Forgiving Your 2019 Self

Forgiving Your 2019 Self

Practicing Self-Forgiveness When You Have Persisting Post-Concussion Syndrome or mTBI

It’s the New Year. This is the time when all sorts of self-help articles appear. About new beginnings. About living more purposefully. About setting and meeting goals. About living a better life in 2020. That’s great— and many of these will be useful. I might even write a few of these, too. 

 But before you turn over that new leaf, I think there is one helpful step that’s worth taking beforehand. And that step is saying goodbye to 2019— by forgiving yourself. 

 What do I mean?

If you have a mild TBI or other mild brain injury, you probably blame yourself for a lot of things that happened over the past year. I know this, from experience, as a coach, therapist and person with his own mTBI. 

It could be that you blame yourself for mistakes stemming from your memory problems. It could be that you blame yourself for having little or no filter on what you say to people. It could be that you failed to start projects or lost altitude on them.  There also might have been situations which you wish you’d handled better with the people you love— or situations at work— where you got irritable or annoyed too easily. 

In my experience, people with brain injuries blame themselves for a whole lot of things— even when they know intellectually that these things are not their fault, but instead a result of their brain injury. They blame themselves even when other people tell them they shouldn’t. 

The self-blame can be even worse for people with persistent mild brain injuries: they don’t know whether their mistakes truly stem from their mild brain injuries, or if they indicate some fundamental character flaw. There are far less people telling them not to blame themselves, since their symptoms are more subtle and inconsistent. In fact, there is a whole body of literature that denies any lasting effects of mild brain injury, and insinuates that people reporting continued symptoms are faking or exaggerating them to gain financial compensation. And that attitude tends to filter down among some medical professionals. 

And more often than not, individuals with persistent mild brain injuries beat themselves up or question their own fundamental competence after they’ve made a couple of mistakes.

If none of this describes your experience, then great! You can stop reading this article now. 

But if any of this applies to you, I want to propose you do something radical, when you look back on your 2019. 

And that is to forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself for being flawed, for struggling more than you used to or more than the average person does; allow yourself to be imperfect, to have bad days, to not have it all figured out. 

Forgiving yourself doesn’t mean accepting failure. It doesn’t mean you have to stop trying to improve in 2020. You are constantly improving, and each year, you can rebuild or reinvent yourself— even with a brain injury. Forgiving yourself means accepting yourself, as a flawed human being who is learning to become a better version of yourself, going forward. And forgiving yourself will clear out the emotional and cognitive space that you will need so you can become a better version of yourself in 2020. 

If you’re open to that idea, try the following exercise: 

1) Take a piece of paper and write down 3-4 things you want to forgive yourself for doing— or not doing— in 2019. These can be anything— bad habits, self-sabotaging behaviors, unhelpful ways of thinking, becoming debilitated by emotions that snowballed on you.

2) Leave room after each thing you write. 

3) In the space you left below each thing you want to forgive yourself for, write something similar to the following: “While it would have been preferable if I had not ______________, I am an imperfect human being, and I am still learning. I forgive myself for this mistake.” 

4) Put the sheet of paper you filled out into a folder and file it away somewhere out of sight, but in a place where you can remember its location, in case you need to refer back to it.

5) Create a new list at the end of the month and repeat this process.

It may take awhile to fully internalize this acceptance of yourself and your imperfection. That’s OK. Try this out, anyway, for the next few months. You will see a difference in the way you feel, eventually.

May you find peace about your 2019. And may you then find focus and purpose for your 2020.