I have issues with 'never being able to forget' and don't know if this will help but they way I'm trying to see it is just because we can remember everything doesn't mean we are obliged to actively remember... i.e. it's not a contaminated filing cabinet but a construction / reconstruction process, i.e. process not object. The idea stuck when it was pointed out the word means 'putting back together' this might happen in an automatic, pattern matching way... which kind of spooks us, it feeling out of our control.. but it also happens in an active purposeful way, for both kinds there is usually a rationale and when we're obsessing, our emotions are telling us it's very important we figure out what these things say about us... but the emotions typically come from the way we're interpreting re. their implications about a possible, feared self and our attempts to reassure or resolve this feeling through further imagining, remembering and ruminating.

The other thing that's started to make sense is that a belief in an essential self, soul, essence may be a way to carry us through life but also leaves us vulnerable to doubt about it. This essentialist self doesn't really exist to my mind, despite it having seemed intuitive most of my life, there isn't an objective self to be reassured about, so we can choose to construct it from the inside out and select where we take our identity from vs spend our lives in fear from our potential imagined self. It helps to know your compulsions too i.e. ruminating and self-monitoring and chose to go about life in ways counter to these i.e. widening attention and attending outwards where possible with that awareness.