فصل 10

Chapter TEN

How to Remove Emotional Scars, or How to Give Yourself an Emotional Face-Lift

When you receive a physical injury, such as a cut on the face, your body forms scar tissue that is both tougher and thicker than the original flesh. The purpose of the scar tissue is to form a protective cover or shell, nature’s way of insuring against another injury in the same place. If an ill-fitting shoe rubs against a sensitive part of your foot, the first result is pain and sensitiveness. But again, nature protects against further pain and injury by forming a callus, a protective shell.

We are inclined to do very much the same thing whenever we receive an emotional injury, when someone “hurts” us, or “rubs us the wrong way.” We form emotional or spiritual “scars” for self-protection. We are very apt to become hardened of heart, callous toward the world, and to withdraw within a protective shell.

When Nature Needs an Assist

In forming scar tissue, it is nature’s intention to be helpful. In our modern society, however, scar tissue, especially on the face, can work against us instead of for us. Take George T., for example, a promising young attorney. He was affable, personable, and well on his way to a successful career, when he had an automobile accident that left him with a horrible scar from midway on his left cheek to the left corner of his mouth. Another cut, just over his right eye, pulled his upper eyelid up tightly when it healed, which gave him a grotesque “glaring” appearance. Every time he looked in the bathroom mirror he saw a repulsive image. The scar on his cheek gave him a perpetual “leer,” or what he called an “evil look.” After leaving the hospital, he lost his first case in court, and was sure that his “evil” and grotesque appearance had influenced the jury. He felt that old friends were repelled and repulsed by his appearance. Was it only his imagination that even his own wife flinched slightly when he kissed her?

George T. began to turn down cases. He started drinking during the day. He became irritable, hostile, and something of a recluse.

The scar tissue on his face formed a tough protection against future automobile accidents. But in the society in which George lived, physical injuries to his face were not the primary hazard. He was more vulnerable than ever to social “cuts,” injuries, and hurts. His scars were a liability instead of an asset.

Had George been a primitive man and suffered facial scars from an encounter with a bear or a saber-toothed tiger, his scars would have probably made him more acceptable to his fellows. Even in fairly recent times old soldiers have proudly displayed their “scars of battle,” and in the outlawed dueling societies in Germany, a saber scar was a mark of distinction.

In George’s case, nature had good intentions, but nature needed an assist. I gave George back his old face by plastic surgery, which removed the scar tissue and restored his features.

Following surgery, the personality change in him was remarkable. He became his good-natured, self-confident self again. He stopped drinking. He gave up his lone wolf attitude, moved back into society, and became a member of the human race again. He literally found a “new life.” This new life, however, was brought about only indirectly by plastic surgery on physical tissue. The real curative agent was the removal of emotional scars, the security against social “cuts,” the healing of emotional hurts and injuries, and the restoration of his self-image as an acceptable member of society, which—in his case—surgery made possible.

How Emotional Scars Alienate You from Life

Many people who have inner emotional scars have never suffered physical injuries. And the result on personality is the same. These people have been hurt or injured by someone in the past. To guard against future injury from that source they form a spiritual callus, an emotional scar to protect their ego. This scar tissue, however, not only “protects” them from the individual who originally hurt them—it “protects” them against all other human beings. An emotional wall is built through which neither friend nor foe can pass.

A woman who has been “hurt” by one man takes a vow never to trust any man again. A child who has had his ego sliced up by a despotic and cruel parent or teacher may take a vow never to trust any authority in the future. A man who has had his love rejected by one woman may take a vow never to become emotionally involved with any human being in the future.

As in the case of a facial scar, excessive protection against the original source of injury can make us more vulnerable, and do us even more damage in other areas. The emotional wall that we build as protection against one person cuts us off from all other human beings, and from our real selves. As we have pointed out previously, the person who feels “lonely,” or out of touch with other human beings, also feels out of touch with his real self and with life.

Emotional Scars Help Make Juvenile Delinquents

Psychiatrist Bernard Holland pointed out that although juvenile delinquents appear to be very independent and have the reputation of being braggarts, particularly about how they hate everyone in authority, they protest too much. Underneath this hard exterior shell, said Dr. Holland, “is a soft vulnerable inner person who wants to be dependent upon others.” However, they cannot get close to anyone because they will not trust anyone. Sometime in the past they were hurt by a person important to them, and they dare not leave themselves open to be hurt again. They always have their defenses up. To prevent further rejection and pain, they attack first. Thus, they drive away the very people who would love them, if given half a chance, and could help them.

Emotional Scars Create a Marred and Ugly Self-Image

Emotional scars to our ego also have another adverse effect. They lead to the development of a scarred, marred self-image; the picture of a person not liked or accepted by other human beings; the picture of a person who can’t get along well in the world of people in which he lives.

Emotional scars prevent you from creative living, or being what Dr. Arthur W. Combs called a “self-fulfilled person.” Dr. Combs, professor of educational psychology and counseling at the University of Florida, said that the goal of every human being should be to become a “self-fulfilled person.” This, he said, is not something you’re born with, but must be achieved. Self-fulfilled persons have the following characteristics: 1. They see themselves as liked, wanted, acceptable, and able individuals 2. They have a high degree of acceptance of themselves as they are.

1. They have a feeling of oneness with others.

2. They have a rich store of information and knowledge.

The person with emotional scars not only has a self-image of an unwanted, disliked, and incapable person, he also has an image of the world in which he lives as a hostile place. His primary relationship with the world is one of hostility, and his dealings with other people are not based on giving and accepting, cooperating, working with, enjoying with, but on concepts of overcoming, combating, and protecting from. He can be charitable neither toward others nor toward himself. Frustration, aggression, and loneliness are the price he pays.

Three Rules for Immunizing Yourself Against Emotional Hurts

1. Be Too Big to Feel Threatened

Many people become “hurt” terribly by tiny pinpricks or what we call social “slights.” Everyone knows someone in the family, office, or circle of friends who is so thin-skinned and “sensitive” that others must be continually on guard, lest offense be taken at some innocent word or act.

It is a well-known psychological fact that the people who become offended the easiest have the lowest self-esteem. We are “hurt” by those things we conceive of as threats to our ego or self-esteem. Fancied emotional thrusts that go by unnoticed by the person with wholesome self-esteem slice these people up terribly. Even real “digs” and “cuts,” which inflict a terrible injury to the ego of the person with low self-esteem, do not make a dent in the ego of the person who thinks well of himself. It is the person who feels undeserving, doubts his own capabilities, and has a poor opinion of himself who becomes jealous at the drop of a hat. It is the person who secretly doubts his own worth, and who feels insecure within himself, who sees threats to his ego where there are none, who exaggerates and overestimates the potential damage from real threats.

We all need a certain amount of emotional toughness and ego-security to protect us from real and fancied ego threats. It wouldn’t be wise for our physical body to be covered over completely with a hard callus, or a shell like a turtle’s. We would be denied the pleasure of all sensual feeing. But our body does have a layer of outer skin, the epidermis, for the purpose of protecting us from invasion of bacteria, small bumps and bruises, and small pinpricks. The epidermis is thick enough and tough enough to offer protection against small wounds, but not so thick or hard that it interferes with all feeling. Many people have no epidermis on their ego. They have only the thin, sensitive inner skin. They need to become thicker-skinned, emotionally tougher, so that they will simply ignore petty cuts and minor ego threats.

Also, they need to build up their self-esteem, get a better and more adequate self-image of themselves, so that they will not feel threatened by every chance remark or innocent act. A big, strong man does not feel threatened by a small danger; a little man does. In the same way, a healthy strong ego, with plenty of self-esteem, does not feel itself threatened by every innocent remark.

HEALTHY SELF-IMAGES DO NOT BRUISE EASILY

The person who feels his self-worth is threatened by a slighting remark has a small, weak ego and a small amount of self-esteem. He is “self-centered,” self-concerned, hard to get along with, and what we call “egotistic.” But we do not cure a sick or weak ego by beating it down, undermining it, or making it even weaker through “self-abnegation” or trying to become “selfless.” Self-esteem is as necessary to the spirit as food is to the body. The cure for self-centeredness, self-concern, egotism, and all the ills that go with it, is the development of a healthy, strong ego by building up self-esteem. When a person has adequate self-esteem, little slights offer no threat at all—they are simply “passed over” and ignored. Even deeper emotional wounds are likely to heal faster and cleaner, with no festering sores to poison life and spoil happiness.

1. A Self-Reliant, Responsible Attitude Makes You Less Vulnerable

As Dr. Holland pointed out, the juvenile delinquent with the hard outer shell has a soft, vulnerable inner person who wants to be dependent on others, and wants to be loved by others.

Salesmen tell me that the person who apparently puts up the most sales resistance at the outset is frequently an “easy” sell once you get past his defenses; that people who feel called upon to put up “No Salesmen Allowed” signs do so because they know they are soft touches and need protection.

The person with the hard, gruff exterior usually develops it because instinctively he realizes that he is so soft inside that he needs protection.

The person who has little or no self-reliance, who feels emotionally dependent on others, makes himself most vulnerable to emotional hurts. Every human being wants and needs love and affection. But the creative, self-reliant person also feels a need to give love. His emphasis is as much (or more) on the giving as on the getting. He doesn’t expect love to be handed to him on a silver platter. Nor does he have a compulsive need that “everybody” must love him and approve of him. He has sufficient ego-security to tolerate the fact that a certain number of people will dislike him and disapprove. He feels some sense of responsibility for his life and conceives of himself primarily as one who acts, determines, gives, goes after what he wants, rather than as a person who is the passive recipient of all the good things in life.

The passive-dependent person turns his entire destiny over to other people, circumstances, luck. Life owes him a living and other people owe him consideration, appreciation, love, happiness. He makes unreasonable demands and claims on other people and feels cheated, wronged, hurt, when they aren’t fulfilled. Because life just isn’t built that way, he is seeking the impossible and leaving himself “wide open” to emotional hurts and injuries. Someone has said that the neurotic personality is forever “bumping into” reality.

Develop a more self-reliant attitude. Assume responsibility for your own life and emotional needs. Try giving affection, love, approval, acceptance, understanding to other people, and you will find them coming back to you as a sort of reflex action.

1. Relax Away Emotional Hurts

I once had a patient ask me: “If the forming of scar tissue is a natural and automatic thing, why doesn’t scar tissue form when a plastic surgeon makes an incision?” The answer is that if you cut your face and it “heals naturally,” scar tissue will form, because there is a certain amount of tension in the wound and just underneath the wound that pulls the surface of the skin back, creates a “gap” so to speak, which is filled in by scar tissue. When a plastic surgeon operates, he not only pulls the skin together closely by sutures, he also cuts out a small amount of flesh underneath the skin so that there is no tension present. The incision heals smoothly, evenly, and with no distorting surface scar. It is interesting to note that the same thing happens in the case of an emotional wound. If there is no tension present, there is no disfiguring emotional scar left.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to “get your feelings hurt,” or “take offense,” when you are suffering tensions brought about by frustration, fear, anger, or depression?

We go to work feeling out of sorts, or down in the dumps, or with self-confidence shaken because of some adverse experience. A friend comes by and makes a joking remark. Nine times out of ten we would laugh, think it funny, “think nothing about it,” and make a good-natured crack in return. But not today.

Today, we are suffering tensions of self-doubt, insecurity, anxiety. We “take” the remark in the wrong way, become offended and hurt, and an emotional scar begins to form.

This simple, everyday experience illustrates very well the principle that we are injured and hurt emotionally—not so much by other people or what they say or don’t say—but by our own attitude and our own response.

RELAXATION CUSHIONS EMOTIONAL BLOWS

When we “feel hurt” or “feel offended,” the feeling is entirely a matter of our own response. In fact the feeling is our response.

It is our own responses that we have to be concerned about—not other people’s. We can tighten up, become angry, anxious, or resentful, and “feel hurt.” Or, we can make no response, remain relaxed, and feel no hurt. Scientific experiments have shown that it is absolutely impossible to feel fear, anger, anxiety, or negative emotions of any kind while the muscles of the body are kept perfectly relaxed. We have to “do something” to feel fear, anger, anxiety. “No man is hurt but by himself,” said Diogenes.

“Nothing can work me damage except myself,” said St. Bernard. “The harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and am never a real sufferer but by my own fault.” You alone are responsible for your responses and reactions. You do not have to respond at all. You can remain relaxed and free from injury.

Thought Control Brought These People New Life

At Shirley Center, Massachusetts, results attained by group psychotherapy surpassed results obtained by classic psychoanalysis, and in a much shorter time. Two things were emphasized: group training in thought control and daily relaxation periods. The aim, according to the study published in Mental Hygiene, was “re-education intellectually and emotionally, in order to find the way into a kind of life that will be fundamentally successful and happy.” Patients, in addition to “intellectual re-education” and advice on thought control, are taught to relax by lying in a comfortable position while the director paints them a pleasant word picture of some placid, calm outdoor scene. The patients are also asked to practice relaxation daily at home, and to carry the calm peaceful feeling with them throughout the day.

One patient, who found a new way of life at the center, wrote, “I had seven years of sickness. I could not sleep. I had a hot temper. I was a miserable person to live with. For years I thought I had a mutt of a husband. When he came home after a single drink, and was perhaps fighting the craving, I would get excited and use harsh words and drive him to a spree instead of helping him in his fight. Now I say nothing and keep calm. That helps him and he and I get along swell. I was living my life antagonistically. I exaggerated little troubles. I was at the point of suicide. When I came to the class I began to realize that it was not the world that was wrong with me. I am now healthier than ever before and happier. In the old days I didn’t ever relax, even in my sleep. Now I don’t bustle around as I used to, and I get the same amount of work done and don’t get tired out as I used to.” How to Remove Old Emotional Scars

We can prevent, and immunize ourselves against, emotional scars by practicing the three foregoing rules. But what about the old emotional scars which were formed in the past—the old hurts, grudges, grievances against life, resentments?

Once an emotional scar has formed, there is but one thing to do and that is to remove it by surgery, the same as a physical scar.

Give Yourself a Spiritual Face-Lift

In removing old emotional scars, you alone can do the operation. You must become your own plastic surgeon—and give yourself a spiritual face-lift. The results will be new life and new vitality, a newfound peace of mind and happiness.

To speak of an emotional face-lift and the use of “mental surgery” is more than a metaphor.

Old emotional scars cannot be doctored or medicated. They must be “cut out,” given up entirely, eradicated. Many people apply various kinds of salve or balm to old emotional wounds, but this simply does not work. They may self-righteously forgo overt and physical revenge, yet “take it out” or “get even” in many subtle ways. A typical example is the wife who discovers her husband’s infidelity. On the advice of her minister and/or psychiatrist she agrees she should “forgive” him. Accordingly she does not shoot him. She does not leave him. In all overt behavior she is a “dutiful” wife. She keeps his house neatly. She prepares his meals well, and so on. But she makes his life hell on earth in many subtle ways by the coldness of her heart and by flaunting her moral superiority. When he complains, her answer is “Well, dear, I did forgive you—but I cannot forget.” Her very “forgiveness” becomes a thorn in his side, because she is conscious of the fact that it is proof of her moral superiority. She would have been more kind to him, and been happier herself, had she refused this type of forgiveness and left him.

Forgiveness Is a Scalpel That Removes Emotional Scars

“’I can forgive, but I cannot forget,’ is only another way of saying ‘I will not forgive,’” said Henry Ward Beecher. “Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note—torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.” Forgiveness, when it is real and genuine and complete—and forgotten—is the scalpel that can remove the pus from old emotional wounds, heal them, and eliminate scar tissue.

Forgiveness that is partial, or halfhearted, works no better than a partially completed surgical operation on the face. Pretended forgiveness, which is entered into as a duty, is no more effective than a simulated facial surgery.

Your forgiveness should be forgotten, as well as the wrong which was forgiven. Forgiveness that is remembered, and dwelt upon, reinfects the wound you are attempting to cauterize. If you are too proud of your forgiveness, or remember it too much, you are very apt to feel that the other person owes you something for forgiving him. You forgive him one debt, but in doing so, he incurs another, much like the operators of small loan companies who cancel one note and make out a new one every two weeks.

Forgiveness Is Not a Weapon

There are many common fallacies regarding forgiveness, and one of the reasons that its therapeutic value has not been more recognized is the fact that real forgiveness has been so seldom tried. For example, many writers have told us that we should forgive to make us “good.” We have seldom been advised to forgive that we might be happy. Another fallacy is that forgiveness places us in a superior position, or is a method of winning out over our enemy. This thought has appeared in many glib phrases such as “Don’t merely try to ‘get even’—forgive your enemy and you ‘get ahead’ of him.” John Tillotson, the seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury, said, “A more glorious victory cannot be gained over another man than this, that when the injury began on his part, the kindness should begin on ours.” This is just another way of saying that forgiveness itself can be used as an effective weapon of revenge—which it can. Revengeful forgiveness, however, is not therapeutic forgiveness.

Therapeutic forgiveness cuts out, eradicates, cancels, makes the wrong as if it had never been. Therapeutic forgiveness is like surgery.

Give Up Grudges as You Would a Gangrenous Arm

First, the “wrong”—and particularly our own feeling of condemnation of it—must be seen as an undesirable thing rather than a desirable thing. Before a man can agree within himself to have his arm amputated, he must cease to see his arm as a desirable thing to be retained, but as an undesirable, damaging, and threatening thing to be given up.

In facial surgery there can be no partial, tentative, or halfway measures. The scar tissue is cut out, completely and entirely. The wound is allowed to heal cleanly. And care is taken to see that the face will be restored in every particular, just as it was before injury and just as if the injury had never been.

You Can Forgive, If You’re Willing

Therapeutic forgiveness is not difficult. The only difficulty is to secure your own willingness to give up and do without your sense of condemnation—your willingness to cancel out the debt, with no mental reservations.

We find it difficult to forgive only because we like our sense of condemnation. We get a perverse and morbid enjoyment out of nursing our wounds. As long as we can condemn another, we can feel superior to him.

No one can deny that there is also a perverse sense of satisfaction in feeling sorry for yourself.

Your Reasons for Forgiveness Are Important

In therapeutic forgiveness we cancel out the debt of the other person, not because we have decided to be generous, or do him a favor, or because we are a morally superior person. We cancel the debt, mark it “ and void,” not because we have made the other person “pay” sufficiently for his wrong—but because we have come to recognize that the debt itself is not valid. True forgiveness comes only when we are able to see, and emotionally accept, that there is and was nothing for us to forgive. We should not have condemned or hated the other person in the first place.

Not long ago I went to a luncheon also attended by a number of clergymen. The subject of forgiveness came up in general, and the case of the adulterous woman whom Jesus forgave in particular. I listened to a very learned discussion of why Jesus was able to “forgive” the woman, how he forgave her, how his forgiveness was a rebuke to the churchmen of his time who were ready to stone her, etc.

Jesus Didn’t Forgive the Adulterous Woman

I resisted the temptation to shock these gentlemen by pointing out that actually Jesus never forgave the woman at all. Nowhere in the narrative, as it appears in the New Testament, is the word “forgive” or “forgiveness” used, or even hinted at. Nor can it be reasonably implied from the facts as given in the story. We are told merely that after her accusers had left, Jesus asked the woman—“Hath no man condemned thee?” When she answered in the negative, he said, “Neither do I condemn thee—go and sin no more.” You cannot forgive a person unless you have first condemned him. Jesus never condemned the woman in the first place—so there was nothing for him to forgive. He recognized her sin or her mistake, but did not feel called upon to hate her for it. He was able to see, before the fact, what you and I must see after the fact in practicing therapeutic forgiveness: that we ourselves err when we hate a person because of his mistakes, or when we condemn him, or classify him as a certain type of person, confusing his person with his behavior; or when we mentally incur a debt that the other person must “pay” before being restored to our good graces, and our emotional acceptance.

Whether you “ought” to do this, or whether you “should” do it, or can reasonably be expected to do it, is a matter that is outside the scope of this book and my own field. I can only tell you as a doctor that if you will do it, you will be far happier, healthier, and attain more peace of mind. However, I would like to point out that this is what therapeutic forgiveness is, and that it is the only type of forgiveness that really “works.” And if forgiveness is anything less than this, we might as well stop talking about it.

Forgive Yourself as Well as Others

Not only do we incur emotional wounds from others, most of us inflict them on ourselves.

We beat ourselves over the head with self-condemnation, remorse, and regret. We beat ourselves down with self-doubt. We cut ourselves up with excessive guilt.

Remorse and regret are attempts to emotionally live in the past. Excessive guilt is an attempt to make right in the past something we did wrong or thought of as wrong in the past.

Emotions are used correctly and appropriately when they help us to respond or react appropriately to some reality in the present environment. Since we cannot live in the past, we cannot appropriately react emotionally to the past. The past can be simply written off, closed, forgotten, insofar as our emotional reactions are concerned. We do not need to take an “emotional position” one way or the other regarding detours that might have taken us off course in the past. The important thing is our present direction and our present goal.

We need to recognize our own errors as mistakes. Otherwise we could not correct course. “Steering” or “guidance” would be impossible. But it is futile and fatal to hate or condemn ourselves for our mistakes.

You Make Mistakes. Mistakes Do Not Make “You”

Also, in thinking of our own mistakes (or those of others) it is helpful, and realistic, to think of them in terms of what we did or did not do, rather than in terms of what the mistakes made us.

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to confuse our behavior with our “self” . . . to conclude that because we did a certain act it characterizes us as a certain sort of person. It clarifies thinking if we can see that mistakes involve something we do—they refer to actions, and to be realistic we should use verbs denoting action, rather than nouns denoting a state of being, in describing them.

For example, to say “I failed” (verb form) is but to recognize an error and can help lead to future success.

But to say “I am a failure” (noun form) does not describe what you did, but what you think the mistake did to you. This does not contribute to learning, but tends to “fixate” the mistake and make it permanent. This has been proved over and over in clinical psychological experiments.

We seem to recognize that all children, in learning to walk, will occasionally fall. We say “he fell” or “he stumbled.” We do not say “he is a faller” or “he is a stumbler.” However, many parents do fail to recognize that all children, in learning to talk, also make mistakes or “nonfluencies”—hesitation, blocking, repetition of syllables and words. It is a common experience for an anxious, concerned parent to conclude, “He is a stutterer.” Such an attitude or a judgment—not of the child’s actions but of the child himself—gets across to the child and he begins to think of himself as a stutterer. His learning is fixated; the stutter tends to become permanent.

According to Dr. Wendell Johnson, the nation’s foremost authority on stuttering, this sort of thing is the cause of stuttering. He found that the parents of non-stutterers are more likely to use descriptive terms (“He did not speak”), whereas the parents of stutterers were inclined to use judgmental terms (“He could not speak”). Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, January 5, 1957, Dr. Johnson said, “Slowly we began to comprehend the vital point that had been missed for so many centuries. Case after case had developed after it had been diagnosed as stuttering by over-anxious persons unfamiliar with the facts of normal speech development. The parents rather than the child, the listeners rather than the speakers, seemed to be the ones most requiring understanding and instruction.” Dr. Knight Dunlap, who made a 20-year study of habits, their making, unmaking, and relation to learning, discovered that the same principle applied to virtually all “bad habits,” including bad emotional habits. It was essential, he said, that the patient learn to stop blaming himself, condemning himself, and feeling remorseful over his habits—if he were to cure them. He found particularly damaging the conclusion “I am ruined,” or “I am worthless,” because the patient had done, or was doing, certain acts.

So remember you make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you—anything.

Who Wants to Be an Oyster?

One final word about preventing and removing emotional hurts. To live creatively, we must be willing to be a little vulnerable. We must be willing to be hurt a little—if necessary—in creative living. A lot of people need a thicker and tougher emotional skin than they have. But they need only a tough emotional hide or epidermis—not a shell. To trust, to love, to open ourselves to emotional communication with other people is to run the risk of being hurt. If we are hurt once, we can do one of two things. We can build a thick protective shell, or scar tissue, to prevent being hurt again, live like an oyster, and not be hurt.

Or we can “turn the other cheek,” remain vulnerable, and go on living creatively.

An oyster is never “hurt.” He has a thick shell that protects him from everything. He is isolated. An oyster is secure, but not creative. He cannot “go after” what he wants—he must wait for it to come to him. An oyster knows none of the “hurts” of emotional communication with his environment—but neither can an oyster know the joys.

An Emotional Face-Lift Makes You Look and Feel Younger

Try giving yourself a “spiritual face-lift.” It is more than a play on words. It opens you up to more life, more vitality, the “stuff” that youth is made of. You’ll feel younger. You’ll actually look younger. Many times I have seen a man or woman apparently grow five or ten years younger in appearance after removing old emotional scars. Look around you. Who are the youthful-looking people you know over the age of 40? The grumpy? The resentful? The pessimistic? The ones who are “soured on the world,” or the cheerful, optimistic, good-natured people?

Carrying a grudge against someone or against life can bring on the old age stoop, just as much as carrying a heavy weight around on your shoulders would. People with emotional scars, grudges, and the like are living in the past, which is characteristic of old people. The youthful attitude and youthful spirit that erases wrinkles from the soul and the face, and puts a sparkle in the eye, looks to the future and has a great expectation to look forward to.

So why not give yourself a face-lift? Your do-it-yourself kit consists of relaxation of negative tensions to prevent scars, therapeutic forgiveness to remove old scars, providing yourself with a tough (but not a hard) epidermis instead of a shell, creative living, a willingness to be a little vulnerable, and a nostalgia for the future instead of the past.