Is it possible to remove painful memories while retaining neutral or positive ones?

Is it possible to remove painful memories while still retaining neutral or positive memories?

This question was submitted by 'Janet'

Mark says...

We don't subscribe to the idea of erasing memories. I know psychiatrists who gave patients vast amounts of LSD in the 1960s and the idea was to completely erase their minds so they could start again and be healthier, and for damaged people sometimes it wasn't a very healthy thing to do. And also prefrontal lobotomies used to be practised - again would often wipe out memory or even ECT treatment - electric shock therapy treatment - seems to often ‘delete’ memories, but then your the brain is very subtle and sensitive and you can damage other parts and so forth.

So we don't subscribe to that, you'd be pleased to hear, but as I said before with PTSD we're looking to decondition the memory so that you are in charge of it in the sense that you can choose to think about it or not. When you think about it you still know that it was bad at the time, but it no longer feels bad to think about.

So we're not getting rid of the memory, we’re deconditioning the memory so that it's no longer traumatic - that's really what we're doing.