This is a pretty huge topic and one that is deeply relevant to the human condition and healing. For my article on forgiveness click here. William Shakespeare wrote “Do as the 'Heavens' have done, forget your evil; With them forgive your Self.” As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.” We are human, all of us. You and me too.
Leo F. Buscaglia wrote “Love your Self, accept your Self, forgive your Self and be good to your Self, because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things.” Robert Holden wrote “True forgiveness is a Self-healing process which starts with you and gradually extends to everyone else.” Forgiveness is a superpower.
LOVE is ‘Living Outside Vicious Emotions’. Remember that love always wins and is the antidote and panacea to all negative feelings, especially self-hatred. Think of Self-forgiveness as taking care of your mental health: It is a healing experience. Brittany Burgunder wrote that “Forgiving your Self, believing in your Self and choosing to love your Self are the best gifts one could receive.” Mahatma Gandhi wrote “Forgiveness is choosing to love. It is the first skill of self-giving love.”
Melody Beattie wrote “Embrace and love all of your Self - past, present, and future. Forgive your Self quickly and as often as necessary. Encourage your Self. Tell your Self good things about your Self.”
Your wounded inner child has been subconsciously running your life until now, using coping mechanisms that were useful in childhood, but that are no longer useful, and may be causing you and others harm. Yet ask your Self “Can a 7-year old who has suffered from unrecognised childhood trauma all his life sin?” It’s time to let go of that Self-hatred and use the big guns of Self-love and Self-forgiveness.
You cannot evolve into your real Self without Self-forgiveness. As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote “At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.” Your soul is waiting to be awakened. As Osho wrote “The first and foremost thing is to be loving toward your Self. Don't be hard; be soft. Care about your Self. Learn how to forgive your Self - again and again and again - seven times, seventy-seven times, seven hundred and seventy-seven times. Learn how to forgive your Self. Don't be hard; don't be antagonistic toward your Self. Then you will flower. And in that flowering you will attract some other flower. It is natural. Stones attract stones; flowers attract flowers. And then there is a relationship which has Grace, which has beauty, which has a benediction in it. And if you can find such a relationship, your relationship will grow into prayer, your love will become an ecstasy, and through love you will know what God is.”
Daryl Calkins wrote that “As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.” Isn’t it time to stop that self-hatred and shame spirals and becoming who you truly are? As C. Joybell C. wrote “Please remember that the lightning has never apologised for breaking skies open; the ocean has never said sorry for sinking ships. You, as well, must never apologise for being a force of Nature. And as you love the lightning and as you love the oceans, so shall you love your Self. The skies are yours, the depths are yours.”
Extend the compassion that you have towards others to your Self: Annette Vaillancourt wrote “Loving people are compassionate towards others. However, if that compassion doesn’t start at home and doesn’t include Self-forgiveness, it is incomplete and lopsided.”
C.S. Lewis wrote “I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than him.” Who are we to judge? We all need to stop playing God. That role is taken.
Louise L. Hay wrote “You’ve been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens”...
Self-forgiveness is an act of Self-love
Forgiving your mistakes
“Everyone makes mistakes. The wise are not people who never make mistakes, but those who forgive themselves and learn from their mistakes” said Ajahn Brahm. Maya Angelou wrote “If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of BEing. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own Self… I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive my Self. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes - it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all… You forgive yourself for every failure because you are trying to do the right thing. God knows that and you know it. Nobody else may know it.” This is the basis of Grace. Eckhart Tolle wrote “There is a fine balance between honouring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving your Self.”
Mary Anne Radmacher wrote “Forgiveness is really a gift to your Self - have the compassion to forgive others, and the courage to forgive your Self.” The inscription above the entrance of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi says of the spiritual journey “Know thyself.” Confucius said that “The more you know yourself, the more you forgive your Self.” You have the birthright of starting over: As Marianne Williamson wrote “The past doesn't determine your future unless you carry it with you into the present. Forgiving your Self and others, you free the Universe to begin again at any moment.” As Mary Shelley wrote "The beginning is always today." And remember, as Michael Bassey Johnson wrote "It is not how heavily you fall. It is how fast you catch yourself." Forgiveness is catching your Self. As Craig D. Lounsbrough wrote "Your new start is only as far away as your fear has parked it."
There is a new beginning every morning. It’s up to you if you face it in the present. Dr Wayne Dyer exclaims “You can sit there forever, lamenting about how bad you've been, feeling guilty until you die, and not one tiny slice of that guilt will do anything to change a single thing in the past. Forgive your Self, then MOVE ON!” As Naide P Obiang wrote "Regrets and mistakes help us identify areas of growth. They are not meant to be dwelled on. Do not let them undermine your potential."
Louis Hay, the spiritual Master wrote “Forgiveness is for your Self because it frees you. It lets you out of that prison you put yourself in.” You have the key to the prison door: It’s up to you to turn that key and walk into being the highest version of you. Norman Vincent Peale wrote “Having asked God for forgiveness, accept release, then truly forgive your Self and turn your back definitely on the matter.”
Personal transformation is not an overnight process: Marianne Williamson wrote “There is a lot to look at when you are serious about transformation. You look at everything you've ever done, every circumstance you've ever been in, cleaning up everything in your past. Reconciling, forgiving others, forgiving your Self. It's a lot of work, actually.”
Jack Cornfield wrote that “For each of the ways I have hurt myself through action or inaction, out of fear, pain, and confusion, I now extend a full and heartful forgiveness. I forgive my Self. I forgive my Self.” I would say ad infinitum. Practice Self-forgiveness daily: As Shannon Adler wrote “Self-forgiveness is a daily practice of the humble, strong and mentally sane. It is an intentional preservation of inner peace and a reflection of a healthy self-concept.”
Apologising to the inner child for lapses in reparenting is a powerful pathway into self-forgiveness. As we accrue experiences of being forgiven by our inner child, we usually become more extensively forgiving of ourselves.
Self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others
Steven Levine wrote “What closes my heart to me, closes my heart to you.”
Without feelings of Self-forgiveness we are closed to the possibility of receiving the forgiveness of others. This is echoed throughout the literature. Many of us are ruthlessly unforgiving of ourselves when we discover we have inadvertently hurt another. Our hurtfulness seems so unforgivable that we are too ashamed to attempt an apology – or we go to the other extreme and apologise for every subsequent breath we take. We become shadows of who we could become. Both positions are so entrenched in self-disgust that we cannot accept genuine forgiveness even when it is offered to us.
We can, nonetheless, learn to express genuine sorrow about hurting others without collapsing into paroxysms of self-hatred and toxic shame. No one’s dedication to recovery, no matter how ardent, prevents him from occasionally mimicking his parents’ hurtfulness. When we are committed to decreasing our unconscious hurtfulness, we owe ourselves forgiveness.
As we cultivate Self-forgiveness, it eventually becomes evident that we also deserve the forgiveness of others. Their forgiveness will of course come easier if we also cultivate tolerance and understanding of their inadvertent hurtfulness.
Self-forgiveness of past mistakes and die-hard habits
Sheldon Kopp wrote that “Man is punished by his sins not for them. And so each day he must forgive himself, again and again.”
All of us have in the past, especially via repetition compulsion, committed blameworthy acts. Once we fully apologise for these transgressions, we need and deserve our own forgiveness. There must come a time in recovery when we stop flagellating ourselves and grant ourselves a final pardon – whether or not we are forgiven by those we hurt.
Many people hold themselves in perpetual blame for past abuses that they no longer commit. The relentless process of self-blame that was instilled in us in childhood must be challenged.
The same holds true for the present. Many codependent survivors beat themselves unmercifully for minor and innocent insensitivities that they wouldn’t think of punishing in others. When we sincerely apply ourselves to eliminating the vestiges of our old abusive habits, we owe ourselves the same tolerance for mistakes that we easily give to others. Perhaps Stephen Levine’s meditation on Self-forgiveness will help us accomplish this:
“Let that unworthiness come up, that anger at yourself – let it all fall away. Let it all go. Open to the possibility of forgiveness. It is so painful to hold yourself out of your heart. Bring yourself into your heart. Using your own first name, in your heart say, “I forgive you” to you. Open to Self-forgiveness. Let go of that bitterness, that hardness, that judgement of your Self. Let some glimmering of loving-kindness be directed toward your Self. Allow your heart to open to you. Let that light, that care for your Self, grow.”
Self-forgiveness and entrenched self-hatred
Stephen Levine wrote “When working with forgiveness, start with the little things. Don’t defeat yourself by going for the hardest first.”
Theodore Rubin wrote “Despair is directly proportionate to the energy and substance used in the service of self-hate. Emotional wellbeing and relative freedom from destructive inner turmoil are directly proportionate to the energy and substance used in the service of (Self) compassion.”
Self-hatred is one of the major ways that we remain stuck in emotional insobriety. In our efforts to cultivate Self-forgiveness, most of us initially experience many failures and many regressions into toxic self-blame. In early recovery we may feel discouraged to notice how often we fall back into condemning ourselves or our inner children. Sometimes we feel powerless to stop ourselves from chanting our personal litanies of self-hatred.
Here as much as anywhere, we need to cultivate patience and self- forgiveness, for we can always eventually return to a self-supporting stance. Sometimes this can be achieved by following Gaye Hendrix’s paradoxical advice “To love your Self even when you find yourself temporarily lost in self-hatred.” Hendrix recommends Self-love for all painful internal experiences “There ought to be something more active to do with feelings and other things we need to deal with. Loving your Self, though, seems to be the one thing that we usually forget to do. And naturally it is the one thing that, if we do not do it, will bring us and our growth to a screeching halt. When you are feeling that impatience, that need to do something, try loving your Self for feeling that way, then do the most loving thing you can manage.”
Hating yourself for hating yourself is one of the most stalwart bastions of toxic shame. It is a process that quickly spirals downward into despair. We can also decrease self-hatred by aggressively refusing to attack ourselves, and by shifting the blame of self-hatred from ourselves to those who taught us to loathe ourselves in the first place.
Unfortunately, there are some occasions when nothing seems to serve to rescue us from self-hatred. Sometimes our only resort is to follow Carl Jung’s advice: “Batten down the hatches and weather out the emotional storm.” This too shall pass. All is well and all things shall be well. Such experiences teach us that no intense emotional upset lasts forever. Indeed, if we stay with inner emotional turmoil long enough and fully feel it, it eventually dissolves, transmutes and is replaced by a different inner experience.
Self-forgiveness and existential pain
Many of us become so addicted to self-blame, that we automatically take responsibility for misfortunes that we have done absolutely nothing to cause.
We are all subject to tragedies over which we have no control. As Harold Kushner points out in ‘Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?’, we must forgive ourselves for existential sufferings that occur as a natural part of the human condition.
In 'Existential Psychotherapy', Irwin Yalom eloquently elaborates on how we all, through no fault of our own, periodically suffer from loneliness, accident, loss, and death. No matter how many friends we have, we all sometimes feel hopelessly alone. No matter how much security we amass, we all lose things and people that we cherish. Grief is part of life and has much to teach us. Experiencing my mother’s death recently has truly helped me to grow.
These losses are painful enough in their own right without the added weight of self-blame and self-condemnation. We need our own mercy and forgiveness most at those awful times when fate deals us an unfair blow. We must create a self-soothing haven in our hearts for ourselves. Perhaps we can even learn to adopt Robert Bly’s wise perspective at such times “Tragedies, then, are not so much about personality flaws as about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.”
Self-forgiveness, other’s forgiveness and extenuating circumstances
Herbie Monroe wrote “Do unto yourself as you would have others do unto you.”
Sincere, non-grovelling apologies enhance trust and build intimacy. The skills we acquire from apologising to our inner children can be used to make amends with others.
Many of us, however, find it difficult to talk about our extenuating circumstances, no matter how pertinent they are. Many of us come from backgrounds where excuses were categorically forbidden.
Most dysfunctional parents react to their children’s excuses as if they are further proof of blameworthiness. Attempts to explain are often “greeted” with intensified punishment. Do you have any unpleasant reverberations with these stock phrases: “What kind of sorry excuse is that?” “Don’t make it worse on yourself by giving me one of your stupid little excuses!” “I don’t care who took your pen (hat, shirt, bike, etc.), you little brat, I still have to buy another one!” “If you try to get out of it now, you’ll really be in trouble!” “I can see in your eyes that you did it – don’t make me hit you harder by lying about it!” Because of the prevalence of this kind of abuse, “making an excuse” has become widely taboo in our culture.
Our childhoods taught us the futility of appealing to our dysfunctional parents or any other authority figure for clemency. I knew from then on that I would have to accept total blame for any mishap I was involved in, however incidentally.
Historical childhood traumas make many of us reluctant to appeal to mitigating factors. As in childhood, we often accept others’ harsh judgements about our inadvertent wrongs without standing up for ourselves – inwardly or outwardly. Instead, we commonly retreat into silence as our inner critic adds its choruses of shame to whatever condemnations we have unprotestingly accepted.
Some of us also experience the other side of this dynamic. We forbid everyone else from explaining the extenuating circumstances around their mistakes or unfair acts because we have not reclaimed our right and ability to cite our just excuses (to ourselves, as well as others).
There are two major extenuating circumstances to which we can rightfully appeal when we ask others to forgive us. The first is that we are human, therefore we all suffer from the human condition, and by nature we are imperfect and prone to making mistakes. I do not have a perfect memory, and I may one day forget a commitment I have made to you. I do not always move gracefully and I may drop and break something valuable of yours. I do not always know when I have repressed an upset about something, and I may occasionally respond unfairly to you in an overcharged manner.
If these incidents are not habitual, and not a passive-aggressive acting out on my part, then I need to forgive my Self for not being a perfect friend. I can also reasonably hope that you too will forgive me once I fully apologise to you.
The second extenuating circumstance is that we are all subject to repetition compulsion and liable to occasionally mimic our parents’ unfairnesses. How can we know about egalitarian love when we come from families in which experiences of fair and respectful relating were rare or nonexistent? We are all destined to occasionally be insensitive to our intimates while we are learning to relate more healthily.
When we discuss the specifics of our mitigating circumstances with those we hurt, they may be able to see that our insensitivity was unintentional. Over time, self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others augment each other as mutually complementary processes that allow us to become increasingly compassionate and forgiving.
When we communicate our extenuating circumstances in a way that has room for apologies, grief, amends, and revised intentions, we make tremendous gains in our intimacy and trust with others and with ourselves. Our newfound ability to apologise with genuine sorrow, while maintaining our self-esteem, sometimes strikes us as the most cogent evidence that we have at last become a fully-fledged adult, our true Self.
Mutual forgiveness
Personal transformation is a journey. Howard Nelson wrote “Maybe we cross from the one to the other only on a bridge of grief.”
Alice Miller wrote “A person who has consciously worked through the whole tragedy of his own fate will recognise another’s suffering more clearly. He will not be scornful of other’s feelings, whatever their nature, because he can take his own feelings seriously. He surely will not help to keep the vicious circle of contempt turning.”
Relationships are fortified by mutual permission to talk about extenuating circumstances. We operate at a higher level of love when we agree to discuss and work through any pain that transfers from the past and attaches to our current interactions. The most compelling extenuating circumstances are often the previously undiscovered childhood traumas from the past that typically only surface in consciousness as intimacy deepens.
In his book ‘The Tao of Fully Feeling’, Pete Walker gives an illustration of how trust can grow from the mutual discussion of extenuating circumstances: “You and I are walking down the street together when I trip and stumble awkwardly for a few steps. Without guile – but unconsciously imitating one of your sarcastic parents – you laugh and exclaim that I’m clumsy and tell me I’ll never be Fred Astaire. This triggers my sensitivity from years of hurtful, childhood teasing and I suddenly feel very upset. I feel ashamed and struggle with an impulse to react angrily. Although my emotional reaction is dramatically out of proportion to the relatively minor sting of your teasing, it is an understandable emotional flashback. However if I do not realise I am experiencing you through the filter of decades of severe teasing, I may become sullen or accuse you of hurting me. If I do the latter, I may trigger a corresponding emotional flashback of shame and anger in you. Perhaps you were told over and over by a destructive parent that you were a hurtful child who always said hateful things. You too suddenly may feel intense humiliation or anger – disproportionate to the severity of our misunderstanding. If we are both ignorant of the primary source of our intense feelings, our interchange will typically devolve into a variety of intimacy-destroying misunderstandings. Either or both of us may blast out abusively in anger and escalate our disaffection; or either or both of us may contract and retreat into shame or fear, and cover up our distress with silence or a distracting change of subject. If we react with unbridled anger, we are unconsciously purging our unprocessed anger about childhood hurt onto each other. This may further deteriorate as we both become increasingly overwhelmed – flashing back to the times we were raged at in childhood. We may even wind up in an abusive fight, regressing into rage in the same awful ways as our parents. One or both of us may end up so upset or afraid that we decide to end our relationship. At the other extreme, our fear and shame may prohibit us from exploring our strong emotional reactions to each other, and we may retreat into our old defences of denial and dissociation. A thick emotional wall may then arise between us, and we may gradually lose interest in continuing our friendship. It has been my observation that many essentially sound relationships end tragically in such ways.” This is the concept of ‘If it’s hysterical it’s historical that is often quoted by psychotherapists.
Unscrambling the mix of past and present pain
If we are to keep our relationships healthy and intact, we must learn how to talk about extenuating circumstances. This not only keeps the process of mutual forgiveness alive between us, but also allows us to avail ourselves of the healing opportunities that arise when past pain attaches to present upsets. To make the most of these opportunities, we must recognise when we are embroiled in an emotional flashback. If we do not, we are likely to summarily transfer old upset feelings onto our current intimates instead of redirecting them to their original source in the past.
Once we realise that we are in the midst of an emotional flashback, we can say that this is the source of our disproportionate upset. In this vein, Walker gives the following example of how he might respond to the interchange described in the previous section: “I’m really sorry about what just happened. I’m just now realising that I really overreacted to your comment about my stumbling because of an old unresolved hurt of mine. Even though I momentarily thought you were trying to hurt me, I now realise you, of course, did not intend to. You’ve always been a wonderful friend to me, and I’m sorry that some of my past “stuff” got stirred up and attached to what just happened between us. As I focus on the feelings of anger, fear and shame that were triggered by your comment, I am reminded of all the times I was cruelly teased by my family for simple mistakes and accidents. I actually feel the pain of it now as I see the derisive looks on their faces. I also “get” why I am especially sensitive around this issue. I bet I was called “clumsy” a thousand times as a kid. I shudder when I remember that time in front of all my relatives when my mother screamed “Clumsy idiot” as I tripped on the edge of the living room rug. God! I’m enraged about how much of that crap I had to put up with. I’d like to scream for every time my mother humiliated me in public. I’m sure sorry that some of my anger just leaked out on you. And, although I do feel some relatively mild anger about your remark, and would like to ask you not to tease me again in such situations or in that way, I bet ninety-five percent of what I’m feeling is about how incessantly my parents picked on me. Damn! I’m so furious about their bullying. I wish I could go back in time as the adult I am now to every one of those occasions. I’d make them see how cowardly they were to pick on someone so small and defenceless. I’d use this anger I’m feeling now to put an instant stop to their abuse.”
Walker continues “Depending on where we were, and our degree of familiarity with each other and this process, I might even turn aside at this point and do something more intensely cathartic, like yelling at imagined representations of my parents or throwing a rock at a wall. At suitable intervals, I would also invite you to focus on whatever it is that you bring from the past to this situation. In so doing, I would welcome you to express the feelings you discover as you search for the antecedents of your reactions to me.”
We are immeasurably enriched when we have an intimate who is willing to mutually explore and work through re-emerging childhood pain with this perspective. Our recovery is greatly enhanced by the non-abusive venting of the old anger and tears that we uncover in free associating about a hurt that has arisen between us.
When we work through our upsets in constructive ways, we gain a greater degree of sensitivity to each other’s needs for safety. This creates the trust that allows our communication to become more vulnerable and authentic, a condition fundamental for the blossoming of real, feeling-based forgiveness.
Moreover, as our recovery progresses, we are decreasingly affected by lingering childhood hurt. There is less undischarged pain from the past to emotionally contaminate the present. Emotional flashbacks occur less frequently and intensely, and are identified more readily. We are increasingly liberated from mis-attributing emotional upset to our intimates.
Conclusion
The Buddha said “If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.” Forgive your Self: You are so forgiveable. Remember that you are an innocent child of God, regardless of your mistakes. This is the path to transformation…
Namaste.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.