奇速英语

放“过去”一马，和自己和解

Many people still carry the burden of their childhoods on their shoulders and in their hearts, even though they are vastly different people now. Most painfully, many people haven’t made peace with their former selves. This inability to live their adult lives based on who they are rather than who they were interferes with many aspects of their current lives including their happiness, personal growth, goal attainment, and relationships. Given these challenges, how do you make peace with your past self so you can live a life of meaning, satisfaction, and joy with the latest version of you? Here are some steps.

1. Embrace Your Humanity

When you embrace your humanity, you accept that you don’t always act in admirable ways, particularly when you are young and are driven more by your unconscious urges than conscious choices. I use the word “embrace” because, after perhaps decades of distancing yourself from your past self, you can now give your younger self the embrace you have longed for for so long and, along with it, the love you craved then and have craved ever since.

2. Acceptance

You were who you were, you did what you did, and there is nothing you can do to rewrite the past. You have likely suffered sufficiently for your wrongs with perhaps daily self-punishments and certainly a particularly painful kind of long mental suffering. Accept your past self and then move on. Though you can’t change the past, you can create a future that can help you atone for that past.

3. Be the Best Version of Yourself

Another aspect of your ability to alter the future is to make intentional choices to not be the person you once were and to be the person you wish you had been in the past. Who do you want to be? What values do you wish to live by? What attitudes and beliefs do you want to guide your life? And, ultimately, what impact do you want to have on your world? From these thoughts, you will identify and can then strive to be the best version of yourself.