Is It Possible To Forgive Yourself?

Forgiving yourself is one of the best gifts you can give yourself in your life. It will bring us peace and greatly contribute to our emotional balance. In this article, we show you how.

Forgiving yourself is no easy task: it takes humility, patience, deep compassion, and unconditional love of self. However, it is essential that we learn to put it into practice if we are to truly be at peace with ourselves and with others.

Most of us have made mistakes throughout our lives because it is part of our life experience. We would have liked to act differently, and we believe that if we had a new opportunity, we would do it differently.

Not knowing how to set limits at work or in a relationship, being overly submissive or aggressive, acting selfishly or doing something that harms others, are all situations that can make us feel very uncomfortable in the form of guilt or resentment towards ourselves.

Is it wrong to feel guilty?

Guilt is a fundamental mechanism of action in our learning. It guides our consciousness and imposes limits that show us whether our motivations and behaviors are appropriate or not. According to personality theorist Erik Erickson, we develop this healthy sense of guilt from the age of three.

If we do not develop it and if we have not internalized an ethical and moral code, we can have many difficulties in our relations with others. Indeed, the absence of guilt is one of the main characteristics of psychopaths.

Thus, feeling guilty when you have done wrong is a good indicator. It means that we are aware that we have done something wrong. And it is this emotion that can cause us to make amends, either by apologizing or by taking some other action that fixes the problem.

The problem arises when we feel guilty about actions or decisions taken in the past, and we allow something that has already happened to torment us over and over again, thus entering a vicious cycle. This loop does not allow us to live fully in the present and binds us to an unresolved past.

What does it mean to forgive yourself?

Forgiving yourself does not mean justifying inappropriate behavior or ceasing to feel remorse. This means that we have to recognize the negative emotions that this generates in us and, even so, decide that they are losing their strength in our present.

Forgiveness is a gradual process, it does not happen all at once, especially if the act to be forgiven is complex. There will be people who take years to fully heal their wounds while for others it will be easier.

To forgive yourself, it is necessary to change our perception of the situation that we have experienced. We must therefore give ourselves permission to move forward and overcome what has happened, living the present in peace and opening up to a future without pain.

Forgiving oneself also means overcoming resistance to change, as it is often easier to feel guilty than to dare to leave self-criticism and pain behind.

Phases of forgiveness

Forgiving yourself is a process consisting of the following steps:

1. Recognize the Truth : To forgive yourself, you have to be honest with yourself. If we’ve done something wrong, you better not be wrong
2. Take responsibility for what happened : all actions have consequences, so it is better to be courageous and face what it entails
3. Getting in touch with the deepest feelings that motivated this behavior : knowing what caused us to act like this is a good thing to avoid repeating the same mistake in the future
4. Open up to feelings without judging yourself : Accepting our imperfection will play a key role at this point. Accepting what happened is the basis for being able to heal
5. Heal emotional wounds : this will require allowing self-criticism to give way to compassion for oneself
6. To love oneself unconditionally : this means accepting oneself in its totality, with its gifts and virtues, but also with its faults and errors. In this last phase, loving and forgiving each other are basically the same thing.

Strategies for Forgiving Yourself

For practical reasons, there are actions that can help us forgive ourselves faster. Let’s take a look at some examples:

• Apologize: Apologizing  is a big step forward if you’ve hurt someone, consciously or unconsciously. But it must be a deep and sincere apology. They should also be without expectation, because asking for forgiveness does not mean that the other person will forgive us immediately. This will facilitate our healing process and possibly that of the other person.
• Sharing the Experience:  Explaining our mistakes to someone can help us in the guilt release process. We can, for example, tell a friend about it, which will give us emotional security and acceptance. Another possible solution is to follow therapy with a specialist to help us manage our emotions.
• Write:  Another very good option is to explain in a letter everything we would like to say to the other person. This will allow us to put our thoughts and emotions in order and release much of the pain. Depending on the situation, we will decide if we are giving our letter to the other person or if it is part of our healing.
• Heal our inner child:  Meditation is a very powerful tool that can facilitate forgiveness. Entering a state of relaxation and communicating with our injured inner child, giving him all the security and unconditional love he needs, will help us come to terms with our past.

Final thoughts

As with other types of forgiveness, forgiving yourself is a process. It is a path that we follow leaving behind pain to open ourselves to living a present and a future without suffering.

We must learn to accept that at each stage of life we ​​proceed according to our level of consciousness. If we haven’t done the right thing in the past, it’s probably because we didn’t know how to do better.

And it is precisely in the healing process that we realize that we are no longer in the phase where we made a mistake, and that thanks to this error we were able to evolve. It should allow us to move forward in a lighter and more compassionate way until we are at peace with ourselves.