Lifestyle

Self-forgiveness is more than self-comfort − a philosopher explains

Self-forgiveness requires confronting negative emotions, acknowledging wrongdoing, and is essential for moral growth and healthier relationships.

Published

8 hours ago

October 7, 2024

The Conversation

Mordechai Gordon, Quinnipiac University

As the Jewish High Holidays approach, which begin with Rosh Hashanah and continue with Yom Kippur, the theme of forgiveness keeps coming to my mind.

The 10 days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur are referred to in the Jewish tradition as the days of repentance, or the days of awe. During this period, Jews who observe the holidays implore God to respond to their sins with mercy, while also requesting forgiveness from anyone those individuals may have wronged in the past year.

Most conversations about forgiveness focus on the meaning and value of forgiving others. Douglas Stewart, a philosopher of education who has researched forgiveness extensively, writes that to forgive implies a willingness to let go of our negative emotions or hard feelings and to adopt in their place a more generous and compassionate attitude toward our wrongdoers.

Other philosophers have pointed out that the benefits of forgiveness include overcoming resentment, restoring relationships and setting a wrong to rest in the past – without vengeance. As such, to forgive should be considered morally valuable and admirable.

But what about self-forgiveness? Is it morally valuable, or just something we do to make ourselves feel better? And what is self-forgiveness, anyway?

As a philosopher of education, some of my own research has wrestled with these questions.

A man with white hair and a red polo shirt throws small white pieces of bread over a wooden bridge into a stream below. — During Tashlich, a ceremony on Rosh Hashanah, people symbolically cast away their sins by throwing bits of bread into flowing water. Bill Greene/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Defining self-forgiveness

Self-forgiveness means managing to work through painful feelings such as guilt, shame and deep disappointment with ourselves. It entails transforming negative attitudes, such as contempt, anger and shame, into more positive emotions such as respect and humility.

It is important to recognize, however, that a wrongdoer cannot simply reject shame: They must confront it. Moral philosophers such as Byron Williston assert that people who have deeply wronged others, such as betraying a loved one, need to experience shame and take responsibility for their actions – such as asking for forgiveness. Otherwise, an attempt at self-forgiveness is not likely to be meaningful.

Finally, we need to keep in mind that self-forgiveness does not imply someone has extinguished all the negative feelings directed at themselves or is done with self-reproach. This would amount to an impossible goal.

Rather, as philosopher Robin Dillon pointed out, self-forgiveness suggests that someone is no longer being consumed or overwhelmed by those negative feelings. In short, it is possible to forgive ourselves and still view ourselves with a demanding and critical eye.

Moral development

Getting there, though, is not easy. Self-forgiveness entails working through a rigorous process of coming to terms with wrongdoing.

According to ethicist Margaret Holmgren, that process includes at least four steps: acknowledging that what we did was wrong; coming to terms with why it was wrong; allowing ourselves to experience grief and self-resentment at having injured another person; and, finally, making a genuine effort to correct the attitudes that led to the harmful act and making amends to the victim.

In other words, confronting negative emotions, attitudes and patterns is essential prior to attempting to restore relationships with others. Only once we are able to relax the preoccupation with guilt and shame, and to genuinely forgive ourselves, can we meaningfully contribute to relationships as liberated and equal partners – especially in ongoing ones, such as with family and friends.

A close-up photo of two people clutching both of each other's hands. — Self-forgiveness isn’t just self-serving. Jasmin Merdan/Moment via Getty Images

Of course, there are cases in which the offense is so vast, such as genocide, that no individual can make full restitution or provide an adequate apology for the wrong.

There are other times when an apology is impossible. Perhaps victims are dead; perhaps a direct apology would retraumatize them or do more harm than good.

In those cases, I would argue, an offender can still attempt to work toward self-forgiveness – acknowledging not only the victim’s intrinsic worth but their own, regardless of their ability to make amends. This in itself is moral growth: appreciating that neither is a mere object that can be manipulated or abused.

The take-home point, I would argue, is that going through the process of self-forgiveness is morally beneficial. It can not only liberate people who tend to reproach themselves incessantly, but it can enhance their ability to relate ethically toward others – to acknowledge wrongdoing, while simultaneously affirming their own value.

Most people have experienced at least one situation in which they inflicted pain on someone else and recognized that their words or actions caused harm. In such situations, we also often feel ashamed of ourselves and attempt to apologize or make amends.

Yet I hope that during this High Holiday season we keep in mind that self-forgiveness should also be considered essential. If moral development means a process in which our self-awareness and character mature, then acknowledging wrongdoing and experiencing shame, followed by self-forgiveness, are indispensable for that process.

Mordechai Gordon, Professor of Education, Quinnipiac University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Our Lifestyle section on STM Daily News is a hub of inspiration and practical information, offering a range of articles that touch on various aspects of daily life. From tips on family finances to guides for maintaining health and wellness, we strive to empower our readers with knowledge and resources to enhance their lifestyles. Whether you’re seeking outdoor activity ideas, fashion trends, or travel recommendations, our lifestyle section has got you covered. Visit us today at https://stmdailynews.com/category/lifestyle/ and embark on a journey of discovery and self-improvement.

Discover more from Daily News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Tell us what did you think about this article?Cancel reply

health and wellness

Protecting Your Lung Health at Any Age

Published

2 days ago

October 6, 2024

Daily News Staff

(Family Features) Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, is a serious lung condition that makes breathing difficult. Whether you’re a younger adult, middle-aged or over 60, you can take steps to protect your lungs or manage your COPD to feel better, be more active and breathe easier. Follow these tips from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to bring your lung health into focus – at any age. Learn more at nhlbi.nih.gov/BreatheBetter.

SOURCE:
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

Discover more from Daily News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

health and wellness

Mixed emotions – neuroscience is exploring how your brain lets you experience two opposite feelings at once

The article explores the concept of mixed emotions, particularly in meaningful life transitions like a child’s first day at college. It discusses scientific research on how mixed emotions are represented in the brain, highlighting that certain brain regions can process complex states allowing simultaneous positive and negative feelings.

Published

2 days ago

October 6, 2024

The Conversation

mixed emotions — Can you hold a positive emotion simultaneously with a negative one? Dimitri Otis/Stone via Getty Images

Anthony Gianni Vaccaro, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Countless parents across the country recently dropped their kids off at college for the first time. This transition can stir a whirlwind of feelings: the heartache of parting, sadness over a permanently changed family dynamic, the uncertainty of what lies ahead – but also the pride of seeing your child move toward independence. Some might describe the goodbye as bittersweet, or say that they’re feeling mixed emotions.

In that scenario, what would you do if I asked you to rate how you felt on a scale from 1-9, with 1 being the most negative and 9 the most positive? This question seems silly given the circumstances – how should you rate this blend of bad and good? Yet, this scale is what psychology researchers often use to survey feelings in scientific studies, treating emotions as either positive or negative, but never both.

I’m a neuroscientist who studies how mixed emotions are represented in the brain. Do people ever truly feel both positive and negative at the same time? Or do we just switch quickly back and forth?

What emotions do for you

Scientists sometimes define emotions as states of the brain and body that motivate you toward or away from things. People typically experience them as either positive or negative.

If you’re walking in the woods and see a bear, your heart rate and breathing accelerate, giving you the urge to flee – likely helping you make a decision that keeps you alive. Many scientists would label that reaction as the emotion of “fear.”

Similarly, warm feelings around loved ones make you want to stay around them and nurture those relationships, helping strengthen your social network and support system.

This approach-and-avoid view of emotions helps explain why emotions evolved and how they affect decision-making. Scientists have used it as a guiding principle when trying to figure out the biology behind emotions.

But mixed emotions do not fit into this framework. If opposite biological systems inhibit each other, and if emotions are biological, you can’t experience opposites in the same moment. This reasoning would mean it’s impossible to hold two opposite emotions at once; you must instead be flipping back and forth. Ever since scientists proposed the first theories on the biological foundations of emotion, this is how they’ve conceptualized mixed emotions.

woman with arms on younger man's shoulders by back of a packed car, both smiling — The pride, love and sadness that mingle when a parent drops off a child at college comprise a classic mixture of emotions. fstop123/E+ via Getty Images

Untangling the biology of mixed emotions

Mainstream methods for measuring feelings still treat positive and negative as opposite sides of a spectrum. But researchers find that study participants commonly report mixed emotions.

For instance, people across cultures experience some feelings, such as nostalgia and awe, as simultaneously positive and negative.

One research group found that volunteers’ physiological responses – such as heart rate and skin conductance – display unique patterns during experiences that are both disgusting and funny, compared with either category separately. This implies that disgusted and amused reactions are indeed occurring simultaneously to create something new.

In a seemingly contradictory finding, research that used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study brain responses to disgusting humor did not find a pattern of brain activity that was distinct from plain disgust. The brain states of people reporting being both disgusted and amused seemed to reflect only disgust – not a unique pattern for a new mixed emotion.

But fMRI studies generally rely on averaging brain activity across people and time. The heart of the question – experiencing truly mixed emotions versus fluctuating between positive and negative states – concerns what the brain is doing over time. It is possible that by looking at the average brain activity across time, scientists end up with a pattern that looks a lot like one emotion – in this case, disgust – but are missing important information about how activity changes or stays the same second-to-second.

Mixed emotions in the brain

To dig in to that possibility, I ran a study to see whether mixed emotions were related to a unique brain state that held steady over time.

While in the MRI machine, participants watched a bittersweet animated short film about a young girl’s lifelong pursuit, with her father’s support, to become an astronaut. Spoiler alert: Her dad dies. After scanning, those same subjects rewatched the video and labeled the exact times they had felt positive, negative and mixed emotions.

cartoon man and child embrace on left, four stylized brains on right with various splotches of red and blue — Researchers looked for brain areas with above average (red) or below average (blue) activity during moments in Taiko Studio’s ‘One Small Step’ that elicited mixed emotions. Taiko Studios and University of Southern California Dornsife Office of Communications

My colleagues and I discovered that mixed emotions didn’t show unique, consistent patterns in deeper brain areas like the amygdala, which plays an important role in quick responses to emotionally important items. Strikingly, the insular cortex, a part of the brain that connects deeper brain regions with the cortex, had consistent and unique patterns for both positive and negative emotions, but not for mixed ones. We took this finding to mean that regions such as the amygdala and insular cortex were processing positive and negative emotions as mutually exclusive.

But we did see unique, consistent patterns in cortical regions such as the anterior cingulate, which plays an important role in processing conflict and uncertainty, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is important for self-regulation and complex thinking.

These brain regions in the cortex that carry out more advanced functions appear to represent much more complex states, allowing someone to truly feel a mixed emotion. Brain regions such as the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate many sources of information – essential for being able to form a mixed emotion.

Our findings also fit with what scientists know about brain and emotional development. Interestingly, kids do not begin to understand or report mixed emotions until later in childhood. This timeline matches up with what researchers know about how development of these brain regions leads to more advanced emotional regulation and understanding.

What happens next

This study revealed something new about how complex feelings are formed in the brain, but there is much more to learn.

Mixed emotions are so interesting, in part, because of their potential role during important life events. Sometimes, mixed emotions help you cope with big changes and turn into cherished memories. For example, you may experience both positive and negative feelings when your friends throw a big going away party before you move to another city for your dream job.

Other times, mixed emotions are an ongoing source of distress. Even if you know you should break up with a romantic partner, that doesn’t mean all the positive feelings you have about them automatically go away, or that a split won’t bring some pain.

What leads to this difference in outcome? Might these differences have to do with how the brain represents these mixed emotional states over time? A better understanding of mixed emotions might help people make sure these kinds of strong feelings become cherished memories that help them grow, instead of a distressing goodbye they fail to get over. https://www.youtube.com/embed/IoVbd_dZYMk?wmode=transparent&start=0 Mixed feelings elicited unique neural activity in particular areas of the brain.

Anthony Gianni Vaccaro, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Discover more from Daily News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

health and wellness

Can you change your personality? Psychology research says yes, by tweaking what you think and do

Published

4 days ago

October 4, 2024

The Conversation

Shannon Sauer-Zavala, University of Kentucky

Have you ever taken a personality test? If you’re like me, you’ve consulted BuzzFeed and you know exactly which Taylor Swift song “perfectly matches your vibe.”

It might be obvious that internet quizzes are not scientific, but many of the seemingly serious personality tests used to guide educational and career choices are also not supported by research. Despite being a billion-dollar industry, commercial personality testing used by schools and corporations to funnel people into their ideal roles do not predict career success.

Beyond their lack of scientific support, the most popular approaches to understanding personality are problematic because they assume your traits are static – that is, you’re stuck with the personality you’re born with. But modern personality science studies find that traits can and do change over time.

In addition to watching my own personality change over time from messy and lazy to off the charts in conscientiousness, I’m also a personality change researcher and clinical psychologist. My research confirms what I saw in my own development and in my patients: People can intentionally shape the traits they need to be successful in the lives they want. That’s contrary to the popular belief that your personality type places you in a box, dictating that you choose partners, activities and careers according to your traits.

What personality is and isn’t

According to psychologists, personality is your characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Are you a person who tends to think about situations in your life more pessimistically, or are you a glass-half-full kind of person?

Do you tend to get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic, or are you more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe they’re rushing to the hospital?

Do you wait until the last minute to complete tasks, or do you plan ahead?

You can think of personality as a collection of labels that summarize your responses to questions like these. Depending on your answers, you might be labeled as optimistic, empathetic or dependable.

Research suggests that all these descriptive labels can be summarized into five overarching traits – what psychologists creatively refer to as the “Big Five.”

As early as the 1930s, psychologists literally combed through a dictionary to pull out all the words that describe human nature and sorted them in categories with similar themes. For example, they grouped words like “kind,” “thoughtful” and “friendly” together. They found that thousands of words could be accounted for by sorting them between five traits: neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness.

cartoon graphic of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism — Personality traits can be sorted into the ‘Big Five’ categories. They describe how you act but not necessarily the essence of who you are. Whale Design/iStock via Getty Images Plus

What personality is not: People often feel protective about their personality – you may view it as the core of who you are. According to scientific definitions, however, personality is not your likes, dislikes or preferences. It’s not your sense of humor. It’s not your values or what you think is important in life.

In other words, shifting your Big Five traits does not change the core of who you are. It simply means learning to respond to situations in life with different thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Can you change your personality?

Can personality change? Remember, personality is a person’s characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving. And while it might sound hard to change personality, people change how they think, feel and behave all the time.

Suppose you’re not super dependable. If you start to think “being on time shows others that I respect them,” begin to feel pride when you arrive to brunch before your friends, and engage in new behaviors that increase your timeliness – such as getting up with an alarm, setting appointment reminders and so on – you are embodying the characteristics of a reliable person. If you maintain these changes to your thinking, emotions and behaviors over time – voila! – you are reliable. Personality: changed.

Data confirms this idea. In general, personality changes across a person’s life span. As people age, they tend to experience fewer negative emotions and more positive ones, are more conscientious, place greater emphasis on positive relationships and are less judgmental of others.

There is variability here, though. Some people change a lot and some people hold pretty steady. Moreover, studies, including my own, that test whether personality interventions change traits over time find that people can speed up the process of personality change by making intentional tweaks to their thinking and behavior. These tweaks can lead to meaningful change in less than 20 weeks, instead of 20 years.

woman in an office leans back in her chair and looks into distance — Identifying patterns that your thoughts frequently fall into can be the first step toward making a change. Maskot via Getty Images

Cultivating personality traits that serve you best

The good news is that these cognitive-behavioral techniques are relatively simple, and you don’t need to visit a therapist if that’s not something you’re into.

The first component involves changing your thinking patterns – this is the cognitive piece. You need to become aware of your thoughts to determine whether they’re keeping you stuck acting in line with a particular trait. For example, if you find yourself thinking “people are only looking out for themselves,” you are likely to act defensively around others.

The behavioral component involves becoming aware of your current action tendencies and testing out new responses. If you are defensive around other people, they will probably respond negatively to you. When they withdraw or snap at you, for example, it then confirms your belief that you can’t trust others. By contrast, if you try behaving more openly – perhaps sharing with a co-worker that you’re struggling with a task – you have the opportunity to see whether that changes the way others act toward you.

These cognitive-behavioral strategies are so effective for nudging personality because personality is simply your characteristic way of thinking and behaving. Consistently making changes to your perspective and actions can lead to lasting habits that ultimately result in crafting the personality you desire.

Shannon Sauer-Zavala, Associate Professor of Psychology & Licensed Clinical Psychologist, University of Kentucky

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.