I hear that people tend to forget bad moments of their lives and decide to focus on the good moments. When I was working on a research project about pain in the hospital I was amazed to discover that people that are in great pain tend to forget it once that pain goes away and time passes. For the research that we were trying to do, we wanted to know in how much pain the people in the hospital were. Whenever the patient was discharged and asked about their pain a month or so later they would always answer that their pain wasn’t that bad. My mentor wanted to gather the real pain that was being felt in present time because people would forget about it and report pain levels lower than they actually were. He came up with the idea of setting up random times when we would have to call a patient to their hospital room and ask them about their pain. The idea that people forget about the bad moments and only remember the better ones was a little shocking to me because I always thought that the bad moments had a great impact on our lives and were not be easily forgotten. Later, I thought about the events in my life. I knew that I have had many moments of stress, worry, and unhappiness but those memories seemed to be buried and difficult to recall. The moments when I was happy were easier to remember.
So what does this mean? Do we program ourselves to live through a painful situation and then delete it or deemphasize its effect on us? There is a recall bias when we try to go back to a moment of pain. We make bad situations seem not so bad. We dwell on positive things and filter out the negative. Yet, does this help us grow as a person or does this limit us? We cannot learn anything if everything we experience and remember is happiness because that makes us live in an illusion of greatness. Do we need to remember the bad events equally as the good events in order to compare and learn from them? I think that having the ability to have a way to forget about certain unwanted events is something good at certain moments were the pain only helps to destroy.
by Erica R.
