Forgive Yourself

Tomorrow is the traditional date to celebrate the birth of a man who went around telling quite a few people that their sins were forgiven. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those to whom he told that still couldn’t forgive themselves for things they had done. It can be remarkably hard to forgive yourself for your mistakes and badnesses.

Many of us believe that it would be dangerous to forgive ourselves for our past mistakes and badnesses. But I think there is a difference between

  • taking responsibility for what you have done and trying to make things right and

  • beating yourself up about what you have done in the past.

Energy spent on beating yourself up and perhaps on feebly (or strongly) defending yourself from your own attacks is energy you aren’t spending on doing better and trying to repair the damage you have done in the past. It is an empirical matter whether beating yourself up is more helpful than discernment of what you have done wrong minus an emphasis on blame. There is little evidence to show that the very painful strategy of beating yourself up works any better than “blameless discernment” (a phrase I take from Shirzad Chamine, author of Positive Intelligence.

I like the quotation at the top of this post: “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.” (More than one famous person has said something like this.) We can’t change the past. We can only change what we are doing to ourselves now using bits and pieces of what we remember from our past and what is in our heads about the past more generally. Is it really helping you or the world to make yourself miserable using pointed shards from your past?

Unless you want to make what I consider the bad bet that beating yourself up is really helping you, forgiving yourself (while resolving to do better) is a good option to consider. The funny thing about forgiving yourself is that it looks more like stopping something you are doing than like doing something. Just cut the power to your attacks on yourself, and you will probably feel better and do better.