How to forgive yourself

How to forgive yourself

Happiness isn’t just about enjoying the good times.

It is that.

But happiness is also dealing, effectively and healthily, with the tough times.

And some of those tough times are due to things we have, or we think we have done wrong.

It follows, therefore, that happiness is at least partly about forgiving ourselves …

via Psyche by Nathaniel Wade & Marilyn Cornish

After several months of therapy, Joe shared that he carried a burden he was hesitant to talk about. With some encouragement, he admitted that he had been treating his four-year-old daughter terribly. He described how typical events such as trying to get his daughter ready for daycare had triggered his anger, leading him to handle her roughly – like grabbing her arm or yelling at her. Joe shared other behaviours that he was ashamed of, such as losing his cool and just walking away while she was crying in the bathtub. Although he was often a supportive and loving father, Joe (whose name, along with some other details, have been altered here for anonymity) knew that these actions had hurt his daughter and his family. He wasn’t sure if – or how – he could forgive himself.

Most of us can look back on our experiences and recall, often with great regret, times when we hurt others or did something that violated our values. Many people find it hard to forgive themselves for one or more of these instances, carrying around a considerable burden of guilt. In our clinical work and research on self-forgiveness, we have spoken with individuals who’ve struggled with a broad range of offences: marital infidelity, patterns of angry outbursts, physically and verbally fighting with teenage children, manipulating and stealing from others as a result of drug and alcohol dependencies, abandoning family or friends when they were in need, and more.

Grappling with what you’ve done wrong prior to forgiving yourself can be a good thing – feelings of guilt can motivate you to make amends and change any entrenched behaviours. However, sometimes self-forgiveness seems painfully out of reach. If this is the case for you, you might be having thoughts like ‘I don’t deserve to forgive myself,’ or ‘I deserve to be punished.’ Or, you may find it hard to forgive yourself for other reasons: because you just can’t gather the courage to face what you have done, for example, or because you want to prove to the other person just how sorry you are.

Self-forgiveness is about addressing your past to move forward

As psychologists who have long been interested in this subject, we developed a process to help people work toward self-forgiveness. The process includes four parts, which we call the Four Rs of Self-Forgiveness. In working toward self-forgiveness, a person does the following …

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