Alma told his son the story of his conversion twice over, and at its center sits a striking claim. The memory that had tormented him became a memory he could hold without torment. The facts of his sins stayed with him, yet the pain drained out of them. The science of memory describes the very mechanism by which this can happen.

Memory scientist Charan Ranganath, in his 2024 book Why We Remember, describes a process the brain uses called reconsolidation. A memory is not a fixed recording played back unchanged. Each time you bring it to mind, the brain opens it, and for a window of time it can be updated before it is stored again. Whatever is present in that moment, a new understanding, a new feeling, a new meaning, gets folded into the memory as it is put back. The event remains, but its emotional charge can be rewritten. This is how a wound, revisited in the presence of something healing, can lose its power to hurt while the lesson it taught remains intact.

The key is what you introduce while the memory is open. Recall a painful past alongside despair, and you deepen the pain. Recall it alongside mercy, and the mercy is woven in. The same memory, opened in two different settings, comes away changed in two different directions.

This is also why simply trying to forget a painful memory rarely works. Pushing it down leaves it sealed and unhealed, ready to surface later with its full charge intact. The memory changes only when it is opened and met with something new. Avoidance keeps the wound closed; honest remembering in the presence of mercy is what lets it heal.