Why Forgive and Remember is Better than Forgive and Forget.

The clichés are buried deeply in our bones, so they must be true, right?

As a psychotherapist I have helped many clients over the years learn the concept of forgive and remember. They often cling to the old paradigm of forgive and forget - I’m sure you know that one, do you? Where you have to pretend something didn’t happen, something that created hurt, violated boundaries, caused harm and resulted in trauma and pain. And forgive the person that did it regardless of how you were affected.

Forgive and forget - it goes well together, the two f sounds, say it on repeat and you almost brainwash yourself into it. Forgive and remember doesn’t roll off the tongue so easy, and it certainly doesn’t have the same rhythmic heartbeat as a jingle on the radio.

The clichés are buried deeply in our bones, so they must be true, right? Wrong.

When I would say to clients, “Always remember what happened to you - forgive, and remember,” their puzzled looks constantly struck me as to how deep the conditioning goes.

“Forgive and remember? Why?”

“If you’re here, in this life, to learn lessons and to grow, how can you grow if you can’t remember what the lesson is?”

I see it sink in.

“Ahh, I suppose that makes sense? But I’ve never heard of it before. Am I really allowed to remember?”

Hearing clients asking me permission to remember something traumatic breaks my heart. And why have we not heard about this before? I’ll say it again for repetitions sake - forgive and remember, forgive and remember. I think I know why it is not ingrained in us. But I could be wrong.

In times of trauma, such as during violence or abuse, which is an extreme example I know, the brain is wired to either submit to the pain and write it to memory OR use all of it’s energy to highlight there is something wrong and escape the moment either physically, mentally or both. The physical escape is preferable, of course. But where it is not possible, mental escape is what happens. We see this often with victims of sexual abuse not remembering what happened to them.

Trauma-Related Dissociation is sometimes described as a ‘mental escape’ when physical escape is not possible, or when a person is so emotionally overwhelmed that they cannot cope any longer. Sometimes dissociation is like ‘switching off’. Some survivors describe it as a way of saying ‘this isn’t happening to me’. These reactions are usually temporary but, in cases of severe or repeated trauma, dissociation may last longer. This can be frightening and difficult to explain to others. [Read more here]

We don’t actually have the capacity to run from violence AND write it to memory. That’s why victims of rape, for example, get mixed up in the details of what happened to them if they do manage to bring their perpetrator to the judicial system. Just as our minds are constantly looking for threats, honed sharply to pick up danger, we also shut down parts of our brain when we are terrified. It’s called ‘Trauma Related Disassociation.”

Trauma-related dissociative symptoms, distinct from PTSD and childhood trauma, can be estimated on the basis of (brain) network connectivity. Furthermore, between-network brain connectivity may provide an unbiased estimate of symptom severity, paving the way for more objective, clinically useful biomarkers of dissociation and advancing our understanding of its neural mechanisms. [read more here.]

What is more troubling, is that a person can be brainwashed after-the-fact to think that what they believe happened never actually happened. This has all sorts of horrific connotations, and I see it happening in our culture right now.

Warnings about the reliability of a forgotten traumatic event that is later recalled—known formally as a delayed memory—have been endorsed by leading mental health organisations such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The skepticism is based on a body of research showing that memory is unreliable and that simple manipulations in the lab can make people believe they had an experience that never happened. [Read more here]

So we are wired, as well as told, to forgive and forget. Forgive and forget is pummelled into us through our culture, an ear-worm from a non-existent advertising jingle, making us believe that we must move on and get on with it.

This adage only encourages us to let bullies get away with it. And it is not okay.

It’s been 4 years since we were told to lock ourselves down. Since we had fear pumped into us through the media every night. I made this video on March 11th.

So where are we, 4 years after the hunger games numbers appearing every night on the 6pm news for over a year?

The bullies are trying to convince us that the plandemic never happened. They’re depending on the forgive and forget paradigm. It’s gaslighting - they are counting on our brains not having written what they did to us, to memory. Unfortunately for them, we have phones with videos, we have social media, we have clips going around the internet catching them on camera doing the very things that they now claim they did not do.

777 comments and 1.4 Million views - click here to see it for yourselves. How can they deny? Yet these people still claim that it wasn’t their fault, that they weren’t responsible, that there was a “they” that told them what to do…

I’m sure you can find many many more examples. I want to focus back to forgive and remember. How does it work? If you actually do remember what happened, then how could you ever forgive anyone for what they did?

Hang on a minute - I never said forgive just anyone. I said forgive, yes. But who exactly to forgive?

You forgive yourself. First and foremost..

Forgive yourself for walking down a blind alleyway where you ended up getting hurt. Forgive yourself for not knowing any better at the time.
Forgive yourself for being so hard on yourself because you “should have known”. You didn’t know. You didn’t fathom the possibility of what could actually be going on. Of what was behind it. Mistakes were not made.

Forgive yourself for thinking the best of humanity, for thinking that actual human beings could do this to you, whatever it was. I currently feel that the majority of them are not actual human beings, but that’s for another day.

Forgive yourself because your disbelief in what was happening to you stopped you from processing the fact that you should have said no, that you should have walked away.

You must forgive yourself.

Forgive the other?

Eventually perhaps… particularly if the other is a loved one or a family member. But you must forgive yourself to start the process of forgiving them. Yes, sometimes your forgiveness is not warranted. You can give it all to God to take care of, and walk away. Remember what happened, forgive yourself, then let go of the emotion around it. That’s your inner work, the rest will look after itself.

There are ways to work with this at any level. In the context of this post, you can remember what happened, grieve your loss of faith in the system, then choose not to partake of it anymore. Take all of the energy you put into that system and walk away. Honour your own grief, because it is a loss, and forgive yourself for falling for it.

BUT ALWAYS REMEMBER.

Forgive yourself and remember so you can stop yourself getting caught up in that same system again, whether it be a family system, a corporation, a system of governance, or a health care system. Know that this is what they are, that this is what they do. And they do not care about you. Ahh. There’s the grief. All of us on the side of truth went through grief - and the 5 stages being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, according to Kubler-Ross. I feel ‘they’ are taking advantage of the acceptance stage, and your hopeful human heart, always thinking the best of people, always believing we need to forgive and forget.

Give yourself time to process it all. Because this is how we move on, truly it is. Remember what they did, and choose to no longer be part of it. 70% of Ireland voted No and No to the referendum. You are in the majority and this is the proof. That is something we did not know until this result. And it’s a massive shift in favour of the humans that live here.

Just imagine if the majority forgave themselves for being duped and walked away from the system, always remembering what was done, and choosing something else instead? It’s time.