The Choice to Forget

The Choice to Forget

Emily Conrad

Brigham Young University

Motivated forgetting is often referred to as the pathway to happiness. Although forgetfulness is viewed as a flaw, motivated forgetting is viewed as a blessing. Motivated forgetting is a when an individual goes through an experience that negates what the mind wants to experience. Instead of remembering the sadness, regret, or fear that happened, the mind censors the experience by causing an individual to forget. This fight mechanism in the human body has been proven to happen to all ages, from young children to elderly grandparents. Motivated forgetting also leads to additional consequences, psychologists today question whether motivated forgetting is a choice and whether the consequences of forgetting outweigh the emotional damage of remembering.        

Sigmund Freud, a famous psychologist, argued that our memory censors a lot of information. Frequently, this censorship can be beneficial to our wellbeing. Censoring the memories can avoid anxiety and depression in many people. A study by Donald Levis (1999) lead to the conclusion that most children under eight who are physically abused often alter their memory to either completely forget or remember less dramatically the events that happened. Although this study has persuasive results, there is a lot of argument about whether motivated forgetfulness is an actual method the brain uses to protect itself, or just a lack of perception towards the situation. For example, with child abuse, children under eight may not understand what was happening, which results in misconstrued memories and potentially false information. Donald Levis (1999) said, “there is perhaps no other topic in recent history that has generated such emotionality as the ongoing traumatic memory debate involving alleged reports of physical and sexual abuse.”

In an American study, 81 percent of university students and 60 to 90 percent of therapists agreed that “traumatic memories are often repressed.” Today, however, increasing numbers of memory researchers think repression rarely, if ever, occurs. People succeed in forgetting unwanted neutral information (such as yesterday’s parking place), but find it harder to forget emotional events.

This topic, like Donald Levis stated, is extremely controversial. Lieden University in England concluded with their study once again that childhood maltreatment leads to memory suppression (Harmelen, 2011). Although this memory suppression is involuntary, it is theorized that the suppression is a protective mechanism so the child can still develop without being harmed by the emotional side effects of such negative experiences. Negative events can result in emotion inhibition strategies, which results in avoiding certain memories. The study also found that intrusions of negative memories were strongly related with psychiatric distress. Positive memories can be released and put in focus when motivated forgetfulness is enabled. This benefits the individual’s mental health; keeping them from depression, anxiety, and trauma.

The strongest study relating to memory suppression was conducted by Elke Geraerts, Beatris Hauer, and Ineke Wessel. Their study, titled “Effects of suppressing negative memories on intrusions and autobiographical memory specificity,” showed evidence that not only is memory suppression a method of the mind, but it also creates consequences (Geraerts, 2010). These consequences include increased memory loss and emotional changes. The study showed that those who had memory loss of a negative event also had increased memory loss after the date of event. These psychologists theorized the traumatic experiences in the patients led a defense mechanism to kickstart in the brain, leading to memory loss, but preventing future events from tainting the brain and leading to anxiety or depression. The study also showed that after a traumatic event, the patients who forgot or did not remember the event correctly also had effects of mood neutrality, meaning the patients were unable to react emotionally to many events. Their happiness and sadness levels were lower than the average patient who had not experienced a traumatic event.

Most people talk about how good their memory is- they brag about being able to remember everything. At my High School graduation, there were girls who said, “remember when…” and honestly, I didn’t remember anything! Although, you may think if my memory lacked at graduation-it must always be bad. On the contrary, I had great memory until a negative event in my life effected my memory. Not just did I forget a lot of the event, but I now have a faulty memory as well.

This happens to more people than just me. Not only does it happen with children, but also those with all ages who have experienced a traumatizing event. Motivated forgetting can range from forgetting how many cookies you ate because of shame to forgetting a negative event like an abuse in your life. No human can remember every event in their life. Even those with “photographic memory” don’t have enough room to store every moment, song, photograph, and name that they’ve ever been exposed to. David G. Myers (2015) referred to the brain as an, “unreliable, self-serving historian.” However often the brain becomes motivated to forget certain things that will otherwise psychologically damage an individual.