Arthur C. Brooks suggests that if you regret how you've treated someone, find another person and treat them with the mercy and kindness you withheld before. He connects this to an ancient Jewish idea that each person reflects the whole world, and points to neuroscience showing how this kind of behavioral change creates emotional release.
There's lots that you can do when you have a simulacrum for this process in the non traditionally religious sense. You know, a lot of people will say, there's nothing I can do to make up to that person whose heart I broke so callously when I was in high school or college, the person I treated so shabbily. But there is a lot that you can do because, you know, there's that, you know that ancient Jewish concept that the whole every person is the whole world. So find another person. Find another person and treat them with mercy and treat them with decency and treat them with kindness and greater kindness than you ordinarily would. And say, I offer this up for what I have done in the past. And there's. Look, I don't have to give you the neuroscience research about the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and how that's affected in the pleasure centers of the brain, blah, blah, blah. We all under. Look, I'm not going to reduce my entire field to that, but we all can do that. You know, we actually all can release ourselves in that particular way. And I think that that's a very natural and very healthy thing to do.
