion that he lived a long and accomplished life and that, at the age of 82, even the common flu could have killed him. I understood that this was a natural process, and I forgave all the people I found ‘guilty’ — including mother-nature herself. Acceptance followed soon after, without any active effort on my part. And when my mom brought grandpa up one day, the only thing I felt was happiness.
Accepting happens, believe me. And if you’ve got there, it is time to reframe this bad experience even more.
Step 6:Gratitude
I read so much about gratitude these days, as everybody seems to be convinced that this is the utmost remedy for everything. While I kind of believe that, I find it hard to be grateful for something when I am still mad, unforgiving, or unaccepting about it. But once those stages are conquered, I have more mental space to appreciate what I learned from the bad experience or how it helped me change in one way or another.
Honestly, if you look back into your life, I think you will find you grew more from the lows than from the highs. Highs are incredible, but they keep you in your comfort zone. On the other hand, disappointment usually triggers creativity, deep reflection, and, ultimately, wisdom.
If you learn to feel grateful for that ‘horrible thing,’ you will find peace of mind, and this will seem like the end of your ‘get over’ process. I still think, though, you have one last stage to unlock.
Step 7:Share
Human beings are, in general, selfish creatures. Even the most generous of us have to make conscient efforts to put other things before ourselves. Sometimes, though, I think people experience this ‘sharing’ feeling. When we share, we joyfully embrace how we cohabit this life with other beings.
I know this sounds a bit vague, but think about it this way: if you see an elephant on the savanna, you wouldn’t be upset by his walking. I bet you would be grateful for bearing witness to it and feel awed by the power of nature. This is sharing. It’s a mix of humility, gratitude, and kindness.
Once you learn to be grateful for something, you realize that life is not your place exclusively. ‘Bad’ things transit through this collective called ‘life’ because maybe they are suitable for something else, or somebody else. This consciousness is the state of sharing, and when you get there, I am convinced you got over whatever that ‘bad thing’ was. You now generously embrace the randomness of life and learn to appreciate the good and not be so thrown off by the flip side of the coin. Well, at least until they cross you again ;).
***
It is difficult to get over difficult things. They are complicated, nasty, painful, and they have a way to our minds. This seven-step process is not always linear, in my experience, and sometimes you can forgive before you understand, accept before you forgive. Hopefully, by reading this, you can start your get-over-it journey.
Just remember not to cynically ‘shake off’ what is not leaving you quickly. Whatever it is, big or small, I suggest you treat any ‘get-over-it’ as a process and not as a magic trick.
