Do you have a problem with forgiving yourself? Have you ever forgiven everyone else except for yourself? Do you have problems with forgiveness? Do you think it is impossible to forgive yourself when you screw up? Do you hold yourself to impossibly high standards?

The first step is to understand your mistakes do not define you. Mistakes fade with each passing day and lose value with time. It is important to remember that you are not perfect, so tricking yourself into thinking you are is only setting us up to fall.

Next is to know that your failures don't define you either. You need to know that there is more to us than just your failures.

You also need to let people in. There is often a tendency to run from people when something doesn't go as planned. You need to have people to rely on. It is important to never dwell.

According to The Huffington Post, “Falling into a pit of self-inflicted despair when we take a misstep is common.”

Being positive and proactive is the only way to fix this common mistake. You will start to heal when you stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Also you should not be afraid to start over. You will sometimes have to start from scratch, rebuild, pull up the old foundations and lay new ones.

Here are 11 steps to ease personal forgiveness:

1. Own your sin: You weren’t supposed to sin no matter how much someone else hurt you or how angry he or she made you.
2. Own all of your sinning: Most people focus on the big sins and forget about the little sins, but in order to truly forgive yourself you have to own all of your sinning.
3. Accept yourself where you are: You might be one of those people who want to fight against the fact that you are a sinner. Every one of us is a sinner. I know especially myself that I have a problem with thinking I have to be perfect. A lot of you probably think you have to be something other than what you are in order to please God. You should accept who you are as you, which is a sinner.
4. Mourn the loss of your ideal self: You will never be perfect so stop trying to be. The ideal picture of yourself you have is now gone.
5. Humble yourself: According to Edwin Crozier, author of 11 Steps to Forgiving Yourself, in Matthew 5:5, Jesus said the meek are blessed. That is, the humbly submissive are blessed. This point seems counter-intuitive. It seems to be a paradox. You probably think you are humble because you are heaping all kinds of misery on yourself. Actually, if you are in Christ, not forgiving yourself is a display of utter arrogance. You somehow think that you are such an awful sinner that you stand out head and shoulders above the rest. Your sinning is so powerful that it defies the powerful grace of God. God could forgive David when he committed adultery and murdered Uriah. God was powerful enough to forgive Manasseh for all of his idolatry, human sacrifice, and sin. God was powerful enough to forgive Peter his denials and Paul his persecution and murders. But your sins are so big that you are too powerful for even God. Humble yourself and accept God’s forgiveness. If God can forgive you, you can forgive you.”
6. Bring your sins to God and embrace his promises: Once you have owned and embraced every one of your sins, you should bring them to God. Confession is an important part of forgiving yourself. You should confess your sins to God.
7. Confess your sins to another person: Sharing your sins with another human being is just as important a part to the journey to forgiving yourself.
8. Stop comparing yourself to others: Some people think they are terminally unique. Terminally unique is either thinking you are not as bad as others so you don’t need forgiveness or thinking you are worse than everyone else so you can not possibly be forgiven even by God and so the remedy that God offers others can’t apply to them. When you compare yourself to others, it only leads to terminal uniqueness.
9. Quit punishing yourself: “At those moments when you want to heap condemnation and punishment on yourself, either verbally or by sabotaging your life, pause and remind yourself that Jesus died so you don’t have to.”
10. See the good that can come from your past sins: Your sins can help other people in similar situations see they are not alone.
11. Keep forgiving yourself: Sinning is not a one-time thing. You will always make mistakes. Remember that God is always with you so forgive yourself so you can pick up your cross and walk hand in hand with Jesus.