“Oh, I was supposed to take out the trash. I completely forgot.”

“The anniversary party! I missed it. I didn’t really want to go, but I can’t believe I forgot!”

“I swear I knew I had that assignment due, but today it didn’t even enter my mind.”

Has this sort of thing ever happened to you? You were supposed to make an uncomfortable phone call, go to an event you would rather miss, have an obligation or task you needed to do—and you forgot completely. I mean, you intended to do it. You said to yourself I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it this evening. You were confident in this declaration. 

And then, only after the time you had allotted for that activity has passed, you realize you didn’t even think of it at the time.

I call this reluctance forgetting. And it definitely happens to me. But these days I use this type of forgetting as a clue. “Wow,” I say to myself, “I have more reluctance around this task than I realized. How am I truly feeling about it?”

I try to take time to assess and feel whatever emotions are being triggered. Because the only way through feelings is to FEEL them. If you suppress or ignore them, feelings don’t go away. They accumulate into emotional callouses that can make it hard to know what you are really feeling, what you want, what is the truth. And this can make you feel as if you can’t trust yourself or like you’re crazy. It can eat away self-confidence. 

I tried to research reluctance forgetting and had a hard time finding an exact psychological definition for the phenomenon. But on a Dartmouth College site, I found a definition that fit. Here, the sensation was called “Defensive Forgetting.”

“Psychological reasons: defensive forgetting

Generally, unpleasant things are remembered better than pleasant things (especially by pessimists), and both pleasant and unpleasant things are remembered better than materials we are indifferent to.”

The concept seems simple, really. The task was unpleasant or we felt indifferent to it, so we forgot it. At the same time, it’s complex. 

Forgetting helps us live with the pains and traumas of life.

And memory is designed to be selective. (Psychology Today)

We often judge the phenomenon, the forgetting to be negative. Indeed, it often has undesired consequences. But really, it just is. It’s more useful to look at the reasons for Defensive Forgetting in the first place. And perhaps creating a system of reminders and motivators to help us complete and survive these unwanted tasks.