Bad Experiences Teach Good Lessons
Can we undo the mental changes that occur in response to traumatic or otherwise bad experiences?
I think not. The life experience might be a poor workplace, team member, learning problem, customer argument, relationship trouble, or other painful life experience. But if we learn how to avoid it later, desensitize ourselves to it, or simply to do better next time, then that bad life experience has taught us good lessons.
Once we’ve learned what we could from a bad life experience, we cannot return to what we were before. Perhaps in the distant future, humans will learn to completely undo the harmful sorts of trauma to which bad experiences subject us. Perhaps one day, we’ll be able to purge all memory of the bad experience and any subsequent interpretations of other experiences because of it, from our brains. Further, we may someday learn to erase the bad experience from the brains of those around us who witnessed our folly. Obviously, we cannot yet affect such a complete memory erasing of the brain, nor the brains around us. Maybe we should not want to either.
Indeed, each and every one of my bad experiences in life has taught me many enduring and very good lessons; lessons that that have steered my subsequent life in positive directions. Thus I’ve found that yes, bad experiences teach good lessons, though at the time, they might not feel like it. Yet over time, once I’ve distanced myself from said bad experiences, I’m actually glad to have experienced them. Why? Because I would not have whatever level of goodness about me that there is, without all those bad experiences that came before now. Chances are that when we behave good in a given situation, it’s likely that we do so because of those good lessons we learned from our bad experiences. So don’t be sad over all those bad experiences you’ve suffered, because each one imparts the gifts of good lessons to you, and you’ll be happier in the future because of it.