How To Forgive Yourself

How to Forgive Yourself

Whether it’s big or small, something you did 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago, self-forgiveness is a skill and a habit that everyone needs to learn in order to truly connect with yourself and live an authentic life. Here are a few practices you can use as you learn to forgive yourself.

1. Recognize the cost of unforgiveness.

Choosing not to forgive yourself will cost your identity and your capacity to give and receive love. Unforgiveness will weigh you down.

Let me explain this with a word picture. Imagine that each one of us is walking through life with a backpack full of metaphorical rocks and bricks of past traumas, past choices and current challenges. Some of the rocks and bricks were put there by others, some were put there by the systems and cultures we were raised in, and some were put there by us. Unforgiveness is like a collection of bricks we’re lugging around all day, every day. Did you yell at your kid after a stressful day at work? That’s a brick. Are you burning with shame because a friend found out you gossiped about her? Another brick.

Pretty soon, you’re scratching and clawing just to get through the day with all of this extra weight on your shoulders. You can choose to keep carrying the bricks. But as you take one weary step after another, you’ll sink lower and lower into a black pit of bitterness. And bitterness is a poison that limits your capacity to give and receive love. It’s nonsense to wallow in bitterness—you’re only hurting yourself.

To sum this all up: Self-forgiveness is the process of removing the bricks you’ve put in your own “backpack,” examining them, learning from them, and then laying them down. And choosing not to forgive yourself comes at a high cost.

2. List your hurts.

If you want to forgive yourself, you’ve got to start by identifying the specific hurts—regrets, mistakes and decisions—that you’re carrying around. Using our backpack analogy, I want you to pull out the bricks and do an inventory of the areas in life where you need self-forgiveness.

1. Name the hurt. Be specific about the actions and words that fill you with regret. I want you to literally write these things out, by hand, on paper.
2. Take ownership for the things you need to forgive yourself for.
3. Keep in mind that you might need to forgive yourself for something you failed to do. Thoughts like I should have gone back to school and I should have moved when I had the chance are indicators that you’re holding on to regret.
4. Understand that your hurt can stem from big life events as well as subtle, daily choices. Don’t dismiss the small things. Maybe you’re unwilling to forgive yourself for a pattern of behavior that has held you back for years.
5. Once you’ve written your list out, take a step back. How does it feel to acknowledge these mistakes? Are you scared? Ready to work? Enlightened?

Keep your list handy as we work through the rest of the steps.

3. Decide to forgive yourself.

Once you’ve identified your bricks of unforgiveness, you get to make a choice: Will you keep carrying them with you through life, or will you choose to set them down?

We have much more power over our thoughts and actions than we realize. If you’re stuck in a twisted web of shame and resentment, you’re not going to just wake up one day and feel like forgiving yourself. Trust me. This thing will eat you up from the inside out until you decide to forgive yourself.

It might feel super cheesy, but when you’re ready to begin the work, I want you to say these words out loud: “I forgive myself for ______.” Use that language in your conversations with others. Talk about your choice. Own up to it.

4. Own and grieve the consequences.

Self-forgiveness doesn’t mean you’re turning a blind eye to the consequences of your decisions. Let’s say you embezzled money, got caught, were fired, and lost a career trajectory that you may never get back. That sucks. Let yourself be sad and heartbroken about what you’ve lost. Accept the fact that you can’t change the past instead of obsessing over the “what ifs.” Don’t excuse or make light of your behavior. It is what it is.

When it comes to grief, I want you to sit in it, but don’t bathe in it. At some point, you have to decide it’s time to move on. And this isn’t a time for you to heap judgement on yourself. It’s a time to grieve, not condemn.