How to Forgive Yourself Even When It Feels Impossible

Find helpful strategies for forgiving yourself so you’ve got the option to move on.

Taking care of your mental healthincludes many things, including learning how to forgive yourself.

It actually causes us to enter into relationships in a down position.

From furthering your social and emotional development to improving interpersonal relationships, here are some reasons to forgive yourself.

Improved Self Esteem

By forgiving yourself, you could feel less guilt or shame about the action.

Reducing such thoughts and learning from mistakes can help you feel better about yourself and your worth.

Forgiving yourself encourages better overall well-being.

This leads to better relationships as you recognize that humans are not perfect and everyone makes mistakes.

While you may want to ignore the feelings and hope they go away, chances are they will resurface.

Truly moving on means acknowledging your feelings, processing them, and accepting why you feel that way.

The important thing, however, is to not linger on them.

You don’t have to continue to feel bad.

“You have to decide: This is a thing that happened, not who I am.”

“So you could write down, for example,I am a liar, I am not trustworthy.

And then you’d look at that and demand evidence.”

Ask yourself: Are you truly untrustworthy, or did you just do one untrustworthy thing one time?

Explore the answer in your writing by, for example, listing the untrustworthy things you’ve done.

“The only way to feel whole is to be vulnerable and speak up,” says Delony.

And the next part is to ask for forgiveness.

And you’re able to’t hinge your thoughts on whether you get that forgiveness or not.

You don’t get to decide what forgiveness looks like."

What they do next doesn’t have to stop you from forgiving yourself.

They are entitled to their feelings, just as you are entitled to stop torturing yourself.

Rather than criticizing yourself over and over for the error, you might turn it into a learning opportunity.

Ask yourself: What circumstances led me to act in that manner?

Remind yourself that you acted based on the knowledge and tools you had at that time.

Verbalize your mistake and what you learned from it.

Saying it out loud may help your brain remember the lesson.

“You may have been fired because of alie you told at work.

You have to be willing to divorce the consequence from your identity,” says Delony.

“Does that mean you’re always a liar?

No, it means you lied one time,” Delony notes.

Who am I going to be in the future?That is the path to overcome guilt."

If a friend or relative had made the same mistake, what advice would you give them?

You could even act out the situation with a trusted companion if it helps.

Then, take your own advice and put it into action.

Forgiving yourself takes time, patience, and effort.

Tenklova, L., & Slezackova, A.

In: Woodyatt, L., Worthington, Jr., E., Wenzel, M., Griffin, B.

(eds)Handbook of the Psychology of Self-Forgiveness.