How to Release and Erase Memories of People and Events

Posted On September 13, 2019 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

Memories are something that only exist in our mind as a mental construct and habitually play out in our mind over and over due to the intense emotion associated with them. All of what becomes actual memory that we can vividly recollect in emotional detail years later comes from significant emotional events (SEE) that had a powerful impact on us in some way. These events and the memories we formed of them served to change us in the most fundamental sense, and as we continued to live out of them, they served to shape our identity and who we became because of them.

Memory and emotion are always connected due to the fact that the event caused a strong emotional reaction in us, and those emotions served to shape the nature of the experience we formed as an interpretation of some kind. Our experience doesn’t come as an objective recollection of the event itself, but how we processed and internalized it as a means of creating our experience of it. As we internalize an intense event, we make it mean something by the story we tell ourselves about it in an attempt to put it in perspective as a means of trying to make sense out of it. We take an existing reality as a strong emotional event and reprocess it to form a new version of it as our interpretation that gives it personal  meaning.

The meaning we give something as the means of experiencing it forms the basis for the storyline we begin telling ourselves that serve to shape us as a person. We create our identity out of the memories we constantly play out in one way or another as the means of producing more of the same type of experiences. They become thematic templates for producing instant interpretations as our perceptual lens and filtering system. They give us a form of referencing system to instantly interpret all new and similar type of events to mean the same thing. As we walk through life we’re always assessing and summing up situations by looking through the thematic filters of our past memories by saying “this means the same things as that”. We consistently shape the present to be a continuation of the past and a means of predicting the future.

We walk into any situation with preconceived notions and expectations of what’s going to happen, and we use a dynamic series of mental and emotional filters to only notice, abstract, and rearrange the information in a way that creates the experience of our expectations. We’re always saying to ourselves . . . this means I’m not wanted; that means I’m not loved; I’m not good enough; people can’t be trusted; life’s unfair; I can’t ever get ahead, and so on. We interpret any number of behaviors or actions to mean the same thing as those same types of actions meant to us in the past. Our memories provide us with a template for producing a congruent and consistent experience of reality that follows a major theme.

Because emotion is the key factor in forming all significant memories, it also acts as the hook that keeps us compulsively attached to them and that serves as a trigger for activating them. As we’re triggered emotionally we produce an immediate reaction that doesn’t require us to think about it in order to form a new appraisal. All reactions are instant and produce unconscious actions in us. We instantly access and replay the emotion, mindset, and behaviors of the memory being activated. As we’re triggered emotionally we literally go unconscious and act out of a delirious state.

Anytime we’re overly emotional or sensitive to the emotions being projected by others, we live our life out of memories of the past as automated patterns and create while unconscious and not utilizing our higher capacities to create in a self-aware, well thought out and intentional manner. Emotionally reactive people are unconscious in the most basic sense and are constantly being controlled and determined by whatever it is they’re reacting to. Their whole life is determined by and becomes a replay of their formative conditioning.

Subconscious and Self-Conscious Mind

What we refer to as our subconscious is the creative aspect of our mind that forms our experiences of reality. It’s the passive aspect of our mind that’s receptive in nature; while the self-conscious aspect is active and self-aware, and has the ability to give direction to the subconscious as a way of forming new patterns of interpretation and behaviors. The subconscious is experiential in nature, which means its programmed with pictures, images, and scenarios that it uses as a metaphorical template for perceiving reality and producing all of our natural behaviors that come in an automatic way without us having to think about them.

The subconscious is emotionally driven and prompted to take action based on impulses and strong emotional charges. It works to create our entire experience of reality and ourselves out of memories of experiences that are emotionally intense. We literally act on ourselves to program ourselves for creating reality based on memories we form and continue to live out of, and the emotional states they naturally act to produce and maintain. Anyone who lives out of memories of their past is literally delusional. They’re living a life of illusions that they themselves are creating without direct awareness of what they’re doing.

The Power of Identity

The truly elusive and compelling thing about our memories is that we’ve actually used them as the means of shaping ourselves by way of them. As we had impacting experiences and tried to make sense of them by explaining them to give them meaning, we simultaneously identified with our own imaginary experiences. As we form an internal experience in our mind as the meaning of events, we sense ourselves within our own self-created experiences, and we make it mean the same thing about us. Whatever we tell ourselves about why something happened and what it means about another person or the way life is, it also means about us in relationship with it, and we begin identifying with our own story about things.

As we shape our identity out of our self-created memories and story about things, we need to keep telling them in order to know who we are. We replay the same scripts over and over in our mind. For this reason giving up our story can be quite difficult. This is especially true when we’re not clear on what story we want to tell in its place. Often when we give up our story or lose what we’ve shaped ourselves around, we don’t know how to be different. In order to tell a new story, we have to give up our memories of the past and develop new ways of being. Without a distinct sense of purpose and direction this can seem a bit daunting and overwhelming.

We become so used to living out of an automated state over time that having to actually make conscious decisions, select new ideas, and develop ourselves in new ways can seem dry causing us to struggle with motivation in maintaining them, especially when compared to the intensity of our emotional past. It’s the emotions attached to an idea that makes it compelling and infuses it with a sense of passion and drama. Emotions act like drugs in our body, altering our state of mind, and when their maintained in a habitual manner, become addictive, causing us to literally crave them.

In order to take over the process of conscious self-creation we have to exercise the higher capacities of our mind to create in an original fashion. This requires not only truly deciding to let go of your past conditioning, but also deciding how you’re going to be instead. What kind of person are you going to create yourself to be and what kind of story are you going to tell by how you live your life? And then, once you make those decisions you have to learn how to intentionally utilize your imagination in order to both instruct your subconscious to release and let go of memories while simultaneously replacing them with new ones. You have to learn how to use your conscious, self-aware mind to direct and guide your subconscious on what to create as a new idea.

Because your subconscious operates out of memory as imaginary experiences, you have to develop new ideas as actual experiences that are vivid in sensory terms. You have to create what you want as a form a virtual memory that provides your subconscious with a pattern to produce natural characteristics and behaviors out of. You have to practice embodying new ways of being as a means of training your body to new behaviors. You have to give your subconscious new emotional memories and form new habits through consistent and repetitive practice.

As you let go of past memories you have to replace the void it creates with new ones, or you have to re-imagine existing ones to form a new experience of them. If you leave a void, your subconscious will automatically draw something in as a means of knowing what to do. The subconscious can’t make decisions as to what to use as a means of creating and relies solely on memories as habitual patterns and tendencies. It’s seeded with suggestions from the conscious mind that it then converts into a reality in the imagination and uses for creating an outer reality of the same nature. The subconscious is symbolic in nature, which means that all imaginary experiences intentionally produced as a desire for creating as an outer reality, are utilized as thematic ideas. So it won’t produce the exact same reality the way you imagined it, but rather adapt the idea to the current situation and environment to produce a corresponding version of the same idea.

Power of the Imagination

While many people believe imaginary processes are an illusion and not real, they’re actually the means for not only giving the subconscious direction for creating as an actual experience, but also the means by which we direct the forces of the natural world. As we think, we imagine and direct energy into the forms of our thoughts, giving them life inside of us. All actual memories are in fact created by re-imagining an event, and are established as a modified version based on how they’re interpreted, and consistently replayed in the imagination. All imaginary processes are how we use our conscious mind to communicate with and direct our subconscious, which uses them as symbolic ideas for creating as an experience of a similar nature.

Another common mistake people make is in thinking that memories aren’t created in or by the imagination, but are an actual recollection of objective events, that they equally interpreted in a neutral and objective fashion. Yet memories are based on how we formed our experience of events based on the emotional state we were in at the time and as an interpretation. We reform the elements of an event in our mind as the means of telling a story out of the emotion we were feeling. Then the memory is recalled and replayed in the faculty of the imagination, forming our perceptual lens as an instant interpretation, and as the means of producing more experiences of the same kind, while altering the memory to some degree every time it’s recalled based on how it’s adapted to the current situation to produce a variable. Memories are actually living creations of the soul itself and they consistently undergo an evolutionary process through adaptation and modification.

Due to the fact that the subconscious is emotionally motivated to perform certain actions, if we have a fear or apprehension around letting go of or erasing memories, it’ll either hang onto them out of a fear of letting go, or it’ll create an experience that’s scary, stressful, and fear based. The emotion itself is the directive for the subconscious to create as an experience. The image used is just the pattern as a process, and the emotion is how that pattern is shaped into an experience. The pattern is simply what’s used to express the emotion attached to it as the reality that invokes more of the same emotion. The subconscious naturally moves into anything that’s presented as being pleasurable, and away from anything that’s painful. So if change is presented as a hard or painful struggle of some kind, the subconscious will avoid it at all costs, and work to sabotage any willful effort to accomplish it.

The scope of this article is the process of letting go of memories and not the instruction on how to create new ones, which I have written several other articles on, and can be accessed by using the search feature on my website. If you’re feeling the least bit apprehensive or unsure of yourself in choosing to let go of your past in order to create a new you, then you should spend some time exploring the nature of your attachment to your story of the past and wait until it becomes an exciting and liberating idea. Letting go of the known in favor of the unknown can be terrifying to those who are new to the idea of conscious self-creation. There’s a great sense of security in familiarity and staying in your comfort zone, even when it’s been traumatizing and painful.

The Process for Letting go of the Past

Once you’ve decided to honestly let go of your past story and feel excited about creating yourself anew, you can start by selecting the memories you want to erase. These can either be ones that were incurred with a specific person or a certain type memories usually represented by a phase or period in your life. You want to become clear on which ones they are because it requires a hypnotic state and an imaginary process where you have to use your conscious mind to direct your subconscious on what to do. If you’re uncertain or vague in anyway, you’ll lose your thought process as soon as you become totally relaxed.

Once you’ve decided, you want to make sure you fully abstract the life lesson the memories held for you in terms of what they helped you to realize so you can retain that knowledge and not repeat past mistakes.

Meditative  Process:

• Get into a comfortable position, either sitting upright in a chair with both feet flat on the ground, preferably touching, relaxing your hands on your lap or thighs, palms down; or by lying down flat on your back with your neck well supported, legs straight and feet touching and hands relaxed palms down on either your chest, abdomen, or thighs. It’s important that your spine is straight and you create a closed system energetically.
• Get comfortable, then close your eyes and turn your full attention inward and start by focusing on your breathing. Take a couple of long, slow, deep breaths to relax, and mentally scan your body for any discomfort, making any adjustments necessary to produce a comfortable feeling. Then relax your breathing to a normal, rhythmic motion.
• You want to talk to yourself as a means of walking yourself (subconscious) through an intentional process, telling yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing as a form of verbal instructions (directing the process involved).
• Breathe in relaxation, exhale all tension and stress, and with each breath you feel your body relaxing.
• Place your attention on your feet – picture your feet or center your attention on the sensations in your feet, and tell them to relax . . . then feel them relax. Once relaxed, move your attention up to your calves, tell them to relax, and feel them relaxing . . . do this all the way up your body to the top of your head, until you’re fully relaxed and somewhat unaware of your body.
• Have a sincere and brief conversation with your body about how good it feels to relax . . . the more you relax the better it feels, and tell it that this is a safe space that’s created by you, and it’s okay to just relax and let go. . .  . speak to yourself with a firm yet comforting and soothing voice.
• Connect with your higher source of power . . . imagine a sphere of beautiful white light directly above your head. Feel it’s love and warmth as a very pleasurable sensation, then mentally ask the light to enter you, or draw it down intentionally, and feel it as it completely fills your head, saturating your brain with a beautiful white light, soothing and comforting you . . . as you continue to pull it down into your throat, filling your throat area, then down into your chest . . . abdomen, and legs, and down to your feet. As you feel your body filled with the beautiful, warm sensation of the light, feel it’s protection and comfort, and reaffirm that this is a safe place and it’s ok to just let go and go deeper and deeper down . . . down into a peaceful feeling of calm relaxation . . .
• Then picture the person (or event) the memories are associated with, and tell yourself that you’re going to abstract from your body all the energy and etheric substance or aka from the various organs and parts of your body they’re located – the body holds memory as emotion – tell your subconscious to become aware of all the sensations within your body associated with this person.
• Place your attention on the sensations, and imagine them as a form of liquid light and visualize yourself using your hands to enter into and pull out the fluid-like energy of the emotion and memory from your organs and muscles . . . .  
• Do this every place you feel the sensations of the memory, while accumulating it and rolling it into a ball.
• Once it’s been surgically abstracted and formed into a ball of liquid light, tell yourself to find the aka (etheric) cords attached at the heart center, and cut them using  a dagger or knife. Imagine doing it and see it as disconnected completely from all parts of your body and as a ball of light in your hands, then mentally thank this person in a sincere manner for the lessons they served to teach you, and let go of the ball sending it back out into the universe to be recycled so it can benefit someone else.
• Watch it floating in front of you and being projected away until it completely disappears into the dark. Tell yourself it’s gone forever and bid it farewell.
• After it’s completely gone imagine a hand whisking your energy field briskly, clearing out all residue, then seal your aura and body with a bubble-like shield of light, telling your subconscious that it can’t ever come back in and will be deflected back out into the universe. That you’re protected and safe . . .
• Sense your body free of the emotional sensations while telling yourself how good it feels. Create an anchor for this state as a picture or word that you use that will instantly produce the state and can be fired at will.
• Introduce the new memory you want to replace it with, associating the emotional trigger of the old memory to the new one. Wait until you get the new memory just the way you want it, and then replay it over and over in your mind until it comes automatically in complete form.  Then produce the emotional feeling of the old memory while instantly playing the new memory in its place. Do this repeatedly until it becomes natural.
• In order to conclude the session, say to yourself . . . and so it is, and so must it be. And slowly bring yourself back into conscious awareness while telling yourself that you’ll wake alert and feeling better than ever . . . .

Most hypnotic processes only require one session, depending on how deep you go and how proficient you are at processes of deep meditation that utilize guided imagery, and your confidence in guiding yourself. If it doesn’t work with one session, simply repeat until it becomes permanent. Change produced by subconscious programming can often be a bit tricky to realize because it comes by simply forgetting. You lose awareness of the memories because you no longer think about them, and can go weeks or even months before it dawns on you that you haven’t thought about it in a long time. When you do think about the memories, you do it in a very detached and matter of fact way, with absolutely no emotion. As you realize that you haven’t thought about it for a while, you forget about it again, and never think about it unless there’s a direct association. It’s no longer compulsive or emotionally painful, and you no longer dwell in it uncontrollably.

Dr. Linda Gadbois 

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher