It pays to remember what made you sad.
Occasionally my wife asks me to relate a conversation I had with someone and I'm notoriously bad at doing so. I usually give the most generalized summary. It was positive or it was negative. The emotions felt. A couple important details. And that's it. While she can almost repeat conversations verbatim. I sort of wish I had a really good recorder. One with a long battery that was safetly hidden... so I could always go back and repeat word for word what was actually said. That by so doing I wouldn't be stuck trying to rely on this less than perfect memory. With it, I have to recreate things (as we all do) but knowing very well that the recreation is partially wrong. And so I recreate and try to deal with the recreation. But then, because I know the recreation is actually wrong, I will then later recreate it again, purposely somewhat different, and again try to deal with it, and then again and again and again. And so then relive negative events over and over and over. And ultimately handicapped in my attempts to best deal with things as a result??

Perhaps all because my memory is just not good enough. Perhaps with a better memory past ugly events... possibly wouldn't bother me as much? There are other factors to consider.

But, anyway, furthermore perhaps a main reason to keep on reliving past negative memories is that one knows that they're not quite remembering them exactly the way they happened? And/or one knows that trying to reremembering them helps one hold on to exact manner in which they were wronged by someone.

Because what's worse than the holocaust? The complete forgetting of it. That such awful things can be done. And they're just fogotten and thus they don't matter. One can go ahead and do such things because they won't be remembered anyway. Everything is forgotten, therefore nothing matters. So someone does something awful to you, and you surely want to remember, in order to deal with it, but even outside of 'dealing' you still very much want to remember. But each attempt to remember is really just a creation of an event, which you hope is the same as the original event. So you try to recreate. Are you doing so correctly? Even 1/5th through the event, you've forgotten the beginning again, so you go back and recreate it anew. And on and on you go, mired in this ugly past memory.

You recreate it because for it to be forgotten is horrible. And because in the remembering perhaps we learn to understand, to understand evil, to understand what we should do if such events may happen in the future, etc.

No let me go back up a few paragraphs to see what I was originally talking about as I've forgotten.... Thank god for writing... So in conclusion the worse one's memory is for a given thing, such as remembering social interactions, the more time spent, the more time mired in past ugly social interactions.

But also, the desire to understand, the more important it is to someone to understand, to totally understand why people act the way they do, also the more mired they'll be in past ugly social interactions.

Also simply the more open one is to the possibility that they're wrong, the more openminded they are, the more they can manage to accept that 'they' hardly exist really at all, the more able they are to go back over and over again and beat themselves down reremembering past negative social experiences.