Any advice on how to forget bad relationships with people?

Question

What have you done to forget or not think about past relationships (friendships) that ended on a bad note.
Its been hard to not think about things I could have done differently or how I could have not been as awkward when trying to avoid the person.

Context: Starting hanging out with a kid who turned out not to be the type of person I wanted to hang out around. Knew him slightly from highschool and he went to my college.

Answer 1

Quit trying so hard to forget. Let yourself remember. Give yourself a time period each day to remember, then tell yourself you won't think about it until the next day at XX o'clock. Get involved with other people and other activities. With time, the memories will fade.

Answer 2

When you first get to know someone, the tendency is to spill your guts... tell them all sorts of personal stuff. What you need to do is learn how to "share" without compromising yourself. Don't give out any information that could be used against you.
The flip side of this is to try to figure out the integrity level of each person you are associating with.

As you get older, you don't really care, but in your teens and early 20s, little eccentricities tend to become ammunition in competitive "popularity games". Us older folks tend to move towards acceptance a lot quicker without getting hung up on details.

Young people tend to look at everything as being a lot more serious than it is. Truth is, that school is a labratory of sorts... a microcosm of the bigger world where you get to try things out in relative safety.

Learn to look at every relationship as a learning experience. Your outgrow many of your early relationships after you learn what you needed out of each one, or after you outgrow that person.

You may wish to start looking into some books... "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie; "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" by John Gray... and maybe "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense" by Suzette Haden.