Thoughts as historical events

The biological impossibility of erasing or eliminating memories

A fundamental premise based on neuroscience and learning theory is that the human nervous system works by addition, not subtraction.

Once we have learned something-that fire burns, that 2+2 is 4, or that we feel humiliated when speaking in public-that neural network is established and there is no "delete" button. We cannot unlearn in the strict sense of deleting information.

What we call "forgetting" or "overcoming" is actually the learning of new associations that inhibit or compete with the old ones, but the original trace remains.

This explains why attempts to "eliminate" negative thoughts or painful memories often fail and generate frustration.

If we actively try not to think about a traumatic or embarrassing event from the past, we are reinforcing the neural network associated with that event, giving it more relevance and energy.

Understanding this is liberating: having recurring thoughts about past fears or insecurities is not a sign of weakness or lack of healing; it is simply the normal functioning of an organ (the brain) designed not to forget threats.

Therapy ceases to be a struggle to extirpate "bad memories" and becomes a training to learn to live with that history without it driving the present.

Understanding thoughts as echoes of personal history

From this perspective, every thought that crosses our mind is a historical product.

It is not a revealed truth about the future or a definition of our essence, but an echo of our past.

If a person has the automatic thought "people will betray me," this does not mean that he has premonitory powers over his current friends; it means that in his personal history there were events of betrayal that his mind registered as important for survival.

The mind is programmed to project the past onto the future to protect us.

By viewing thoughts as historical events, we change our relationship to them.

Instead of saying "I am a coward," we can rephrase it as "I am having the old thought that I am a coward, which I learned in my childhood when I was criticized." This distance allows us to validate our story without being a slave to it.

We recognize that our mind is like a parrot that has learned certain phrases over the years and repeats them in the face of certain stimuli.

We do not have to get angry with the parrot or try to sew its beak shut; we can simply recognize that it is repeating what it learned twenty years ago and decide whether that "recording" is useful for the current situation or whether we prefer to guide our behavior by our present values.

Summary

Neuroscience indicates that the brain functions by addition, not subtraction, which makes it biologically impossible to erase memories; trying to eliminate negative thoughts only reinforces their neural networks and increases their presence.

From this perspective, thoughts are understood as echoes of our personal history projected into the future, not as truths, but as learned repetitions that the mind uses to protect us.

The therapeutic objective is to change the relationship with these events, seeing the mind as a "parrot" that repeats old recordings, allowing us to listen to it without the obligation to obey its past dictates.