I’m not a fan of “forgive and forget.”
I’m more a “remember and recover” kind of guy.
Trauma does a real number on our memory.
Many trauma survivors experience their memories as fragmented.
Many survivors describe big chunks of their life that are just “missing”— and many are surprised to learn that this isn’t just how it is for everyone.
Many survivors have been sufficiently gaslit by either our abusers and bullies, or the culture in general, that we’re not at all confident our memory represents reality.
Entire books have been written about what are called the “Memory Wars”— very public disagreements between mental health professionals in decades past about how memory, especially traumatic memory, works.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of therapists out there who aren’t especially well trained on how to work with trauma memories or the psychological defenses they activate.
All of which can leave survivors feeling hopeless— and kind of haunted by our memories.
The “let the past go” crowd tends to lean into “forgive and forget” as a comprehensive recovery strategy.
I’m here to tell you “forgive and forget” isn’t a strategy.
You, as a trauma survivor, get to choose what if any role “forgiveness” is going to play in your trauma recovery.
(I personally think any discussion of “forgiveness” in trauma recovery should begin with and focus on self-forgiveness— but you do you.)
But “forget?”
In my experience, there’s no real “forgetting” some of the things that have happened to us— nor should there be.
We can’t really “forget” those memories— even if we’ve dissociated them at this moment.
What we CAN do is change our relationship to those memories.
What we CAN do is change what those memories MEAN to us, our worth, our story, our future.
That’s what trauma recovery, at least my version of it, is all about: not pushing away or obliterating our awareness of what happened to us, but actually processing it. Actually coming to terms with it.
Actually relating to those memories in ways that are not toxic to us.
We can’t do that work if our goal is to “forget,” whether or not “forgiveness” ever entered into the equation.
“Forgive and forget” sounds nice.
But in my experience, “remember and recover” is how we build a life worth living.
Don’t get seduced by the bypass.
This is very much a “the only way out is through” situation.
