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Key points
- A person's past can direct what they think, what they feel, how they behave, and how they interact.
- The influence of one's past self can often be unhealthy for one's present self.
- Empathy, embracing humanity, forgiveness, and acceptance can help people make peace with their past selves.
- Taking ownership, making amends, being the best version of ourselves, and living our best life are our future.
At one level, I’m always amazed at how so many of us allow our past selves to have such a big impact on who we are now and how we think, feel, and engage with our world in adulthood. At another level, I’m not the least bit surprised because our childhood experiences that shape our early selves are met by such inexperienced and naïve versions of ourselves.
When we are young, we are unable to put those experiences in the context of our lives and manage the strong and unfamiliar emotions we feel. We lack the pre-frontal cortex development that would enable us to create understanding and perspective, allowing us to manage those early life experiences more effectively.
It is not uncommon for me to hear people discuss their early selves using words like hate, blame, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and revulsion, even decades later. They still carry the burden of their childhoods on their shoulders and in their hearts, even though they are vastly different people now, infused with experience, insights, and perspectives that you might think would enable them to separate themselves from those less developed iterations of themselves. And, most painfully, because 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, the $64,000 question is: 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? In my professional and personal journeys, I have discovered eight steps you can take to find that equanimity with your earlier self that is required for you to feel that same way with your present self.
1. Empathy
Empathy is where your journey to peace with your past self must begin. Without being able to feel what the younger you felt, you won’t be able to accept, much less embrace or provide succor to, that earlier version of yourself. Whatever you did or think you did when you were young, you must understand that you didn’t choose to be that way. Instead, you were a victim of your culture (e.g., family, peer, popular, societal) and just trying to survive what was, in your limited life experience, an overwhelming situation.
Looking at your past self through the lens of empathy will hopefully elicit a response of “I really see and understand you now.” It can also evoke feelings of concern, caring, and compassion that will draw your earlier self toward you instead of other feelings of anger and hurt that have caused you to repel that younger you.
2. Embrace Your Humanity
A key aspect of what has kept you from making peace with your past self is that you felt ashamed for who you saw, a flawed being not worthy of love or respect. Yet, it is those very qualities that you came to revile that, in fact, make you so worthy of both because those imperfections are what make us human.
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. This acceptance of all aspects of your humanity—the sublime, the mundane, and, yes, even the unprincipled—relieves you of the low (and unfair) opinion you hold of yourself and, in a sense, absolves you of your perceived sins (used in the secular sense of the word). In doing so, you remove the painful emotions I described above that you have felt for your past self for so many years.
I use the word “embrace” deliberately because, after perhaps decades of distancing yourself from your past self, giving that earlier you the cold shoulder for being the awful person you believed yourself to be (which only added insult to injury), you can now give your younger self the literal and metaphorical embrace you have yearned for for so long and, along with it, the love you craved then and have craved ever since.
3. Forgiveness
From the first two steps, empathy and embracing your humanity, you can now forgive yourself for the perceived transgressions of your youth. You weren’t a bad person by birth or upbringing. You didn’t choose or intend to do bad things. Instead, you were vulnerable, impressionable, in need, and knew no other way to act.
As I said above, you were a victim and just trying to manage an untenable situation. Your younger self deserves to be forgiven. And, perhaps even more, so does your current self for carrying the weight of your former self on your shoulders for so long.
4. Acceptance
With empathy, embracing your humanity, and forgiveness comes 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-flagellations and certainly a particularly painful kind of long psychic imprisonment.
Accept your past self and then move on. It’s time to grant your past self-parole because, just by being on this journey, you are demonstrating that you have been rehabilitated. Though you can’t change the past, you can create a future that can help you atone for that past.
5. Ownership
The four previous steps don’t free you of responsibility for your actions when you were young. You may have acted badly and hurt others. You do not get a “get out of jail free” card just for forgiving and accepting yourself. That might make you feel better, but it doesn’t reverse the harm you may have inflicted on others.
To make peace with your past self, you must take what may be the most uncomfortable course of action, namely, to own what you did and take full responsibility for your early behavior (“I did that, I was wrong, and I am so sorry”). That willingness to own your past shows tremendous strength and bodes well for owning your future.
6. Make Amends
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to go back in time and correct everything you did that you regretted? Unfortunately, you don’t have that transtemporal capability, at least not for going back in time. But you do have that seemingly magical capacity to go forward in time, and that is where you can make amends. Until you develop the ability to travel back in time, the future is the only place to redeem yourself with good deeds.
7. 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 deliberations, you will identify and can then strive to be the best version of yourself.
8. Live Your Best Life
When you make peace with your earlier self, you remove the weight of your past from your shoulders and are liberated to live your best life. What does “best life” mean? That is a question that is deeply personal, and only you can answer.
Defining and operationalizing your “best life” can come from profound explorations of what meaning and purpose you attach to life, what values you prioritize, what your aspirations are, what you find fulfilling, and what brings you joy and contentment. Once you answer these deep questions, you will have a clear path toward who you want to be and what you want to do in the present and into the future. And when you continue your journey with those questions answered, you truly leave your past behind you and can chart a course toward a remarkable future.
