Healing Your Life Through Forgiveness

During my studies in clinical psychology, life coaching and personal development I learned that forgiveness is important and being able to forgive others is essential. What was left out is the most important aspect of forgiveness which is forgiving yourself.

Yet, in my lifetime I have done and said things I later regretted and felt awful about.

​I continually beat myself up over these things and then convinced myself I was a “bad” person for behaving this way. The guilt over these situations and the shame I felt about them caused me to become depressed and embarrassed. I was disappointed in myself and my self-esteem was in the toilet.

After many years of feeling shame and guilt, I became very ill and I wondered what was causing the illness.  I took the time to notice that my self-talk was focused on criticizing myself and blaming myself.  On top of that, I was treating my body poorly with too much food and alcohol. I often started fights with people close to me for no reason and I was engaging in many self-sabotaging behaviors. One time I felt so much rage I got scared of myself.  At that point, I was not just feeling guilty. I actually felt bad about who I was.

I tried to figure out why I was feeling this way even though I had forgiven others in my life fully.  Then one day I began to journal the feelings I was having about myself and realized I had not done any self-forgiveness.  I knew that to be emotionally healthy I had to have complete peace of mind and to be in love with myself fully.

I created a process to recognize and admit that I had harmed people in my life and decided that instead of blaming myself I would create a way to forgive myself and to have compassion for my human experience. I decided to let my toxic behaviors go and to give myself the same forgiveness I had given to others. As I forgave myself more and more each day I felt more connected to others. I felt a release of pain in my mind and interestingly in my body.  It is clear that not forgiving myself had caused me to become ill and the less self-righteous I became and the more I forgave myself, the more love, kindness, and compassion I had for others. I literally found that as I shifted from self-hatred to self-love I felt more and more freedom and my physical body became healthier and healthier. I share this process in my book “About To Break: The Path To True Forgiveness”. 

Many people, like me, have been physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abused and carry shame and guilt with them – consciously or unconsciously. I have come to see that the more I become aware of my feelings and the more I forgive myself the less I beat myself up over the experiences I have had in my life.

I now know that self-compassion connects me to my human experience. We all make some wrong choices and then we can hold regrets as part of our experience in our physical bodies. There isn’t a person on the planet who hasn’t “harmed” another by deed or by the tongue. We all share this trait and we are all connected. Knowing you are not alone you can choose to let the self-defeating beliefs and behaviors go. Otherwise, you will carry them the rest of your life and have mental and potentially physical suffering as well.
I suggest you take time to journal about your mistakes and understand you mostly made them from a place of unconscious behaviors. You are not broken, you are whole and complete and a beautiful bright shining diamond, perfect with all your imperfections, just as I am.  After you write your mistakes, take the time to read your journal. Then send love to yourself knowing you did the best you could in the moment you made the mistakes.  Take a few minutes and honor your beautiful human behaviors and forgive yourself just as you would open your heart to forgive another.

If any of this process isn’t working for you, stop for a minute and ask “Why would I be choosing to not love and forgive myself?”. Spending time and energy intentionally choosing to continue a pattern of being unloving towards yourself stops you from enjoying life and getting all the juice you can from your human experience and can cause health issues.

Step up. Allow yourself to let go of what you have had guilt, resentment, and shame about.

I found that when I truly began loving myself my self-respect increased as did my self-confidence and self-esteem. My health improved. My relationships improved and even my income improved.  I also noticed I am not repeating the same mistakes again because I allowed myself to become aware of my behaviors and I no longer have guilt or shame about the way I acted or what I said. I have forgiven myself and let go.