Memories

 It is normal and necessary to devote a lot of our memory to negative experiences and feelings.  Remembering things that hurt us or that we feel ashamed or embarrassed about are necessary to help protect us from future harm and repeated mistakes.  They are also necessary to enable us to grow into the better versions of ourselves that we hopefully desire to be.  The blessed thing is that these memories don’t all come back to us and aren’t all present in our conscious awareness at any given time.  This normal amnesia and selective remembering is particularly helpful for, perhaps over sensitive, people like myself who seem to store memories of everything.  Memories are preserved and stored away until they seem relevant to our present experience and our desire to remember their lessons.  They surface to help us remember what we don’t want to do again or fail to do again in our present or future.  It is true though that sometimes emotional connections to negative memories exceed and take up more residence and presence in our current consciousness than is required to have learned from and be protected by their lessons.  It doesn’t serve us to cling too fiercely to things that can’t be undone or changed.  Not doing so of course can be much easier said than done.  It is sometimes very hard to accept that the past is unchangeable when there are things that we very much wish that we could correct.