Di, of Pensitivity101, is our host for Truthful Tuesday. This week Di wants to know:
Do you forgive and forget, remember but dismiss it as unimportant, or does it depend on the circumstances?
Someone you know — maybe someone you love — has “done you wrong.” You’re upset, angry, and hurt. You’ve been betrayed. A trust has been broken. Is it even possible to forgive and forget?
I don’t think so. Not both.
Everyone make mistakes. I know I have. I’m sure you have, too. I can say that with certainty because none of us is perfect. To err is human, right? The unfortunate truth is that you can’t change the past. Once words have been spoken, they can’t be unspoken. Once deeds have been done, they can’t be undone.
Alexander Pope said that to forgive is “divine.” Depending upon the circumstances, that can be really hard. What you can do is focus on the present and strive for a better future. While it may be difficult, frustrating, and even painful, it’s for your own benefit to be forgiving.
And then there’s forgetting. Forgetting is not only pretty close to impossible without undergoing a frontal lobotomy, it’s probably not even a very wise thing to do. If you forget something that has caused you pain, how can you learn from that experience? How can you grow?
You may want to forget, but you can’t. I have accepted that people may forgive, but are unlikely to forget the pain and the hurt. But over time, that pain and hurt will diminish, and if I wish to salvage my relationship with someone who has “done me wrong,” I need to find a way to deal with it, and that means genuinely forgiving the person who hurt you.
And that’s what is so hard about “forgive and forget.” The former is hard to do; the latter is impossible to do. As Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz noted, a wise person won’t try to do both.
This, That, and the Other 
Some relationships are not worth trying to salvage.
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True.
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I agree that forgetting is not very smart, unless one suffers from bad memory
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There are times and situations, I think, when bad memory might be a blessing.
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Oh yes it is! I can assure you
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Agreed. And I don’t think we *should* forget, because learning from things in the past should make us better able to cope with things in the future.
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Exactly.
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I guess maybe thats why I love grace…I have burned a lot of bridges…lol
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Thanks for this response Fandango, and your meme is spot on. I can’t forget when someone has hurt me, but the time came when I told myself ‘enough’.
I can’t change the past but I can certainly not include them in my future.
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I recently experienced someone telling me it’s “normal” to forget things (meaning to tell me that I should forget), but who was remembering the things (and wrongly in point of fact) while I wasn’t bringing them up or upset about them (or actually remembering them at the time). Totally surreal (even while I think that word is overused).
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I discovered, and this is just me, that when forgiveness is real, the event becomes less apparent. Not forgotten, but smaller and distant.
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I totally agree with that. It’s in the context of the person who did the wrong not repeating it or exacerbating it.
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https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/durham-report-mueller-trump-collusion-rcna84772
Trump wants us to forget Robert Mueller’s findings — and it’s working
The real bombshell of John Durham’s report isn’t that Trump was investigated over Russian collusion. It’s that so few seem to care about Mueller’s findings
May 16, 2023, 6:51 PM CDT By Michael A. Cohen, MSNBC Columnist
On Monday, special counsel John Durham released the final report from his investigation of the Trump-Russia probe — and after four years, nearly 500 interviews, two acquittals and at least $6.5 million in expenses, the American people should demand their money back.
Much of Durham’s details were outlined in a 2019 report by Michael Horowitz, then the Justice Department’s inspector general. Even Durham’s allegedly major bombshell — that the FBI should never have opened a probe into coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — is contradicted in the report’s final few pages, where Durham concludes that the bureau should have opened a “preliminary investigation [instead].”
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From Wikipedia on Mueller:
On May 17, 2017, Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as special counsel overseeing an investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and related matters.[6] He submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr on March 22, 2019.[7] On April 18, the Department of Justice released it.[8][9]
Before the release, AG Bill Barr jumped out and clouded the public and media perception of the report by composing a wordy substitute characterization — contrary to the substance of the report. That tactic is similar to Durham simply claiming [as a supposed bombshell] that he concludes what he wanted to conclude all along (but now claims with no evidence as if with, so don’t read the actual content of the report, whereas Mueller had evidence) and while Mueller accomplished convictions in court (so don’t pay attention to the facts) as well as finding evidence of Russian interference in the election.
Both Barr and Durham have wanted to paint Donald J. Trump in better light than was real about him.
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Your last paragraph captures it well
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Thanks.
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