Forgiving Yourself: A Step-By-Step Guide to Making Peace With Your Mistakes and Getting on With Your Life

Introduction

What Is Self-Forgiveness?

If you selected Forgiving Yourself from a bookshelf, you are probably a person who knows too well the pain of recognizing that something you did or are has damaged your life and the lives of others. The damage may be to your close relationships, to people you barely know, to your spiritual relationship with a higher power, or to your relationship with yourself. If your words or actions have driven loved ones away; if blindness to your limitations has resulted in hurting someone else; or if your reluctance to see yourself realistically has resulted in a rupture with what you have assumed about yourself, then you are poised to begin the process of forgiving yourself.

What is self-forgiveness? How does it happen? Is self-forgiveness just accepting yourself? Is self-forgiveness arrogant or dangerous? Some would answer that others must forgive us or that God must forgive us before we can forgive ourselves. Self-forgiveness can restore peace within a person, and when peace is restored and hatred eliminated—even self-hatred—good things can result. Self-forgiveness is a process that can coexist when others forgive us for hurting them, or when God is at work. But being forgiven by another does not preempt the need for self-forgiveness.

Self-forgiveness is a specific process that results in several outcomes. First, self-forgiveness results in your being able to finally feel that you have paid your debt to those you think you have owed. Second, self-forgiveness ends the desire to continue punishing yourself for letting your flaws or mistakes hurt other people. Third, self-forgiveness requires a commitment to personal change, and once you change, you will feel better about yourself. Finally, when you have forgiven yourself, the things you have believed about yourself and other people begin to make sense again. Your ideas about life are no longer troubling or incongruent. Your life and its meaning seem to fit again into the big picture.

The process of forgiving yourself is not easy. Self-forgiveness results from an honest, sometimes very painful, confrontation with ourselves that being forgiven by another person does not require. Other people may forgive us, but they may not know us as well as we know ourselves. Only we can know how mean or arrogant or blind to our limitations we have been. It is this knowledge that makes self-forgiveness so hard, maybe harder than forgiving another.

What Self-Forgiveness Is and Is Not

Self-forgiveness always has to do with relationships. Forgiveness of oneself is called for when relationships have been permanently altered because of our actions, inactions, words, and some might argue, even thoughts. Self-forgiveness does not apply to aspects of yourself that have hurt you, and you alone. For example, a person does not need to forgive herself when she has gained too much weight to fit into a favorite dress or when she has failed a test as a result of not studying hard enough. She may regret these situations and be faced with accepting her flaws, but self-acceptance is not at all the same as self-forgiveness. Each requires a very different healing process. Self-acceptance focuses on oneself and discovering or creating a better self-concept. Self-forgiveness focuses on other people and allows us to transform ourselves into better people for the sake of others. Self-forgiveness does not result in the conclusion, I’m okay; you’re okay. On the contrary, self-forgiveness requires a person to acknowledge that something about herself has not been okay, and, in fact, has damaged important parts of one’s life and the lives of others. Self-forgiveness is the process of self-examination that results in the conclusion, I must change. I’m not okay. Who benefits from self-forgiveness? Isn’t self-forgiveness a dangerous and even cynical way for a person to let herself off the moral hook and give her license to offend other people again? No. People who suffer after they have harmed their relationships are not able to let themselves off, morally. Instead, they are burdened down with guilt or regret for what they have done. A person brave enough to confront her flaws is a potential asset to others, not a danger. One who is blind to the parts of herself that can wound others is dangerous.

PEOPLE WHO SEEK SELF-FORGIVENESS

People who seek to forgive themselves are people of conscience. People who lack conscience, by contrast, have no concept of the pain they may cause others, or may feel no particular concern even if they know they have harmed other people. Sociopaths and psychopaths feel no need to forgive themselves; they are unconcerned about the pain they may cause. People who struggle to forgive themselves for the mistakes they make are, by contrast, people with ordinary or even extraordinary consciences and well-developed senses of right and wrong. We can easily see the difference between the mugger of an old woman sneering at the court cameras and the shriveled, guilty-looking man who, in hunger, broke into a house to steal money. For the first person, non-forgiveness is not an issue. Having little conscience and therefore little empathy for his victim or remorse for his violence, he will see no need to forgive himself. By contrast, the second man, believing he is wrong, will have to live with the guilt of his conscience perhaps for the rest of his life. Self-forgiveness occurs in people who are aware of their impact on others. For this reason, our families and our society need people to be able to forgive themselves.

It is also important, however, for people to understand when they have done nothing that merits forgiveness. Others in their lives may attempt to persuade them that they have been wrong or bad in some way, and that they should experience shame and guilt. People who feel bad about themselves—that is, who experience subjective feelings of having hurt someone—can achieve self-forgiveness; but there must also be objective verification from outside someone that self-forgiveness is required or even appropriate.

Many people are clever at drawing others into a sense of obligation or shame. Perceived obligations can make people feel bad when objectively they should not. If you want to attempt to forgive yourself, you must first undertake a careful, critical assessment of yourself and your situation to discern whether there is really something to feel bad about or whether others are manipulating your emotions. This process will be discussed in detail later.

CONDITIONS THAT REQUIRE SELF-FORGIVENESS

What conditions require self-forgiveness as opposed to self-acceptance? Aside from the first condition, that self-forgiveness is needed when we have hurt others, there are five additional characteristic situations that indicate a person needs to learn self-forgiveness. These conditions are as follows:

1. Causing injuries that result from mistakes, wrongdoings, or limitations

2. Causing harm that challenges or alters our central personal sets of assumptions

3. When apologies from others do not seem to correct the situation

4. When an injurer is exposed to her self-as-feared * ¹

5. One or more of four these discrete emotions are felt by the person who must forgive herself: guilt, shame, regret, or grief

MISTAKES

A mistake is defined as a harmful, rash, impulsive or foolish act² or an error in action, opinion, or judgment.³ Mistakes can be made through action or inaction, omission or commission. For example, one person looks into her empty wallet after just losing her entire week’s wages in a slot machine. She has made a mistake of commission. She behaved in an impulsive way and made an error in judgment. Another person decides not to put her week’s wages on a winning horse that paid 25 to 1. Her mistake was one of omission, which is also an error in judgment.

A mistake is always neutral morally. Mistakes are neither good nor bad when considered independent of their results. Mistakes take on moral properties only in their results and become hard to forgive when they cause something bad to happen. Let’s say that a person goes out to chop down a dead tree and does not check for the presence of people nearby. When the tree crushes picnickers in a neighboring meadow, the neutral act of cutting the tree becomes an error in judgment that causes great harm. The tree cutter may be unable to forgive himself.

When morally neutral action is not taken and great harm results, a state of non-forgiveness can erupt. A woman who did not tell her teenage son about the dangers of unprotected sex blames herself for his contracting HIV. Her act of omission, she thinks, destroyed his life. For this she cannot forgive herself.

Mistakes are errors; mistakes that require forgiveness are errors that result in harm or do not produce good when good was possible. A mistake might be a person’s not having intervened or not having said a kind word; or it might result from taking a certain action at just the wrong time.

Forgiving your mistakes, though, is different from forgiving your transgressions. Transgressions are the second source of unforgiven injuries.

TRANSGRESSIONS

Transgressions are actions taken that pass over or go beyond certain moral limits. To transgress means, literally, to go across, as to go across a boundary or barrier. Transgressions that cause people’s inability to forgive themselves have certain properties that are similar to mistakes. But there are key differences.

A transgression, unlike a mistake, is not morally neutral. It is wrong, regardless of whether it alters any relationship or is even detected by another. A person who lusts after her neighbor’s husband may feel guilty of her transgression even if she never acts upon her thoughts. She might find herself unable to forgive herself for her thoughts if she belongs to a religion that emphasizes the wrongness of (and need for repentance for) such things. Worse than mistakes, transgressions are forbidden, illegal, immoral, or questionably moral acts.⁴

Transgressions can cross over a variety of moral boundaries—codes such as the Ten Commandments, laws established by society, or personal commitments made by individuals. Sam violated a legal boundary and a personal one at the same time.

Sam, forty-four at the time he wrote, still had trouble forgiving himself for something he did when he was twenty: He caused a car accident. The other driver was a pregnant woman. He was required, by law, to repair the woman’s car, but for more than a month he did nothing. For this, he was given a warning by the insurance company; still he did nothing. He writes:

"I was at a self-centered stage in my life and didn’t care that I had caused an accident; and then I was irresponsible in making amends…. I did not fix the car with proper materials, and even put off fixing it for over a month while she was incapacitated.

I was only embarrassed at the time because I got the warning; but later on I found it hard to forgive myself.…

Sam had trouble forgiving himself, not so much because he broke a law, but because he violated his own sense of personal morality. Personal ideas of right and wrong are unique to each individual. Laws and civil codes, by contrast, protect individuals from each other when there is disagreement about what is right or wrong. Legal transgressions are quite separate from moral transgressions.

LEGAL TRANSGRESSIONS

Legal transgressions might include stealing, civil disobedience, assault and battery, diverting money into shady business dealings, or improperly recycling your trash. In other words, the violation of a city code or a state or federal statute is a legal transgression. Society sets forth rules that we are all expected to abide by, regardless of whether we agree with them. People who transgress legal codes or laws may or may not have trouble forgiving themselves depending on how strongly they agree with the laws they violated.

Legal transgressions are violations of one kind of rule only—legal rules. Moral transgressions can be violations of two kinds of rules, interpersonal agreements about right and wrong or religious moral codes.

MORAL TRANSGRESSIONS

Moral transgressions between people are special kinds of wrongdoings. They are special because when two people form a relationship, their separate ideas of right and wrong combine to form a new construct of right and wrong, unique to those two people. The new construct reflects people’s religious beliefs, education, gender, and even their ages. For example, two older people, raised before the Great Depression, might share an opinion that to ask each other a very personal question would be intrusive or morally wrong. Two teenagers in the 90s, by contrast, are likely to see nothing wrong with inquiring about each other’s family, sexuality, or religion—all once considered taboo. When people transgress moral agreements with friends or spouses, colleagues or employers, they cross the barriers of their own ideas about right and wrong by lying, withholding information, taking resources, or withholding truth to have more of something (perhaps more money, more sex, or more objects) or less of something (less need to justify their opinions or decisions).

Moral rules, in addition to being part of people’s interpersonal relationships, are also set down in religious scripture; and they are violated for the same reasons that interpersonal rules are: Religious rules are violated by people who expect the violations to profit them. The teachings found in the New Testament, the Talmud, Buddhist scriptures, and most of the major world religions provide specific delineations of what constitutes right or wrong thoughts and actions. If people steal, lie, murder, commit adultery, or are envious or jealous of others, they are likely to have violated religious codes of right and wrong. Transgressions may hurt people who are betrayed, but they may also hurt the betrayer’s relationship with God because violated religious covenants are spiritual betrayals.

Transgressions are committed with selfish purposes in mind. They are not morally neutral, like mistakes. A person must take responsibility for a transgression to achieve self-forgiveness. When people engage in transgressions, they know what they are doing. There is intent involved in transgressions where there is no intent in a mistake. If you have violated a moral code with another person or a written code that has guided your spiritual life, you may have trouble forgiving yourself because you intended the wrongdoing. You chose to engage in selfish and wrong behavior knowing that you might damage your relationships. Still, self-forgiveness is possible with hard work and personal change.

TRANSGRESSIONS WITH EVIL INTENT

A transgression is committed by someone to gain personal advantage. A teenager lies to her parents about chaperons being at a party because she knows if she tells them the truth, they won’t let her go. You may lie about being unable to come to the phone because you would rather continue to watch TV. These transgressions, though, are not likely to evoke the need for forgiveness. They have no malice in their intent. They are rooted, maybe, in self-service but not in malice. Even if a fire broke out at the unchaperoned party and the teenager sustained massive burns, she might have trouble forgiving herself for lying and damaging the trust of her parents, but she does not have to forgive herself for evil in her heart.

Transgressions with evil intent share the same properties as other transgressions. They have an inherent moral wrongness and violate a moral boundary for personal advantage. But they differ in one key way: in evil transgressions, a transgressor intends to injure others.

Transgressions with evil intent might include abusing a child, blowing up a building with people inside, acting in a specific way that is designed to lead a person into injury, or any number of actions taken or words spoken with the intent of harming others. Murders, child abusers, and batterers engage in evil transgressions.

Mistakes, transgressions, and evil transgressions gain moral gravity and greater weight on a scale similar to legal ideas of misdemeanors and felonies. Mistakes that cause harm are generally misdemeanors. Felonies where there is no intent (like drunk driving that results in a death) are less grave, morally at least, than felonies with intent (like first-degree murder); but people may be unable to forgive themselves for any one of the three.

The pain of non-forgiveness is rooted in your mistakes, transgressions, evil transgressions, or the fourth source—your own shortcomings and limitations. When beginning the process of self-forgiveness, it will be imperative for you to accurately identify which of the four sources of non-forgiveness you must reconcile.

SHORTCOMINGS AND LIMITATIONS

A shortcoming is the condition or fact of failing to reach an expected or required standard of character or performance.⁵ A limitation is a less inclusive idea, meaning a restrictive weakness or lack of capacity.⁶ Both ideas relate to personal characteristics. Both may be acquired or innate. Either can result in damage to the self or another person so grave that it can be considered unforgivable.

Innate shortcomings and limitations might be physical or mental. For example, a person may be brighter or less bright than someone else, taller or less tall, stronger or less strong. A limitation can appear to be an attribute until it causes harm. The very bright professor who cannot understand her daughter’s school difficulties and places such demands for performance on the girl that the daughter runs away may be as unable to forgive herself as the mother whose low IQ prevents her from recognizing that her child’s high fever will cause the child permanent deafness. Both will have trouble forgiving themselves because their limitations harmed their children.

Shortcomings may lead a person into committing a mistake. They are neutral morally. They may be regrettable; but taken alone, they are neutral. Cowardice and fear of the dark, heights, or water are neutral until a person cannot help her friend who is lost in the dark or stuck on a cliff or drowning in a river. The exposure of such shortcomings may give rise to the need for self-forgiveness. Acquired shortcomings may bother people more than innate ones because they are more readily recognized and modified. A talented equestrienne takes a bad fall from her horse and lets her fear of riding dominate her. Because she can ride well, she might be more likely to have trouble forgiving herself for not intervening if a runaway horse with a disabled child plunged over a cliff than the non-rider nearby who was also afraid to attempt the rescue. The latter has to forgive herself for cowardice—the former for allowing circumstances to destroy her capacity to act and assist another human being. When people’s shortcomings are hidden deep in the psyche and are only recognized when they finally result in injury to others, then the pain of remaining unforgiven can consume a person until the process of self-forgiveness begins.

Changing Our Life Assumptions

When a person so damages a relationship that she cannot forgive herself, she may find that some of the central assumptions she has about herself need to be looked at and changed. We all have assumptions about who we are that make it possible to live our lives with minimal fear or chaos. These assumptions are called