Self-Care Sunday Week #4 – Self-Forgiveness

This week wraps up my December Self-Care Sunday topics. For this last week I wanted to talk about self-forgiveness. It seems to be that it is easier to forgive others than it is to forgive ourselves, why is that? Is it because we don’t hold others to the same standards as we do ourselves? Do we demand more of ourselves than others? Maybe we feel the emotions of our mistakes more? All I do know is that I cannot be the only one who mentally beats myself up over things that I cannot change.

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you” – Lewis B. Smedes.

There are many things that I have forgiven myself for over the years, it was not easy or natural but with practice and time I’ve made peace with the things that I am not proud of. There’s not much that I regret because everything in life has taught me something and it’s all part of who I am. However, I’m a work in progress and I still mess up, I still make the wrong decisions, and still find it hard to forgive myself. I replay things in my head over and over and give myself anxiety wishing I’d done it differently.

As a mother, I make mistakes – probably daily, and every night I replay what I could have done differently. Many times it feels like there’s a big difference between how I want to handle situations and how I actually end up handling them, the mother I want to be vs. the mother I am. I feel guilty working as much as I do, and I feel that maybe I am not being the best mother I could be and I worry on the effect it has on my son. I apologize to him and own it when I mess up and while he forgives me, I just can’t seem to forgive myself.

We need to forgive ourselves though, the world beats us down enough as it is, we don’t need to add to it any further. The mistakes we make do not make us inherently bad, they make us human. We are not the sum of all our mistakes. Forgiveness can help heal ourselves of past traumas. Forgiveness does not excuse away something but instead accepts the reality of it, unwrapping the negative emotions and finding peace with it. Forgiveness is not passive, it is something we must choose to do and actively pursue and work towards.

Self-forgiveness, in my opinion, is probably one of the most important aspects of self-care. It ties in with so much of our mental health; guilt, shame and fear are just a few things that can be helped when we learn to forgive ourselves. “Forgiveness has been shown to elevate mood, enhance optimism, and guard against anger, stress, anxiety, and depression” (Forgiveness Apology, Blame 2020).

We cannot change our past mistakes but we can work towards forgiving ourselves for them and when we acknowledge all that encompasses we can learn from them, heal and move forward.

Forgiveness Apology, Blame. (2020). Retrieved December 27, 2020, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/forgiveness