The old adage “forgive and forget,” has merit. Though let’s play with that a bit. After all, when someone wrongs us, hurts us, we may want to cling to that pain, ensuring that our pain survives, our unjust treatment continues to prod us, reminding us of how we were harmed, victimized. Some people don’t know how to forgive and move past a bad experience–keeping it firmly in the present, when it’s already in the past. Others may know how to forgive, but have found a functional role for their victimhood, their suffering, and cling to it. In the worst cases, they may integrate that role into their identity. “I am a sickly person.” “I am a victim.” “Bad shit happens to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” “I am a traumatized person.” You likely have encountered at least a couple of these in your own life experiences.
They’re sad, and you may wish to help those people “snap out of it,” or the ever-popular (though not with them), “get over it.”
And there are some great arguments for both forgiving and forgetting. There are even some respectable arguments for forgiving, though never forgetting. People like this have decided that the problem they endured may very well happen again, and they want to be prepared for it. And while I wouldn’t suggest being unprepared, I know that the easiest way to attract a circumstance is to prepare for it. The best way to accelerate that is to practice it!
My general answer to that, so no one misunderstands, thinking I’d advocate blind ignorance, is to think it through, learn the lessons, and then build strategies which lend themselves to automation. Creating a principles-driven process you can just run as a single “program,” quickly, unconsciously, with no conscious effort at all. When you operate from principles, timeless and flexible in their utility, things have a funny way of seeming to “just work themselves out.” And when that’s unconscious, your “bigger brain” is doing all the work.
That said, I want to offer a new approach–forgetting, bypassing forgiveness, altogether. And here’s why. Most of my clients have said the reason they choose to forgive is to release the pain and frustration, the hurt they have experienced by being wronged. It isn’t to let the other person, if one exists, “off the hook.” Far from it. “It’s to enable me to get back to being me, to living my life,” one client said. There’s tremendous power in that, and healing becomes one of those automatic processes which kicks off, unconsciously, when we forgive and let go of our anger or self-righteousness.
Yet I’ve asked the same people why they choose not to “forget” after, they’ve offered some variation of, “I don’t want to repeat that mistake,” or “live and learn, once you know that can happen, you want to prevent it in the future.”
Point taken. But what if it were possible to extract the lesson, to learn what you needed, and let go of the rest? That is, feel the hurt, the betrayal, whatever it may have been, deal with it in that moment–end the relationship, retract the permission to further harm, whatever it is for you–then distill the actual learning, the lesson you considered valuable going forward…
And then forgot the rest?
I once tried this in a relationship of mine. A former partner enjoyed protracted conflicts, which if you study Psychology, might inspire an eye-roll. In nearly every case, any illusion of an extended fight or argument is typically expressing a core issue which has yet to be resolved or healed.
This current point of disagreement isn’t even the flashpoint, the spark that sets off the blaze. The blaze is like the fires underground in Centralia, Pennsylvania.
That’s where a coal fire started in 1962 underground and still burns to this day. If you were unaware of that, but either played the video games or saw the “Silent Hill” horror movies, those were based loosely on the real events in Centralia.
Similarly, when someone is “wounded,” hurt profoundly by a childhood experience, or even a more recent one, we tend to seek out ways to express our hurt, our anger, our frustration. Remember that as humans we Generalize (thank you, Uncle Milton), so the situation need not be even similar, or even the same kind of issue. As long as it makes sense to that person, and they see it as a viable scenario in which to play out their wounded emotional state, it may work for them. If you are unaware of this, and are arguing with such a person about the surface point, you’re not going to find common ground. You don’t even yet realize that you’re on separate continents.
In other words, when this former partner and I would have a challenge, I could see her investing more emotion into that difficulty than she could justify to herself–logically. (If you think I’m mindreading, a la Milton Erickson, you’re one consonant off–I am MindLeading™, specifically following the first step, Radical Understanding.)
The point is that she was wounded by a past experience, namely rejection in her childhood, and felt angry and frustrated with those she loved. She eventually noticed this herself and considered a path toward healing, which illustrates an important decision point. When we find a behavior creates problems in our lives, we can do a number of different things. Obviously, we can ignore it, though typically, it grows worse, ever more disruptive.
We can address it fully in at least two different ways. In one, we use a traditional therapeutic intervention, where we identify the initial wound, revisit it, explore its origins, and hope that such awareness will be enough to heal it. And presumably, change that disruptive behavior.
I have nothing against this, and if you have the time and money to invest, as it can sometimes require a significant amount of both, you may find this helpful. When the behavior and wound aren’t massively impacting our daily lives, there’s little harm in approaching it in such a traditional way, and many people have found great success with that approach. For them, the “journey” through the pain which caused that wound can be rewarding.
NLP, as a form of “brief therapy,” takes a different approach. And where the behavior and wound are massively impacting our lives, I strongly prefer this perspective. If your friendship, marriage, career, your life, is on the line, I would go for brief therapy as a form of triage. Triage, which often resolves the issue with minimal effort.
From a high level, NLP would suggest a couple of different tactics.
First step for either would be: Identify the subjective experience in the wounded person–how they experience it. Not past-tense, but present. After all, over time we often amplify or distort the emotional impact of such events. How do they construct that experience right now, in their subjective understanding of reality? What senses encoded the information, how did they filter it, and how did they store it? Then, how have they modified it over time, and what exactly does it look like, feel like, sound like, to them right now.
With that information, we can help the person modify their subjective experience, changing how they feel about it. We can teach them to modify their subjective experience with a wide array of tools. Tools they can learn to control themselves, running their own brains, their own lives.
Similarly, we can assist them in creatively generating the skills and capabilities, the missing information from the memory, which can help them enrich that experience so it is helpful–or at least much less painful–all while recalling the life lessons the experience taught us. If that sounds overly simple, it really is. We humans are not that complicated, though our egos seem to resent that fact, and fabricate all sorts of mess, complexity, even chaos to make ourselves feel special.
Back to my former partner. This childhood rejection sought expression in everyday misunderstandings, with myself and her other friends. Because the present, surface issue now was connected to that past wound, it became important to her. She would cling to the details of those experiences, and if asked to help someone understand, she would become frustrated. Such emotional connections at times don’t hold up to logic all that well. And to someone in the throes of such intense emotion, being asked to make logical sense of it will often only anger them. When she felt that need to express her frustration from that wound, she would often pick up the same surface conflict as before. Her friends were in turn frustrated by this, how she “never lets it go.”
She knew what I do, and I offered to assist her in healing this wound, but she saw it as a part of her, she had integrated that wound into her identity. If you viewed anything that way, how eager would you be to give it up? She felt the same way, so I left that alone.
I experimented instead with myself and learned that while a different approach would work, it had its own challenges. I decided to try anyway.
I gave myself the suggestion to let a conflict go, along with all its details, once we stepped away from it. I carefully extracted the lessons, the points she made, and how she expressed her self-reported wounds. But the details of the argument or misunderstanding? Intentionally lost. Released to make space for new, useful memories.
Though one problem I hadn’t considered was that when she would pick up the fight, which in her mind, she had “paused,” not “stopped” (her explanation), I was a bit lost. She became very angry about something fairly mundane, which didn’t make sense to me. Though remember what we learned in MindLeading™, that each of us walks around with a subjective construction of reality, guided by our Map of the World. The topic may seem “mundane” to us, but to the other person, it may be devastating. Dismissing the item based on our own subjective view is a bad idea.
I recalled then that this wasn’t the actual issue, just the current presentation of her past wound. But if you’ve ever been in that situation, calling it out is rarely wise!
She wanted me to resume the week-old argument and I was disarmed, having forgotten the details.
Why had I been so upset about this? What was my “side” in that argument?
Because I didn’t remember, I naturally felt confused, though supportive of her concerns.
If the relationship had been solid to begin with, my lack of “fight” would have diffused the tension quicker. I would still have needed to address each point as it arose, including and especially the core of her wound–which eventually would have surfaced. I’d since done this with other relationships and it’s worked exceedingly well. That because in most conflicts, our own lack of emotional state control is our biggest weakness. The person with the most flexibility in thought and action will lead that interaction.
Picture a “frazzled, stressed, angry person.” Now can you imagine that phrase above describing them— “The person with the most flexibility in thought and action” fitting even remotely? Not likely, right? When we’re in a heightened state of emotion, our focus narrows, our flexibility fades, and our options diminish. That person is stuck, anything but flexible.
With my former partner. who I finally accepted loved to fight, my strategy sometimes made things worse. She wanted to resume the former fight once scheduling permitted!
Carrying over the same fight saved time as we didn’t have to concoct some new grievance! But for someone who craves that efficiency and rapid return to a conflict…
It can be frustrating when the other person doesn’t remember the fight’s details and can’t just resume.
I said that “sometimes” this made things worse. Doing this forced her to re-explore the fight’s contents and her point to it, which at times diffused the fight, itself. And I wasn’t much of a fight for her as I was, though caring about her feelings, oblivious to my own formerly emotional state. I replaced this with curiosity and concern, which are often disarming in themselves.
Where it can work for you, and hopefully you choose people who want to address healing appropriately, just letting go of the hurt or angry emotions can work wonders. Without them, finding solutions becomes easier, your relationships more stable and rewarding.
And since the link between stress and physical and mental health is well established, you may even live longer.
I can promise you that you will live happier.
Copyright © 2026 Chris Gingolph