Memory is one of the most important, influencing his whole life. And many people take the problem of developing their memorization skills very seriously. Fortunately, there are a huge number of opportunities today: various trainings, courses, seminars and other training programs. If a person has a need to improve his memory, he can easily find suitable materials. However, much less attention is paid to the problem of forgetting, although its importance is by no means less. Indeed, many of us often have a desire to get rid of some memories, sensations from the past, and simply free our memory from unnecessary information. This is what we decided to talk about.
Among the many designed to improve memory, there are special methods designed for intentional forgetting. Their combination is called aircraft technology. This term itself is rooted in Greek mythology, in which the notorious river Lethe was often mentioned (remember the common expression “to sink into oblivion”). Lethe is the river of oblivion, which was located in the underground possessions of Hades. Dead souls that enter his realm, after drinking the water from Lethe, have forever forgotten that they have ever lived.
So what is the use of aircraft technology and what exactly is it used for? To begin with, it is worth saying that the property of human memory to forget is its integral component, because. thanks to it, mnemonic processes are complete. And many Russian and foreign psychologists have spoken and are talking about this. It is the ability to forget that helps a person to erase from memory something that happened in the past, but has a destructive effect on the psyche and personality in the present, as well as any information that is currently irrelevant. These are the two main reasons why it is recommended to master the techniques of forgetting.
There are two main flight techniques: suppression and removal. Let's consider each of them separately.
suppression
This method is considered precisely as a psychotherapeutic one, i.e. thanks to him, it becomes possible to forget what has a traumatic effect on the psyche. Often, some memories of negative events bother people and pop up in their memory more and more often because of their bright emotional coloring. A person begins to react sharply to this, to be afraid of these memories, and they become stronger. To eliminate these and other possible intrusive thoughts, as a rule, two exercises are used.
"Burning Letter"
Write down on a piece of paper all the memories that make you feel negative emotions. Describe them in detail. Then take this sheet, crumple it and put it in a pre-prepared refractory container. Ignite the crumpled sheet. Watch the flames. And while the leaf burns, imagine how all the memories that disturb you burn with it, and then turn into ashes. As soon as the paper is completely burnt out, spread this ashes into the wind, throwing it out, for example, through a window.
The essence of this exercise is not only that it helps to get rid of unnecessary memories, but also to become their master. It is by having the opportunity to dispose of his memories that a person can get rid of them. It may even be unpleasant to some extent, but the result is worth it, because a person no longer needs to defend himself from annoying thoughts, suppress them, because. he can simply describe them and burn them. And fire, as you know, has always been the best psychotherapist for people: looking at it, people were cleansed of what was psychologically pressing on them, “thrown a heavy burden off their shoulders.” If a person has a vivid imagination, he is able to almost literally imagine how his troubles and misfortunes are burned along with paper, freeing memory from a heavy burden.
"TV"
Sit in a comfortable chair or sofa and assume a comfortable body position. Try to project your negative experiences in detail onto the large television screen created in your imagination. After that, pick up the same imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your "movie". View it as a silent movie. Then gradually make the image blurry and dull. Imagine that it becomes less and less bright and disappears completely.
The most important thing in this exercise is not to rush. No need to try to complete the entire exercise in a couple of minutes. On the contrary, you need the process as detailed as possible. For example, you can imagine turning off the TV after the picture disappears, unplugging the power cord, picking up the TV, holding it up to the window, and throwing it away.
You can also dream up with the film itself: translate the plot from drama to comedy. Simulate the continuation of the situation in a comical way, put a funny melody or a stupid song on the image, imagine that the roles are not played by you, but by one of the comedic actors. Become the director of your memories - so you can manage and control them. If you don't need them, throw them out of your "video library".
Even if "Burning Letter" and "TV" do not completely rid you of memories, you will no longer be afraid of them anyway. And if you are not afraid of them, then they will surely become indifferent to you. And the fact that a person is indifferent, quite rarely disturbs his memory.
Removal
This is the second flight technique. It is intended to a greater extent in order to remove from memory information that has lost its relevance, and which is only mental and emotional garbage. In the removal technique, several exercises can be distinguished.
"Aircraft Rag"
For example, your memory contains unnecessary images (words, people, pictures, data), which, although they do not negatively affect, distract your attention and interfere with concentration, free flow of thoughts, etc. Imagine all this information on a large chalk board. Then imagine how you take a wet rag and erase all those blocks of this information that you do not need. In empty places, new images can form, associated with previous ones or associated with nearby ones. Take the rag again and continue to wash. Do this until nothing appears from scratch. This technique is suitable if there is little information, because you can divide the board into several sectors and clear each of them one by one.
"Images on Film"
There are cases when the amount of information is large and a simple "aircraft rag" may not work. Then you can transform this technique a little. Imagine that all recreated images are displayed on the same board, but only it is covered with an opaque film. Fill all this tape with unnecessary data, and then just pull it off the board, immediately freeing up a lot of space on a new tape stretched over the same board. The presented technique was used at one time by an outstanding Soviet and Russian journalist, professional mnemonist and owner of a phenomenal memory, Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky.
Recording
This is another technique used by S.V. Shereshevsky. He said that it always seemed funny to him that people write down everything they want to remember, because if a person writes down, why should he remember then? He decided that if he would write something down, then he did not need to memorize it. This became one of the laws of forgetting developed by Shereshevsky, which he began to apply whenever it was necessary to forget something not very important: phone numbers, names of people, etc. You can use this trick too. Just note that the more a person writes, the less he uses his memory, and the less he uses his memory, the less trained it is and the less he can remember. Therefore, the less he writes down, the more he will train his memory, and the more he will remember. And it turns out that the recorded information is the information that should not be imprinted in memory, which means that it can be safely forgotten. A very good reception, although for many it seems somewhat paradoxical.
In conclusion, I would like to add that the more you practice forgetting unnecessary information, the faster you will master this skill. After some time, the need to use any technique will disappear by itself, because. You can forget any information and erase memories only with the help of one strong-willed effort, giving your brain the appropriate command.
Don't forget to leave a comment. We will also be interested to know which of the considered forgetting techniques seems to you the most effective.
Most likely, everyone has memories that people would like to forget. A disturbing incident, an embarrassing situation, humiliation, insults from a loved one - it can be anything. And no matter how hard you try to forget it, the memory resists.
No need to suppress all unpleasant thoughts. There are times when you need to reflect on what went wrong so that you can learn from your mistakes and move on. But when the only result of your thoughts is to prolong the pain, you need to get rid of them and move on.
According to recent research, people can program themselves to forget everything on purpose. Here's how to forget what you don't want to remember.
Drive bad thoughts away
A conscious decision not to think about bad memories can help erase them forever. When you are reminded of something you don't want to think about, don't let your mind think about it.
Forget all the details associated with memories
To get rid of bad memories, forget about the details, people, emotions associated with them. Details may include smells, sounds, or images associated with the event that you don't want to remember. For example, if you don't want to think about a traumatic event, put the details of it out of your mind. It could be a song playing in the background, or the faces that were looking at you at the time.
Do it daily
Suppressing bad memories is difficult. Any thought that is suppressed tends to ricochet. For example, if you want to block out the emotions associated with a car accident, your brain looks for any thought about it to block it out. This makes it, so to speak, more accessible. That is, when you do not block it, the thought rushes back, again haunts you. Thus, you need to block memories daily. You need to regularly push them out of your consciousness.
Don't Focus Too Much on Blocking Thoughts
Blocked thoughts tend to come alive faster and stronger when you attach too much importance to them, pay attention to it. Recognize the fact that it is very difficult to suppress thoughts, but you must continue to work on it, while trying not to overdo it.
Avoid Triggers
Certain images, objects, smells, or places can trigger bad memories for you. Throw objects or images that prevent you from forgetting what you don't want to remember from your mind. Avoid places or people that remind you of your painful past.
Distract your mind
Another strategy you can try is to replace a bad memory with a good one. If the thought of past failure continues to haunt you, try thinking about how you succeeded at something in the past. Don't let bad memories affect your mood. As soon as they flood over you, start thinking about something good.
Associate something positive with a bad memory
Learn to associate negative thoughts with positive ones. This will help you overcome bad feelings. For example, think about your bad moment while enjoying a good movie, or doing something that makes you happy. A positive association will make your negative memory less painful.
Become aware of the memory
Another theory suggests that becoming fully aware of the memory and the negative emotions associated with it will help you deal with the painful emotions. Feel angry, sad, or hurt. Scream, scream, cry. Let go of your emotions to lessen their influence on you.
Use the release ritual to erase the memory
This is a mental exercise, a kind of ritual for releasing negative emotions or memories that have settled in your mind. Write down every detail of the memories that you want to forget. Allow yourself to write openly, knowing that no one will read it. Then you need to burn a piece of paper. When you see the paper on fire, you mentally release the memory. In addition, you can also tear or shred the paper into small pieces, this also helps a lot.
Practice Mindfulness
Learn to focus on the present moment instead of thinking and worrying about your past, which cannot be changed or foreseen in the future. Don't live your day on autopilot. Notice and pay attention to small details, sights, smells and sounds. Regular meditation practice will help you be mindful and appreciate every moment of life.
Live your life to the fullest and create good memories
Always be around people who make you happy. If possible, travel and meet new people. Communicate as much as possible. This will help you form new good memories that will naturally make your bad memories disappear.
Don't sit idle
Think of a new hobby or physical activity. Devote yourself to creativity and take part in arts and crafts activities. Spend your energy creating something new, or try your hand at volunteering. You will be constantly busy with business, and you will have less time to spend it thinking about bad memories.
Talk to someone about it
Talking to a friend or family member you trust can help. Their advice, opinions, and similar stories can give you a different perspective on things and help you forget what you don't want to remember.
By following all these tips, you can erase bad memories from your memory and gain complete control over your life.
Instruction
The reason for the obsession of memories of a significant person for us is the incompleteness of the action. You communicated in the past and experienced pleasant moments, but for certain reasons your life paths diverged. But the emotional attachment to the person remained, and therefore thoughts regularly arise about the possibility of resuming relations. You can stop returning past events to memory by completing the action.
Write this person a letter. Let it not reach the addressee. It is important that you be as honest as possible about your feelings in the letter. Write down all your thoughts about how dear this person was to you, how you felt next to him. Tell him in a letter how your life is going now and how it has changed since the breakup. This letter must be written down on paper. During the recording process, you work on your feelings. For a long time they accumulated inside you, but did not find a way out. Now you have set them free.
We tend to idealize people from the past. Grievances and negative character traits are gradually forgotten. Only pleasant moments of communication arise in memory. To destroy the ideal, try to find out about this person through acquaintances or through social networks. It is likely that, having collected information about the object of memories, you will realize that it is far from your ideas. Life goes on and it changes people. Now we are noticeably different from those who were 5-10 years ago. Sometimes it happens that the people with whom we enjoyed talking in our youth become completely uninteresting to us in adulthood.
Focus on your present. The past should not weigh you down, as it has already happened and cannot be returned. Let it be left behind. You are here and now. This attitude is the key to a successful life. The ability to discard the burden of the past days in time gives space for action.
Free your material world from oppressive memories. Get rid of all things that remind you of a person. If you still have his personal belongings, photos, gifts and postcards, collect them in a box and hide them away or send them to the trash. Let the things of the past not disturb your soul.
If the breakup happened recently, try a change of scenery. The first weeks are the hardest to get through. Ask to visit your parents or friends. Take a vacation and go on a little trip. Let new pleasant experiences enter your life. Take a new breath, because life is just beginning. A breakup always opens up new possibilities. It returns to reflections on the meaning of life and development prospects. There is a reason to do a general cleaning in the most inaccessible corners of your personality and get out of there long-forgotten resources.
If it were possible to erase, erase from memory those memories that hurt, leaving, deep in the soul, an indelible mark. Every person has those moments of the past that you want to forget forever. I agree, it is not so easy to do this ... But nothing is impossible!
In addition to the problems of today, most modern people are weighed down by negative memories from the past.
Resentments, fears, hatred, negative events - all this was once in the past, but a person continues to carry it in himself today.
Over time, the details are erased, but the feelings of discomfort remain.
Nothing can be changed, perhaps the offenders are no longer in this world, or such situations can no longer be, but the person continues to remember this with persistence worthy of another use.
And when some situation reminds them of this, they experience these events again and again within themselves.
They constantly think about how to get rid of negative memories, but they cannot do it.
But all this only leads to a waste of time and effort. When your feelings and emotions are wasted.
And by adulthood, this negative experience accumulates, leading to various diseases, problems in life, and the development of phobias.
A person turns into a tourist in life, carrying a load of negative memories from the past in himself.
And the SEAL OF TIME is visible on the faces of such people - wrinkles, an extinct look, tension.
Go outside and you will immediately see such people.
Look at people of advanced age - someone cheerfully walks and smiles, and someone is literally bent in three deaths and barely trudges. And undoubtedly a large contribution to this was made by a load of negative memories from the past.
Look at successful people. All of them have problems too, and there are many more than the average person, but you won't see it on their faces.
Perhaps you yourself carry the burden of the past in yourself, which prevents you from moving on.
Even if now you are a master of sports in martial arts, and at school someone mocked you, you can’t return it
Now you are a different person and why carry the burden of the past. Dump your backpack, and walk forward freely.
What difference does it make what happened yesterday. The main thing is that today, and the best of course is ahead.
If there is still an opportunity to correct the situation, then do it. If not, then just forget it.
But this is where most people have problems.
The fact is that in the life of a modern person there are too few emotions, especially positive ones.
Therefore, he tries to replace them with something - and negative memories just help in this, giving him the opportunity to deal with the offender in his imagination and get moral satisfaction, each time coming up with new ways of revenge.
But you need to get rid of it - if you want to move forward and achieve success in this life.
I offer you a simple but very effective method that will help you find the answer to the question - How to get rid of negative memories.
Take a piece of paper, sit down alone in a calm atmosphere and, so to speak, pour out all your grievances, fears, everything that haunts at the moment. It is necessary to feel them for the last time - most likely you will have tears in your eyes - this is even better.
Write it all down in detail, and then just burn this sheet. Take a piece of paper with your hand and set it on fire from the opposite end and watch your fears and resentments burn in the fire, at the same time imagining the same process within yourself.
If it doesn't work the first time, do it a few times.
And I assure you, with each time the emotional coloring will weaken.
And very soon you will lose interest in your grievances, and over time, the negative experience will dissolve, leaving free space for new impressions and achievements.
And I assure you they will.
Therefore, if you have a load of negative memories, then apply this method on the next day off. Do not think about whether it will help or not. Just DO IT.
And very soon fresh colors will appear in your life!
The past is forgotten, the future is closed, the present is granted
(c) m / f "Kung Fu Panda"
To fully live in the present, the past must be left behind.
You probably yourself understand that it is important to stop dwelling on failures and old problems, regret your mistakes, get angry at past offenders ...
In general, remove everything that pulls you back - and happily move forward ...
Today we will talk about how to stop living in the past.
Looking only to the past is like walking backwards on the road: you can't see anything but your old footprints. The goal may sometimes not be realized just because, in fact, you go to it just out of an old habit, and you yourself have long outgrown it and lost interest in it.
7 practices for not judging yourself for your past life
1. Make the decision to work on how to stop living in the past.
By itself, the "cure" will not happen - you must make a choice: "" and begin to act. It’s good that now you don’t need to “cut the tail in parts”, picking and working through each injury for years.
In the conditions of modern energy, healing takes place in a complex way.
2. Send your past love and forgiveness
Continuing to berate yourself for mistakes, "wrong choices" and actions is a sure way to live in the past all your life.
Just accept that in the past you did what you could, based on your "then" knowledge, capabilities, level of awareness.
Without you, "the former" would not be you now. And in difficult moments in the past, you were very scared or sad you might experience confusion and uncertainty not feel any support.
Reveal to yourself in the past love and sympathy. Just remember yourself in one of the difficult moments and direct it there. the light of your love, caring attention. Say to yourself those words that were so needed at that moment.
Some scold themselves for having voluntarily or unwittingly hurt others; for having made the “wrong” decision at some point in their lives.
Others manage to condemn themselves even for allowing themselves to be mistreated in the past - they did not protect themselves from the offender, they did not leave the tyrant man in time.
3. Heal your pain and injury
It is the old unhealed wounds that stir the soul and make us live in the past. Some are as fresh as if they happened yesterday.
You need to heal yourself. This - base action on the way to an easy and free life.
Especially for this, Alena Starovoitova developed (videos from it supplement this article).
4. Thank the past for wisdom
No matter how difficult the situation was, having passed it, you became better, wiser, stronger.
If any specific traumatic situations from the past are bothering you right now, do the technique "Pearls of Wisdom".
Think and write down a few points - what you this situation has taught, this act, this person, how your life has changed, what you realized and comprehended thanks to that incident.
What you write is the pearls of wisdom. Leave them to yourself, present. And the rest of the burden of that situation gratefully release. You took the most important thing from it.
5 more ways to find a pearl of wisdom in a traumatic event.
5. Forgive people from the past
Always keeping anger at offenders, you will never stop living in the past.
In fact, those people who hurt you "once" are no longer there. You have changed, they have changed. In fact, these are different people.
Those with whom you are angry or offended for the past are no longer them, they are theirs. psychological twins in your mind and memory. And you can always agree with your memory and consciousness.
An important note - if grievances from the past affect relationships with people from your present (family members, friends) - you need to work especially tactfully here, without violating their spiritual space.
In the article, you will learn how to reverse the polarity - move from hatred to love and forgive offenders.
6. Recognize and rewrite old scripts
The scenario is the behavior “on the knurled”, driving on the old rails. He registered in the subconscious and over and over again makes you step on the same rake.
Important such scenarios find and write. For this, there are special exercises. For example, at the master class, Alena suggested that the participants perform a bright creative action that “replaces the picture.” One of the participants performed a ritual: she melted the ice from the refrigerator, like the ice of a relationship.
You can come up with something of your own.
Scenarios are an automaton that clicks somewhere inside and makes you react and act in a pattern over and over again. The traumas of the past cannot simply be erased. But you can work through them consciously. And rewrite inefficient scenarios for more successful ones.
7. Focus on the present!
Just transfer your attention to the present, right at this moment. How are you dressed? What do you want right now? Is your body comfortable? What is your joy now? What do you value in your current life?
You will see how a lot of energy, joy and opportunities in your present!
Increased efficiency, perseverance, attention to detail, knowledge in areas that were previously inaccessible - all this came along with the new wave. And it began at the moment when another blockage of the old energy was cleared…
P.S. And one of those possibilities is to pass. Three whole hours of exciting, bright and useful work on yourself, together with like-minded people and an excellent coach!
If you are looking for a way to stop living in the past, .
