This week, I want to talk about forgiving yourself.
This came to me as a response to my own article from last week about regaining my worth after an abusive relationship. One reason it took me so long to move past this experience is because I have difficulty forgiving myself. In my opinion, forgiving yourself may be one of the hardest tasks in the world. It sounds easy, but the pathways to forgiving yourself are actually hidden within many deep layers of the subconscious, hardly visible in our day-to-day life.
After writing last week’s piece, I noticed that I began to feel guilty for talking about my experience. In addition to that, I started to feel compassion for my abuser and blame against myself. That’s when I realized that forgiving others is often much easier than forgiving yourself. But why is that?
Forgiving yourself is a process with a few major steps, depending on the situation. One is to admit that you are at fault and then to accept that all you can do is try harder next time. The other is to recognize when you are not actually at fault, but make yourself feel as if you are. This is tied up with self-blame.
It may be easy to overlook the subtle effects of self-blame, but they persistently affect the way we interact with the world around us. The mechanisms of self-blame are sly and secretive, and they might pop up unexpectedly when we speak up for ourselves. But to forgive yourself, you must untie intricately knotted memories and experiences while maintaining the determination to unbury even those recollections most deeply rooted in our psyche.
When forgiving yourself is wrapped in the throes of an unhealthy relationship, the ability to decipher between actions which we should feel truly responsible for and the blame we assign to ourselves because someone else illegitimately made us feel bad is not intact. Distinguishing between the two may be hard and tiresome, but it is necessary if we want to move forward with our life in a positive, healthy, and self-nourishing manner.
To forgive yourself is to have a self-critical eye. It is to analyze your actions and to sometimes admit that you have done something wrong. It may mean recognizing that you have been someone you do not want to be and committing to change. The only way to move forward is by figuring out what you can do differently in the future. To move on, we have to be kind and understanding with ourselves and keep in mind that humans are not perfect and we all make mistakes. Those mistakes might mean staying in situations which perpetuate self-harm, as much as we do not want to own up to ourselves that we have consciously let ourselves be beaten down.
But there is another layer to self-forgiveness. This is the layer where you have to ask yourself, "Was I sincerely, truly, and legitimately in the wrong, or was someone else in the wrong and I was vulnerable to feeling guilt that actually was not mine to feel?"
Sometimes, there is a precise answer to this question, but often, it is a mixture of the two. When this is the case, you are left to discern between the pieces you must be responsible for on your own, and the pieces in which someone else was at fault and for which you must forgive yourself.
To say “it is okay, it’s not your fault” takes a lot of effort and is sometimes painful. It can be tricky to distinguish between what you need to be responsible for and what is not your burden to bear, and if you are a self-critical person like I am, then you understand the process of continuously questioning yourself and your actions. It always feels as if you could have done better.
For me, when I do things that I know are harmful to myself (because the self is the most important), or when I put myself in situations that I later regret, I suffer. But that is precisely the reason I do not need anyone else reinforcing the fact that I should feel bad about certain things. Often, I already have, and I have done so on my own accord.
Probably everyone feels this way to some extent. We have to let go of the things that weigh us down and know which weights are not our responsibility to fix. And we must forgive ourselves for the people we were at one time but do not want to be again.
Forgiving yourself means that you recognize your faults. Forgiving yourself means that you strive to become someone better. Forgiving yourself should come with a desire to change, to become someone new and improved.
Forgiveness is not about excusing and forgetting. Forgiveness is recognition of wrongdoing and a desire to not repeat similar actions in the future. Of course, this also means that you must believe people can change, and that you are worthy of the person you want to become. That may be the most important.
Me, I do believe that people can change if they truly desire and work hard to become better. For you, it is up to you to decide.
