forgiveness Archives - Amazing Health Advances

How To Move on Without an Apology

The AHA! Team — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:59:31 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #470) and blog, I talk about how to move on without an apology. Unfortunately, there will be times in life when someone hurts you and refuses to apologize, regardless of what you say or do. Here are just a few tips to help you when this happens: -Recognize and honor what happened to you. Remind yourself that it is not just “in your head”. You don’t need someone to admit they hurt you to validate what happened to you. -Allow yourself to feel the pain and emotions. Acknowledge how the person made you feel. Their lack of apology doesn’t mean it was okay, and you can be sad or upset about it. -Put boundaries up, especially if someone keeps hurting you or taking advantage of you. You may even have to pause or end the relationship—don’t feel guilty about this. Part of keeping someone accountable may include taking away their access to you. But make sure these boundaries are healthy and not just a distraction from your pain. For more on healthy versus toxic boundaries, listen to my recent podcast. Work on forgiving the person who hurt you even if they don’t apologize -Work on forgiving the person who hurt you even if they don’t apologize to disentangle yourself from the pain. For more on this, listen to my recent podcast on forgiveness. -Explore the “why” behind your feelings, and a great way to do this is using the using the Neurocycle mind management method, which I discuss in detail in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and my app Neurocycle. The Neurocycle is a way to harness your thinking power that I have developed and researched over the past three decades. It has 5 steps: Gather awareness of how you feel mentally and physically when you think about what happened. Reflect on how you feel. Why do you think you feel this way? Write down your reflections to help organize your thinking. Recheck: think about what your thoughts and feelings are trying to tell you. What does it say about how you view the person/situation? What is your antidote—how will you take action to protect your mental health and take control of your story? Look for clues in your writing, then start to reconceptualize the way you are thinking about what happened and the person who hurt you. Do your active reach. This is a thought or action you need to practice daily to help you reconceptualize what you worked on in the previous steps. What are you going to do to protect your own wellbeing and boundaries? What action steps are you going to take? Remember that you can’t fix or change the person who is impacting you in a negative way—don’t try to force someone to apologize. Focus on your own response and healing. Remember that moving forward and healing doesn’t depend on someone’s apology. Don’t give that person this power over you. Remind yourself that you get to write your own story. You cannot control the circumstances of life, but you can control your reaction to what happens to you. You have power over your own story, and you do not have to stay connected to the person who harmed you. For more on moving on without an apology, listen to my podcast (episode #470). Podcast Highlights 0:50 What happens when someone hurts you & doesn’t apologize 2:08 Tips to manage your mental health when someone doesn’t apologize 5:47, 15:57 How to use mind management to heal when someone hurts you This podcast and blog are for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical advice. We always encourage each person to make the decision that seems best for their situation with the guidance of a medical professional. To read the original article click here.

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One of the Best Mental Health Lessons from Ted Lasso

AHA Publisher — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 08:00:02 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #348) and blog, I talk about the importance of compassion and forgiveness, and how these qualities impact our wellbeing. I recently started watching a popular show on Apple TV called Ted Lasso. Some of you may have heard about it, and some of you may have even watched it already! For those who don’t know what the show is about, here is a brief description: (Spoiler Alert) Jason Sudeikis plays Ted Lasso, an American football coach who is hired by a football club in England (and by “football” here I mean what we call soccer). He knows little about soccer but takes the job anyway. We find out early on that Hannah Wadingham, who plays a character named Rebecca, is the owner of the soccer club. Rebecca recently got divorced from her husband, and they used to own the club together. Her former husband is a very prideful man who cheated on her and treated her badly. She ended up winning complete ownership of the club through the divorce settlement, and she wanted to hire an inexperienced coach so that she could ruin the reputation of the club and hurt her former husband Rupert (played by Anthony Head). Apparently, the club was one of the things her ex-husband loved, and she was trying to ruin it to hurt him the way he hurt her. The character of Ted Lasso comes across as an all-around loveable and nice person. He truly wants to understand those around him, and he works hard trying to get to know people. From the very first episode, he starts to bring Rebecca homemade cookies, which she loves. There’s not a day that goes by that he does not do this small act of kindness. Rebecca, however, is so focused on her revenge that she disregards the people that she has in her life in the present, including Ted. She has an assistant named Higgins (played by Jeremy Swift) who she constantly puts down, who himself is facing a moral dilemma because he wants to work for her but does not feel good about helping her destroy the club. Her best friend Flo, played by Ellie Taylor, has a daughter who Rebecca has lost contact with over the years, even though she is her godmother. In the show, we witness an exchange between them when Flo tells Rebecca that her daughter misses her godmother and can’t understand why she isn’t in her life anymore. Meanwhile, Rebecca, in her mission to ruin the club, hires paparazzi to take photos of Lasso with Keely (played by Juno Temple), the girlfriend of one of the club’s star players, to make it look as if they were romantically involved. This would have severely hurt both Keely and Ted’s reputations and affected the morale of the whole team. Thankfully, in this particular episode, Keely manages to stop the story from being published. Yet Rebecca still tries to do this even though Ted and Keely had been so kind to her. While watching this all play out, I noticed a connection between how much pain Rebecca was in from the trauma that she experienced from her divorce AND how much pain it was causing her and the people in her life as she held onto her anger and tried to get back at Rupert. Of course, I believe that Rebecca’s anger is valid, and that the character of her ex-husband is an awful person who used and mistreated her. Her experiences are very real, and affected her mental and physical wellbeing. Our experiences are wired into the brain by the mind, which, in turn, can affect how we feel and our overall health. However, Rebecca felt that the only solution to her pain was to hurt Rupert in a similar way, and that this was also causing her pain. Rebecca was constantly worrying about her plan for revenge, which made her overlook the incredible people who were still in her life. For example, when Keely found out that Rebecca hired the paparazzi, she was extremely hurt because of the friendship they had developed, and she felt like Rebecca had broken her trust. Likewise, Rebecca’s assistant Higgins ended up quitting because he was suffering emotional trauma from the way that Rebecca treated him and did not like being a part of her plan to ruin the reputation of the soccer club. A defining moment in Rebecca’s life occurred in episode 9 of season 1, where she found out her ex-husband was having a child with his new fiancé. This was one of the hardest things to watch because you can clearly see Rebecca’s deep feelings of pain and grief. It was clear that she had always wanted a child while she had been married Rupert, and he had made her put it off. Now, she has lost her opportunity to become a mother, and this news broke her. Her response to the whole situation was still incredible. She could have shut down and gotten more bitter, and tried even harder to get revenge on her husband. But instead, there was a shift in her mindset—she chose to change the way she reacted to what was happening to her and hope <-?? her experiences played out in her brain, body and life. Rebecca decided to confess to Ted about how she organized the paparazzi and how she only hired Ted to ruin the reputation of the club. She admitted everything, and reached out to the people in her life when she was in a place of extreme brokenness. Ted responded with so much forgiveness and compassion that it completely shocked Rebecca. She fully expected anger and hate from him because those were the emotions she experienced from her ex-husband, and those were the emotions that had dominated her mind because of the grief and trauma of her ugly divorce. But this anger and desire for revenge had only made her brokenness worse. Rebecca realized she was not able to ever fully heal as long as she stayed in this dark mental place. When she experienced Ted’s compassion, she suddenly felt free from the pain she was experiencing—it didn’t just go away, but she did realize that it didn’t have to dominate her life. There was another way to live! You could literally see this change in her facial expressions and her whole body, as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. It’s as if she was finally able to let go of the toxic anger that was breaking her down because someone she respected accepted and loved her, despite everything that had happened. This is such a crucial scene in the show because it shows how extremely important it is to surround yourself with people who will love and accept you, especially in the moments when you feel broken. It also shows that you never know how you will impact someone if you show love and compassion and have grace—you could literally end up transforming a life! At the end of the day, all human beings need compassion and understanding. We are all struggling, and we are all a little bit broken. Sometimes our brokenness causes us to do things that may hurt other people in our life. But true healing comes when we can seek out help and receive love—when we feel safe enough to admit where we made a mistake, and can see how we are all connected and how our actions impact others. We all need all the help we can get as humans in an ever-evolving, hugely complex world, including large doses of gentleness, kindness, and compassion for each other as well as ourselves. We need a new narrative, one where we listen to each other’s narratives and problem-solve through them together. As I discussed in a recent blog and podcast, the brain functions best with a flexible, dynamic balance between specialized, locally segregated activity, and more generalized global integration. Too much segregation and excessive integration can lead to suboptimal functioning. What does all this science mean? Research has shown that training yourself to be more kind and compassionate to both yourself and others can increase your positive emotions, sense of social connectedness and pro-social behaviors, while decreasing your negative feelings, stress and social biases, all of which improve your brain integration, balance and health. This is also why forgiveness and grace are so important. Research shows that the details of a transgression, which can hold us in a viselike grip, are more susceptible to being reconceptualized and even forgotten when we forgive. Unforgiveness keeps the toxic thought tree strong and powerful in your brain, which impedes your healing because it’s still “connected to the source.” This is due to the law of entanglement in quantum physics, which keeps everything in a relationship— toxic or otherwise—entangled, affecting each component. When we forgive, we actually grow a part of our brain called the anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS); the more we grow this area, the easier it will become to manage the pain of a trauma or toxic experience. To read the original article click here.

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Why We Shouldn’t (and Can’t ) Just “Forgive & Forget”

AHA Publisher — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 07:00:45 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #272) and blog, I talk about why forgetting doesn’t fix or heal something. As much we would love to permanently forget the bad things that happen to us, we can’t just erase traumatic events from our memory, as they impact our brain and body. As I have said many times before, thoughts are real physical structures we build into our brain with our mind in response to what we experience. Here’s how this works: how we react or respond to various life situations and the world around us is called the mind-in-action. The mind-in-action is how you uniquely think, feel, and choose. This mind-in-action changes the way your brain is shaped (through neuroplasticity) and how it functions, as well as your biochemistry, and the genes associated with mental and physical health, which is why mind-management is essential! Let’s look at a traumatic experience we are all too familiar with. Our personal experience of COVID-19 is quite literally a physical tree-like structure in our brains with all the associated memories of our unique experiences, which can affect us mentally, emotionally and physically. No matter how much we pretend that this pandemic doesn’t exist, or want to shut our eyes and hope it goes away, we cannot, as it does exist, and our unique experience of it affects us all in different ways, and we all need to find different ways to manage these effects. That is not to say all types of forgetting are bad. We may distract ourselves temporarily to cope in the moment or compartmentalize our experiences to deal with another pressing matter, which is fine and a very human thing to do! However, we cannot escape the long-term mental and physical repercussions of a traumatic experience because it is as real as a virus like COVID-19, eliciting the same immune responses in the brain and body. We cannot just “forget”; we have to learn how to reconceptualize our pain and fears through mind-management, as I discuss in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. In fact, there are some great ways to distract your mind in a healthy way, like the box and windows technique, where you make a mental note to start dealing with the root of the trauma or pain when you are ready. But, at the end of the day, you need to learn to become a healthy responder instead of just reacting to what happens to you, or trying to forget or avoid it. You, with your mind that is always in action, are powerful; you are the ultimate change agent in your life. What does this look like? When you learn how to manage your mind and self-regulate your thinking, this builds healthy neural networks in your brain, which lay the foundation for more cognitive resilience and healthier responses to stressful events. The more you practice this way of thinking, the more you can learn to be a “first responder” in every and all situations. Essentially, you are learning how to catch and edit your thoughts and reactions before they trigger toxic chain reactions and become ingrained neural networks, a.k.a. bad habits. Mind management also teaches us how to embrace, process, and reconceptualize thoughts that have already become enmeshed in the networks of our minds as trauma reactions and negative thinking patterns. This is a lifelong journey, a lifestyle, but one that’s well worth the effort! Indeed, if we don’t transform our pain through reconceptualization, we can transmit it, and it can take over our thinking and relationships. We can get ourselves into serious cycles of toxic rumination and worry if we refuse to face our issues head-on. As I always say, it is in the breakdown that we break down toxic thoughts, habits, and trauma. We all need to learn how to reflect on our experiences in a way that helps us accept that even though we may not be able to make sense of them, we can still deal with them and move forward! To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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