When someone is suffering, we often tell them to either forgive or forget. While this advice may seem reasonable, it can also be deeply frustrating because we often don't know how to actually do it. How do you truly forget or forgive? Few can explain the actual process of forgiveness or forgetfulness and how to achieve it.
Perhaps no one can teach us this because it's not simple, and sometimes it takes a lot of time and effort to figure out how to move on. The process of forgiveness or forgetfulness may be unique for each person and each situation. It’s an evolving journey, and it's up to us to develop a strategy that makes sense for whatever we’re dealing with.
So, what is the difference between forgiving and forgetting?
To forget means to stop remembering something, like when you don’t think about it anymore. To forgive means to stop being angry or upset with someone for something they did wrong and to let go of any bad feelings toward them.
You can forget without forgiving, and you can forgive without forgetting. You can also do both—forget and forgive. However, each of these scenarios creates different pathways in your brain, follows different processes, and has different requirements.
Forgetting is mainly about your mind; forgiving is mainly about your heart. Forgetting involves closing yourself off to something; forgiving is about opening up and expanding further.
In simple terms, when you forget, you basically take the "painful content" and put it behind a closed door somewhere deep in your unconscious mind. Forgetting is just hiding the information from your conscious mind in the back memory storage of your unconscious.
You can convince yourself not to be affected by it anymore. You might not even feel the pain anymore. This is how numbing works, and it’s an important process! You mentally hide information from yourself, mainly to avoid feeling the pain. We all do this to some extent. Many things happen during the day that you simply forget, either because your brain has decided they are useless or because it’s scared to feel the real emotions behind that data, thought, or knowledge.
If your brain doesn't know how to efficiently and coherently process complex knowledge, situations, events, or trauma, it’s safer for your nervous system to forget. It’s better to hide the data or neural networks that cause suffering.
So, you forget. And you should actually thank your brain for its ability to master the process of forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness is one of the key elements in trauma formation. This is why we often don’t properly remember, or might even have complete blackouts from, the most traumatic experiences in our lives. If we truly remembered every hurt and pain we experienced, we would most likely go crazy.
Our system isn’t yet ready for that. Our brain is not yet efficient and mature enough to remember everything safely. We usually don’t have the emotional wisdom and capacity to remember most of what we’ve experienced until now.
People who go through intense traumatic experiences but fail to forget some parts of them might suffer greatly. If they remember something they don’t have the tools to consciously process, digest, and integrate into their mental and emotional system, they might suffer or even develop various neurological disorders. Accessing information that can’t be easily integrated into conscious awareness can create distortions and confusion.
Your mind might become very unsettled or anxious, and your heart might suffer greatly from a range of emotions. Trauma protects your mind and heart, storing everything somewhere but usually hiding it from you. Forgetting helps you move on. Your recovery and healing process from a traumatic experience might be even more painful and complicated if the trauma mechanisms don’t work and you remember everything.
So, you should thank your brain for its ability to forget. And you should never shame anyone for forgetting something. Their brain has decided that this is the safest way for them to be right now. There’s nothing wrong with it. They will remember when they have the space and tools to do so safely and with care. We should never push people to remember things they aren’t ready to feel and reintegrate into their conscious awareness.
If they forget, it’s most likely because something was traumatic to them, and remembering it might be deeply retraumatizing. If they don’t know how to deal with the re-emergence of trauma in their nervous system, remembering will cause them deep suffering.
If you want to remember, you need to heal your heart and change some deep brain circuits first. You need to learn how to forgive for real before you can remember it all. If you remember but still don’t know how to forgive, what’s the point of remembering?
If you can’t forgive and you can’t forget either, you might unconsciously seek some form of revenge. There might be a part of you that wants the other person to suffer as you did. You’ll want to find inner peace again and make things fair. This can be very dangerous. You can destroy your own soul when driven by the power of revenge.
In this case, it’s better to forget. It’s better to be an innocent fool with a healthy mind and heart than a spiritual tyrant who remembers everything.
You’re better off forgetting if you don’t yet know how to forgive.
But if you do remember, you have no choice but to learn how to forgive for real.
And this is hard. It can be very hard.
Forgiveness is slower, more complex, and more cyclical. To forgive, you need to open your heart to fully feel again, to see, understand, and comprehend the complexity of different perspectives. Your heart needs to be held in presence and compassion to heal and regenerate. Your heart needs to be pure and open to forgive.
Your heart needs tremendous courage not to be corrupted by the pain it feels when you remember.
Forgiveness is about opening the heart. It’s about unconditional acceptance of what is. It’s about gratitude, grace, and bliss. It’s about recognizing the perfection of everything as it is and was, even if it still hurts. It’s about seeing the purity and kindness in everyone’s heart, no matter what. It’s about understanding that we all get stuck in our own wounds and traumas from time to time. We all suffer about something at some point, and we all unconsciously cause others to suffer.
Forgetfulness is just a brain trick to be more efficient and happy. Forgiveness takes real effort, a deep desire to transform, and to expand our consciousness even more. To forgive, you need to expand and include something that hurts as a part of yourself. To forgive is to know how to welcome your own pain with love, unconditional acceptance, and compassion.
Forgiveness is about self-love.
It’s about expanding yourself and continuing to love it no matter what. It’s about seeing the truth and feeling deep gratitude and bliss, not resentment and suffering. The alchemy of forgiveness is about knowing how to transform deep pain and suffering into pure love and joy.
Forgiveness is about your consciousness. When you forget, you fragment your consciousness in a way. When you forgive, you reintegrate the parts of your soul into a coherent whole again. When you truly forgive, everything will start to make much more sense. Your mind will be happy and efficient again, and your heart will be innocent and eager to find more things to remember and fully forgive.
This is where the conscious path of evolution becomes a real pleasure and fun. Being conscious isn’t about always being in a high-vibe zen universe. It’s about knowing how to coherently and safely open our hearts to transmute deep suffering into compassionate self-awareness.
Sometimes, when we become more conscious, we might remember things we wish we didn’t. But that’s part of the journey. The things you’ve hidden from your consciousness might be divine, good, bad, or very ugly. It’s not always love and light that you find and feel when you become more conscious and aware of yourself. Yet, you must still learn how to transform it into something coherent and meaningful for you and your consciousness. Even if it hurts, you must know how to forgive if you want to remember even more.
Before becoming fully conscious and awake, learn how to truly accept and fully forgive what you’ve already forgotten. It’s advice for your own safety and well-being if you don’t want your own mind to traumatize you even more at some point.
Awareness is about the skillful mastery of the heart, not about empty, meaningless remembering or awakening of your corrupted mind.
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