Forgiving Me
Forgiving others feels hard. Forgiving ourselves often feels impossible. In my experience, I find that many women are a bit better at forgiving others than forgiving themselves. When we’ve messed up, we don’t like to let ourselves off the hook. Often, we go over our mistakes on repeat until we feel deeply ashamed. And this shame, when we’re already struggling to forgive ourselves, keeps us stuck.
Brene Brown made one of the best distinctions I’ve ever heard about shame that has helped my clients so much. She distinguishes between guilt and shame. Guilt, she says, is doing something wrong and feeling bad for it. We do something wrong and we feel guilty. Shame, she says, is doing something wrong and deciding you’re a bad person because you did that wrong thing. Brown describes how we can quickly descend into a shame spiral.
“The difference between shame and guilt is...the difference between ‘I am bad’ and ‘I did something bad.’ ...Shame is about who we are, and guilt is about our behaviors.”
Guilt is more likely to help me correct my behavior. Shame gets me stuck and causes hopelessness. Shame messaging comes straight from our inner critic. Our inner critic is the voice in our heads that loves to tell us all the ways we don’ t measure up. She loves black and white thinking and focusing on problems. She has a scarcity mentality and convinces us there’s never enough never enough love, never enough forgiveness, never enough of anything good, really.
Learning to forgive yourself, in my experience, requires we avoid moving into the shame spiral. As strange as it sounds, try to stick with guilt! It can be dealt with much more easily. Guilt is a function of your conscience (that all humans have) and it’s helpful. It’s a warning system. It helps you see where you need to course correct.
Here are a few ways to accept responsibility and deal with your guilt without moving into a shame spiral:
Get curious about where you feel shame in your life. Where are the places you feel inadequate, faulty, or just plain getting it wrong? Notice when feelings of shame show up.
Start addressing the inner critic directly. Remember her? She’s the voice that loves to tell us all the ways we don’t measure up. But how do we address our inner critic? Two ways:
Activate your inner guidance. Who better to stand toe to toe with your inner critic than your inner guide. As Christians, we believe our inner guide is the Holy Spirit. We receive this guide when we choose to follow Christ. Our inner guide is so unlike our inner critic. Our inner guide sees the gray, focuses on small changes and successes, knows there’s more than enough love and forgiveness and kindness to go around. Pray for the Holy Spirit’s intercession, guidance, and presence.
Challenge the cognitive distortions the critic uses and reframe your thinking. Cognitive distortions are errors in thinking, like overgeneralization, all or nothing thinking, and minimization. For example, our inner critic may say something like: “See you messed up. You always mess up! You’re never going to get it right.” Or “I failed at maintaining my sobriety. Clearly that means I’m a failure and everyone else can see I’m a failure too. I’m never going to stay sober.” When we directly address those errors, it helps us avoid that shame spiral. So in answer to these cognitive distortions, we reframe our thinking. That reframing sounds more like, “I messed up. I’m human. Sometimes I don’t get it right, but many times I do.” Or “I drank. I failed at my goal of staying sober. Others may notice this, but they will also notice that I’m not giving up.”
Forgiving yourself for sins, poor choices, or the ways you’ve caused others pain is certainly hard. It’s scary to forgive yourself, but you’re worthy of forgiveness. Here is a process you can try if you don’t know how to begin to forgive yourself:
Confess your wrongdoing to God.
Ask God to help you accept your mistake without excuses or justification.
Apologize to yourself. Amends aren’t only for others.
Practice stopping self-defeating thoughts (inner critic) that keep you stuck in shame.
Forgiveness is an act of the will – it’s a choice. It’s also not a one and done, typically. We choose to forgive ourselves or others, and then we go to sleep, wake up the next morning and choose it again, and we do that until we realize it’s been a while since we had to choose, and we begin to feel the peace forgiveness brings.