Be Kind to Yourself

By Matt Mirabile, June 2021

Everyone blows it. Your progress will never be a straight line up and forward. Every day brings new challenges, and some of them knock us down. Sometimes the difference between staying down for days, or even weeks, and moving on is a simple as being kind to yourself.

People that have trauma in their backgrounds are very hard on themselves. They do not forgive themselves and believe they need to grovel for a while. It seems they need to beat themselves up for a while. They often believe they don't deserve to feel better. The problem with this is it guarantees we will stay down and in the dumps. It also stimulates the wrong circuits in the brain. The ones that keep us feeling badly.

One way of turning things around and stimulating the right circuits in the brain is to forgive ourselves, and to do it quickly. This turns off the production of hormones that and circuits that keep us bound up in despair and self-punishment and allow us to return to a more sane state of being. When we forgive ourselves (and others) we can clear ourselves of the emotional tempest that saps so much energy and see our conditions clearly, with more sanity.