I struggle with letting go of things. Distressing situations, that occurred 40 years ago and more, still regularly pop into my mind and stress me out. I don’t seem to be able to move past them and forget them. Even small irrelevant things annoy me and get me worked up. How can I either forget them or stop them raising my blood pressure? I seem to continually be stressing about insignificant things that I can’t change anyway. Can you suggest some techniques to move on and lead a calmer life?
Eleanor says: Since you said a lot of these are small or insignificant upon reflection, I’ll assume we’re not talking about big traumas, or the kinds of insults a person shouldn’t aspire to forget. I assume they’re the kinds of sour memories we all have: bad luck, bad slights. Being yanked backwards through time to those hurtful memories can be so unpleasant. Not just for us, but for the people around us; it can keep us psychically stuck in old distress, each new event seen as a trace outline of the past.
So why do we keep going back?
One possibility is that we feel not enough has changed. Time might have passed, but in the respects that matter, we still feel as though we’re right there. Still scared in the same ways those situations made us feel, still vulnerable to those same stressors, even uninsured against the same mistakes. If you feel as though a lot has changed since an indignity, either in you or in your circumstances, the memory feels more like a postcard from somewhere distant. But if you feel the same in the ways that matter, an upsetting thing from the past can still seem threatening insofar as that version of us persists today.
Or maybe we go back to these memories because there’s some unanswered question we keep trying to solve. Why did I say that? Why did they do that? If I’d done that differently, would this have changed?
Maybe, more rarely, we go back because we’re bored. Sometimes if present-day life doesn’t quite feel stimulating or agential enough we can go back to conflicts or hard choices from the past, because even though they were unpleasant, they somehow feel more real.
Therapy can help figure out which it is for you. When the distressing thought comes knocking, why does it seem worth opening the door? That would really help you tailor your strategies. The calm you’ll need if you’re trying to solve a question may not be the calm you need if you still feel vulnerable in those same ways.
Well-meaning people might say you need closure, a way to tell a coherent story. Closure is great if you can get it, but I’m not convinced it’s essential. My worry is that hunting for narratively satisfying ways to transmute bad memories ultimately ransoms our ability to move on to our ability to make sense of events. Coherence may be genuinely beyond our reach. Bad luck doesn’t make sense. People don’t always have a “why”, much less one we can accept as an explanation. Our trials are not always an Act 1 to which our later life can be the satisfying Act 3.
I think – at least sometimes – it’s less “I have to get closure” and more “I have to see this as past; over”.
On good advice, I once went back to some of my haunted places and saw how tall the trees had grown, how the buildings were gone. The world I kept going back to in my head quite literally does not exist. Other people write the bad things down and tear them up, have a little funeral, set them on fire (safely).
As you try to figure out what is captivating about these memories, it might help to try seeing them in past tense too. Not solved, just over – not a source of new pain, not part of a pattern; an echo of hurts gone by.
