{"id":237732,"date":"2026-05-26T02:21:04","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T07:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/your-brain-doesnt-forget-when-you-forgive-it-does-something-far-more-surprising-with-those-painful-memories"},"modified":"2026-05-26T02:21:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T07:21:04","slug":"your-brain-doesnt-forget-when-you-forgive-it-does-something-far-more-surprising-with-those-painful-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/your-brain-doesnt-forget-when-you-forgive-it-does-something-far-more-surprising-with-those-painful-memories","title":{"rendered":"Your brain doesn\u2019t forget when you forgive\u2014it does something far more surprising with those painful memories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/your-brain-doesnt-forget-when-you-forgive-it-does-something-far-more-surprising-with-those-painful-memories.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Forgiving someone might not erase painful memories, but it can subtly update them, making past hurts feel less upsetting. It\u2019s less \u201cforgive and forget,\u201d and more \u201cforgive and update.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Psychologists have long known that forgiveness is crucial for healing rifts and keeping social bonds strong. Folk wisdom even advises us to \u201cforgive and forget\u201d after a wrong, implying that saying you forgive someone should make the bad memory vanish.<\/p>\n<p>But forgiving doesn\u2019t actually make you forget, notes Duke neuroscientist Felipe de Brigard: \u201cWhen you forgive someone for a wrongdoing, you don\u2019t forget the event. But once you forgive, the memory doesn\u2019t hurt as much.\u201d Indeed, past studies hinted that forgiving someone can blunt the memory of their misdeed. What hasn\u2019t been clear is how that happens in the brain. Is the memory simply erased, or does it get rewritten?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forgiving someone might not erase painful memories, but it can subtly update them, making past hurts feel less upsetting. It\u2019s less \u201cforgive and forget,\u201d and more \u201cforgive and update.\u201d Psychologists have long known that forgiveness is crucial for healing rifts and keeping social bonds strong. Folk wisdom even advises us to \u201cforgive and forget\u201d after [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}