Faithfulness to your own vision, which I wrote about last time, requires a clear relationship with who you are now. But there is a tension that complicates this relationship more than we acknowledge: the way we relate to our younger versions. To the person we were at twenty, to the person who made certain decisions we now look at with embarrassment, regret, or a judgement that is not always fair.
Today's subject is about this reconciliation, not as a sentimental exercise, but as one of the most practical and most liberating moves you can make for the quality of your current life and relationships.
Why do we judge our younger versions so harshly? A few mechanisms worth understanding.
The first is that we judge with the information we have now, not with what we had then. It is the most common and most unjust type of judgement: applying the wisdom of the present to the decisions of the past. Your version at twenty-five did not know what you know now. It had not accumulated the experiences you have since gathered. It made decisions with the tools it had available, which were fewer and less calibrated than those you have today.
The second is that harsh judgement of past versions is sometimes a way of avoiding compassion towards yourself in the present. If I can demonstrate that I was naive or foolish then, I can explain why I do not forgive myself. It is a perverse logic, but a frequent one.
The third is that some past versions produced genuine pain, whether to others or to yourself. And the judgement is, sometimes, an attempt to compensate for that pain or to demonstrate that you are now different, better, more conscious. That you have distanced yourself sufficiently from who you were.
What does this judgement cost? More than it appears.
It costs energy, because carrying a conflictual relationship with your own history is a form of chronic inner conflict that consumes resources without producing anything useful.
It costs authenticity in relationships. People who have not forgiven their past versions tend to hide them. And hiding the past produces a form of distance in current relationships, because you cannot be fully present and fully yourself if part of you is concealed.
It also costs the capacity for genuine growth. If past versions are seen as failures to repudiate, not as stages to integrate, you cannot use what you lived as a resource. You do not learn from them, you deny them.
What does it concretely mean to make peace with your younger versions? It does not mean defending them or minimising what they did wrong. It means looking at them with the eyes of an honest and gentle witness, not a judge.
The honest witness can say: yes, I made a mistake there. Yes, I hurt someone. Yes, I made a poor decision. Without adding: and therefore I am a bad person or and therefore I do not deserve to be forgiven.
There are a few practices that concretely help.
The first is to re-situate the decision. Mentally reconstructing the context in which you made a decision you now regret. What did you know then? What pressures did you have? What fears? What needs? Not to absolve yourself, but to understand. Understanding reduces judgement.
The second is to recognise that your younger versions survived with what they had. And that counts for something. Even the decisions you judge harshly came from the best response available at that moment to the circumstances you had.
The third is to address that version internally with something of what you would have wanted to hear then. Not as a performative therapeutic exercise, but as a sincere move of recognition.
In relationships, not making peace with past versions produces a specific and problematic effect: the transfer of shame or regret into current relationships. The person who has not forgiven how they loved in the past will love with fear in the present. The one who judges themselves for how they treated a previous partner will either be excessively cautious or repetitive in the same pattern, because unforgiven patterns repeat.
Making peace with younger versions is not a one-time destination. It is a continuous practice, because we always change and there will always be versions of ourselves that we will judge from a future perspective. The idea is not to stop growing and stop judging. It is to make judgement an act of recognition, not condemnation.
Think of a version of yourself that you judge most harshly now. What would you need to know about the context that person was in to be able to look at them with more gentleness? And what would change in you if you could do that?
