Self-Forgiveness as a Potential Protective Factor for Mental Health and Well-Being in Older Adults: A Narrative Review

Depression, chronic guilt, regret, and suicidal ideation are common and often under-recognised sources of suffering in later life, yet geriatric care has traditionally focused on risk and deficit rather than on modifiable psychological strengths. Self-forgiveness, the process of replacing persistent guilt, shame, and self-condemnation after a perceived wrongdoing with an accepting, responsible, and self-compassionate stance toward oneself, has been proposed as one such strength, but it is understudied in older adults and rarely considered in clinical practice. This narrative review synthesises the empirical evidence on self-forgiveness and mental-health, well-being, and physical-health outcomes in adults aged 60 and over, and considers its implications for geriatric care. After briefly defining self-forgiveness, we introduce the distinctions between genuine and pseudo self-forgiveness and between dispositional and situational forms as an interpretive framework and working hypothesis rather than as a finding derived from the reviewed evidence, since no included study operationalises these distinctions in this age group. Across a small, geographically concentrated body of evidence that rests on a limited number of independent samples, higher self-forgiveness is associated with lower depression, rumination, and suicidal ideation and with greater life satisfaction and self-esteem, frequently operating as a resilience factor that buffers the impact of adversity and negative self-evaluation; a single longitudinal study found an association with mortality only among participants with more years of schooling. We discuss the scarcity of validated, age-appropriate measures, the difficulty of separating self-forgiveness from adjacent constructs such as self-compassion, and how forgiveness-based, compassion-focused, and life-review interventions could be integrated into mental-health promotion for older adults.