Have you seen or experienced something which you want to forget with all your heart?
With this technique you can erase the horrific and disturbing images from your mind and get on with your life.
Here’s how.
How to brainwash yourself to unsee something
1) Identify what you want to unsee
First off, the bad news:
There’s no technique to wipe your entire ex partner out of your memory or forget about the car accident you had last year. An entire incident and trauma can’t just be erased wholesale.
What can be done, however, is to brainwash yourself to unsee a specific moment or particularly painful part of a memory.
For example, you may remember sad feelings thinking about your ex and the great times you had together as well as the painful separation.
But you can brainwash yourself to forget the last fight you had when they told you that you’d never find anyone and deserved to be alone. That one incident can be left behind instead of sticking in your mind like a dagger.
You can brainwash yourself to unsee the moment of impact when you were almost killed by an oncoming truck that you narrowly avoided and which still makes you have panic attacks to this day.
2) Get specific about what you’d like to unsee
The next step after identifying a specific memory or experience you want to erase from the memory banks is to really focus on its details.
Think back to what you felt like at that time, what you were wearing, what other people around you were saying, any music that was playing and sounds or smells in the air.
Smell is deeply linked to our memory and stimulates the amygdala part of our brain. This is strongly linked to our limbic system, which is the prehistoric “lizard brain” that humans all have.
The thing with the limbic system is that it has the “master key” to your body and mind. Traumatic and painful memories can become overwhelming because our brain interprets them as a priority linked to our survival.
In many cases they then continue to replay and filter everything else we experience, unintentionally sabotaging our lives.
This is why it can be so important to understand how to brainwash yourself to unsee something.
3) Why do you want to unsee it?
After having the specifics of the memory in mind that you’d like to unsee, the next step is to focus in on what it is about this memory that bothers you the most.
I understand that this can be the last thing you want to do, especially if you have a painful image or memory that keeps popping up and ruining your day.
But this is part of the housecleaning that you must do in order to sweep this painful episode away and be able to get on with your life.
As clinical psychologist Allison Broennimann, Ph. D. writes:
“Getting to the root of what bothers you the most will help you figure out what you need to forget.”
For this reason, do the following checklist:
- What is the main emotion associated with this memory?
- How has it negatively impacted your life in the present?
- What people, places and other details related to this image and memory upset you the most?
- What would it feel like to be unburdened of this awful recollection?
This is all part of freeing your mind from chains of the past that can often keep us subconsciously sabotaged even when we’re not aware of it.
4) Liberate your lobes
We’re all looking for answers in life.
In one way or another, we want meaning and a reason for our actions and choices. There are also times when painful experiences have left us grappling with trauma that we can’t seem to move past.
In my case, a particularly painful memory from childhood and a quest for truth led me on a search for spiritual solutions.
What I found was interesting! But it was also confusing…
So many different people and “gurus” were telling me they had the one answer, and that if I wanted to process that one disturbing memory and find peace in life I just needed to follow them (and pay a high fee).
The thing with spirituality is that it’s just like everything else in life:
It can be manipulated.
Unfortunately, not all the gurus and experts that preach spirituality do so with our best interests at heart. Some take advantage to twist spirituality into something toxic – poisonous even.
It’s very easy for a skilled manipulator to gaslight you, making you feel ashamed, unworthy or “dirty” for being upset about trauma and your own painful experiences.
They then occupy a position of “authority” over you where they are cleaner or purer than you for supposedly not struggling the same way you are.
It’s elitist bullshit, and it’s not the true path to spiritual empowerment and processing trauma.
In fact the effective path for working through blockages and trauma is closer to the opposite of what many New Age gurus teach.
I learned this from the shaman Rudá Iandé. With over 30 years of experience in the field, he’s seen and experienced it all.
From exhausting positivity to downright harmful spiritual practices, this free video he created tackles a range of toxic spirituality habits and how to avoid them and embrace far more effective techniques.
So what makes Rudá different from the rest? How do you know he’s not also one of the manipulators he warns against?
The answer is simple:
He promotes spiritual empowerment from within.
Click here to watch the free video and bust the spiritual myths you’ve bought for the truth.
Rather than tell you how you should practice spirituality, Rudá puts the focus solely onto you.
Essentially, he puts you back in the driver’s seat of your spiritual journey, giving you the tools you need to take charge and successfully do things like help yourself erase something you never wanted to see.
5) Letting go
As I wrote earlier, our brains often store painful memories deep in the subconscious and guard them as prized objects.
That is because they are linked to survival and possible threats to our physical or social existence.
This can include things like brutal rejection, family crises and mental health struggles, because our brain also interprets these as potential threats to our life based on deep evolutionary patterns of group belonging and exclusion.
It can also include physical events such as sexual and physical abuse, horrific accidents, bullying and disfigurement and illness.
The memory of an incident or time is seared in our mind and heart, often with particularly vivid moments dominating us even in our nightmares.
Letting go starts with the desire to let go, an identification of the specifics of the memory and zeroing in on what you want most to let go.
Then comes the process itself.
6) The cleansing fire
Think of this painful memory like a reel of film. You know how they used to have actual physical reels in the old cinemas that would spin around and feed into the projector?
You have this reel in your hand, and on it is the memory that you no longer need.
This is where it comes down to how to brainwash yourself to unsee something: the exact specifics depend on you.
But at this point you want to run through this memory like you’re playing the reel. Except this reel also includes smells: smoke, perfume, food, wet earth, a spring river, pine needles in the snow…It’s all there in your nostrils, along with the sounds, sights and sensations in your body.
The memory is all in that reel and after it runs through for about one to two minutes, you extract the reel of film from the projector and toss it in a burning metal barrel outside the projector room. It burns rapidly away in acrid black smoke, withering and charring. It is completely gone.
That is a memory you no longer need. The movie has already played, and it’s no longer available for viewing. It’s gone.
7) Remove triggers
Here’s a secret: this memory is gone from your “ready access files.” But it’s still way back in the vault in case of an emergency.
If you want to avoid your neurons going on a trip to retrieve it in the future, it can also help to remove triggers that can bring it back up.
Triggers are very much a real thing. These are objects, places, people or other details which can bring back up the memory.
Now that you have burnt the reel, it should be charred away and not available to grab off the shelf like any other old memory.
At the very least, it won’t be dominating your life day and night.
But to make sure that this memory stays gone and that it’s fully gone away, you should also take care to avoid triggers when possible.
If your memory that you erased was of a house fire that happened when you were 10, stay away from bonfires and woodstoves that bring the memory back up!
It’s not always possible to avoid triggers, but when it is you should do so.
This can sometimes include some pretty big life changes.
If you almost drowned and that’s the memory you erased, but you still live next to the ocean where it happened, then just going out for a stroll can overwhelm you with the salt air and the view of the ocean.
It may be time to move if at all possible.
8) Breathe through it
Brainwashing yourself to unsee something is possible, but it’s not always easy, and the process can be taxing.
I get it, getting yourself to unsee something can be hard, especially if you’ve been inundated with some really traumatic imagery and experiences.
Earlier I mentioned the shaman Rudá Iandê and how he’s helped me break through toxic spiritual beliefs and find real answers to life challenges.
Another one of Rudá’s most brilliant videos is about breathing.
As the bridge between our conscious mind and unconscious system, breathing is the one body process we can consciously control or allow to run on autopilot.
It’s actually the key to healing deep pain and trauma that’s blocked in our body and keeping us trapped in instinctive responses we may no longer choose to employ if given the option.
Specifically, Rudá adapts shamanic breathwork to a modern format, giving you powerful breathwork tools to break through toxic patterns and energy drains, which he explains in this free breathwork video.
The exercises in his invigorating video combine years of breathwork experience and ancient shamanic beliefs, designed to help you relax and check in with your body and soul.
After many years of suppressing my emotions, Rudá’s dynamic breathwork flow quite literally revived that connection and helped me overcome some really traumatic memories which were making my life almost unbearable.
And that’s what you need:
A spark to reconnect you with your feelings so that you can begin focusing on the most important relationship of all – the one you have with yourself.
So if you’re ready to say goodbye to anxiety and stress, check out his genuine advice below.
Click here to watch the free video from Rudá.
Did you see that?
Painful and traumatic memories are part of life. But the problem with some moments and scenes is that they lurk just beneath the surface and sabotage everything we try to do.
Sometimes it’s necessary to brainwash yourself to unsee something.
The film reel technique above is a way to do that, along with taking a look at the free your mind teachings from Rudá and trying out techniques that he teaches in the shamanic breathwork video.
At the end of the day, we have far more control over our own mind than many of us believe.
Tapping into our personal power and creativity can give us much more freedom to move into the future as a more powerful and able-minded person who’s no longer held back by the pain of the past.
