Intrusive memories are disruptive to daily functioning and detrimental to well-being; unfortunately, the presence of these memories is a defining characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although increasingly understood as a memory disorder, current trauma management and recovery strategies for PTSD do not often take principal memory theories into account. Many common practices, such as delayed processing after trauma exposure and spaced therapy sessions, might inadvertently strengthen the retention of intrusive memories in the long-term. In this paper, model simulations show that altering the timing of different presentations of emotional stimuli might affect subsequent intrusions. Experimentally, we demonstrated through a two-day within-subject image presentation task that when emotional images are presented in spaced intervals (as opposed to consecutive, “massed” presentation), the perceived frequency of intrusions for the mass-presented emotional images during the 24 hours after first exposure were significantly lower than spaced images. Our study presents a novel strategy that can potentially mitigate the frequency of intrusive post-traumatic memories, highlighting the advantages of translational applications of computational cognitive models to mental health.