For Your Brain’s Sake, Forgive Yourself
Research of the highest caliber has found that self-forgiveness keeps your brain healthy for longer as you age.
A longitudinal study (researchers followed over 1000 people for 10 years) found that people who are high in hostility have more intense cognitive impairment as they age.
What’s hostility?
It’s cynicism, distrust of others, expected mistreatment from others, and general adversariality (word?).
More hostility makes you think worsely, more quickly, as your brain ages.
Cognitive impairment is tested by simple things, like remembering the day of the week.
But, if you’re on the hostile side, as I think it’s safe to say we all are to some degree, there is hope.
Self-forgiveness.
Self forgiveness is the opposite of feeling like you’ll never be able to make up for your past mistakes or offenses.
It’s the feeling that you’ll be able to make up for, or that you already are, little by little.
Forgiving yourself protects your brain from the carnage of hostility.
Hostile people make enemies, make other people feel bad about themselves, make other people angry at them.
They are stuck in disconnection.
Hostility makes it very difficult to feel Aliveness in your relationships with others.
Relationships with others affect our relationship with ourselves.
When we feel connected to others, we are more able to connect with ourselves.
The more connected we are with ourselves, the more energy we have to bring outward to our relationships with others.
We’re all hostile somewhat because we’ve all experienced disconnection.
We’re all mistrustful of other humans because we’ve all been mistreated at one time or another, and pain is memorable.
Hostility, like all negative emotions, reinforces itself.
When you expect people to hurt you, you feel disconnected, which makes it hard to connect with people.
When other people see someone with an orientation of disconnection, they’re more likely to disconnect too.
Disconnected people make more disconnected people.
If you cause one person to be more hostile to you, it affects all of your other relationships.
Relating is a skill. Bad relating now makes you worse at relating in general.
Every relationship gives us the chance to practice good relating.
When we have a relationship that’s sustainable and energizing, it comes from good relating, balanced exchanges.
Exchanges?
We talk, we listen. We follow, we lead. We give support, we accept it.
Energizing relationships, built from balanced talking/listening, following/leading, giving/accepting, make us even better at relating.
They make all of our other relationships better too.
Relating is something we don’t just do with other people, but also with ourselves.
Self-forgiveness, like all positive emotions, reinforces itself.
When you forgive yourself for mistakes you’ve made, it’s the opposite of being your own enemy.
It’s being your own friend.
Not forgiving is not just the absence of forgiveness. It’s the presence of a grudge.
Forgiving yourself improves your inner relationship.
Forgiving ourselves reminds us that our life is big.
When we’re reminded of our relational nature, our connectedness, we remember how big our life really is.
Much bigger than we tend to feel on a daily basis.
When you feel that your life is big, you see more possibilities, more approachable experiences.
Forgiving yourself is not easy. It starts like this.
“I am human.”
One of the biggest reasons we can’t forgive ourselves is that we think we should be more than human.
And you (yes, you) almost get away with it sometimes, which is the real problem.
We all have superhuman moments, but they are (and must be) very rare.
Because we’re HUMAN.
Because you’re so smart and talented at that thing (yeah, that thing; you know what I’m talking about), you think that you should be having superhuman moments all the time.
Wake up.
Forgiving yourself starts with reminding yourself that you are no more, and no less, than a human being.
Have you seen human beings recently? We’re a mess.
But apparently we can stay sharper in the brain if we don’t blame ourselves for our mess.
Instead, maybe we can do what the best humans do and play in the mess.
