Do you live with a burden of guilt and you don’t know how to forgive yourself and move on? This translates into conflicts and the following characteristics: insecurity, perfectionism, constant self-accusation, fear of failure (resulting in a state of constant vigilance) and being too demanding of people. other. Guilt is a helpful way of stimulating correct and respectful behavior, and so helps us to better understand each other. A real sense of guilt is a symptom of an awakened conscience that serves self-censorship and the prevention of failures and lack of morality.
But sometimes, the feeling of excessive guilt so much that we fail not only to forgive ourselves. Sometimes it can be a lot harder than forgiving someone else. When you live with a sense of guilt for something that has happened in the past, this bundle of negativity buried deep inside you can cause an eternal and penetrating sense of unhappiness. To forgive oneself is an important act to move forward and free oneself from the past. It is also a way to protect your health and well-being in general.
How to Forgive Yourself and Move On
Certainly, it is difficult to forgive. It takes time, patience and courage to admit that there is a problem and to put in place a solution. When you are under the burden, how to forgive yourself for what you have done, the process can be even more difficult. The path to forgiveness is not an easy path. As you become aware of yourself and understand that you must take your time in life, you can also learn to forgive yourself.
Each of us has a past. Each of us has made bad choices in his past. Each of us has done bad things in the past. Each of us has had to make some serious mistakes or make bad decisions in the past. It may happen that all our acts, our ways, our decisions, our conduct in the past can have a heavy weight on our conscience. And that can create the feeling of guilt in us. Which is normal. But we should not let guilt down so much that we cannot go further in life. ” Guilt becomes a burden for us when it stops us from moving forward in life.” (Thomson Dablemond)
If your guilt is a burden to you, then you must know that you must learn to forgive yourself. In this article, Weddingincana.com offers you steps to learn to forgive yourself. How to learn to forgive oneself? Here are some steps:
1 – You Must Understand the Importance of Forgiveness.
Living in a state where you cannot forgive requires a lot of energy. You are constantly crushed by the fear of your vulnerability, you burn with anger towards the source of your suffering and you constantly live in sadness, pain, and guilt. This energy deserves to be better exploited so that your creativity and your skills are nourished instead of your negativity. Forgiveness also allows you to live in the present instead of living in the past, allowing you to move towards the future with a new sense of purpose that will make you focus on change, improvement, and use. benign past experiences, rather than being held back by the wounds of the past.
Indeed, understand why you must forgive yourself. If you acknowledge your fault, you will feel guilty and you will need to forgive yourself. When you think of your memories, it could lead to feelings that make you uncomfortable.
To identify the reason for having these feelings, ask yourself the following questions:
– Do I have this feeling because of the negative result of what I did?
– Do I have this feeling, because this negative result is my fault?
Once you have become aware of the importance of forgiveness, you are taking the first step to forgive yourself.
Some are afraid to forgive themselves because they are afraid of losing the sense of their existence as a self that is built on anger, resentment, and vulnerability. In this case, ask yourself if you want to show the world how angry, easy to hurt and very responsive. Is the comfort of this mentality worth the effort and the nuisance it imposes on you? It’s better to go through a little time of insecurity while you find your way than to continue living the rest of your life crushed by anger.
Consider forgiveness positively. If you are bothered by the idea that forgiveness implies that you should no longer feel intense feelings such as resentment and anger, do you say that forgiveness can be a chance to experience intense positive feelings such as joy, generosity, and self-confidence? To think about what you will win rather than what you will lose has the advantage of keeping you in a positive spirit while minimizing negative emotions.
2 – Accept That Failures Do Not Make You a Bad Person.
Everyone fails at one time or another in his life. Do not see your failures as things that make you a bad person, whether professionally or relational. As Bill Gates said, ” It is normal to celebrate one’s successes, but the most important thing is to learn from one’s failures.” By learning from your failures, you make the first step possible to forgive yourself.
This is where many people stab themselves. Their past presents itself to them as so obscure a picture that they end up seeing in themselves a negative image. ” Man’s past makes his life, the past of man is a part of his life, but the past of man is not his whole life.” (Thomson Dablemond). That your image of the past is not your same image of the present or of your future. That’s why to accept that chess does not make you a bad person.
Likewise, accept your feelings. Part of the struggle is often not being able to accept that you are feeling emotions like anger, fear, resentment, and vulnerability. Instead of trying to avoid confronting these bad feelings, accept them as part of what fuels your lack of forgiveness for yourself. “A problem named is a problem ready to be solved.”
3 – Do Not Be Afraid to Start from Scratch.
To truly forgive yourself, do not be afraid to start from the beginning. You will not learn to forgive yourself simply by learning to live with your past. You must learn from this experience. Take what you have learned and apply it to your life to build a better version of yourself. Thus, you will take a very important step in your journey to learning to forgive yourself.
Never forget that forgiving does not mean forgetting. You are entitled to learn from your experiences and to guide you through them. The goal is to leave aside the self-imposed resentment and reprimand that accompany remembering the past. To give yourself new chances to rebuild a better life than your dark past is to give yourself a chance to forgive yourself.
Adopt a new state of mind to learn from your past mistakes. One way to move on is to adapt to what you have learned.
Set goals for the future to help you build a stronger mindset. This look towards your future will help you forgive yourself in the present by focusing on the positive changes you can make.
When you feel guilty, “forgive your mistakes and mistakes and move on”. This will help you every time you make a mistake.
Above all, do not dwell on your past mistakes. You must learn from past mistakes, but you will not be able to forgive yourself by constantly thinking about them. You may not be aware of the present moment. Your life begins to stagnate because you find yourself obsessed with what you did or did not do. Instead, focus on the present and what you can do in the future to improve your life.
4 – Realize That Nobody Is Perfect.
You might want to forgive yourself because of what you have done to others. First, you must realize that you are not responsible for what others are doing. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone goes through times when their actions are not particularly brilliant. By realizing this, you may be taking the first step towards your healing.
Perfectionism can push you to have criteria too hard to judge your own behavior, criteria that you will not impose on anyone else. And if perfectionism makes you too hard on yourself, you’re stuck in a situation where self-forgiveness becomes very hard to give because it will look like an acceptance of a lower-level self. Get out of this vicious circle by thinking of what Martha Beck, American sociologist, called ” welcoming imperfection “. Beck said, ” to welcome imperfection is the means to accomplish what perfectionism promises, but never gives.” This allows you to accept that we are all imperfect and that you are human and thus imperfect too.
5 – Do Not Think About What Others Expect of You.
If you are stuck in a spiral of self-hatred in which you never feel up to it because of what you have been told, self-forgiveness is essential. You have no control over what other people do and say, and many things are said and done unconsciously and often motivated by the flaws of others. Spending your time lowering yourself because you think you are not up to the expectations of others means giving too much importance to what another person, with his mix of feelings, can think of. Forgive yourself for trying to live according to the expectations of others and instead begin to make the changes necessary to pursue your own goal.
6 – Learn to Be Aware of Things.
You will help your future healing by becoming aware of your present actions. If you cultivate a strong sense of who you are and accept the actions you want to take, you will help build a better future and forgive your past actions or reactions.
7 – Break the Chain of Severity and Stop Punishing Yourself.
For every person who has been tough with you, think that a person has been tough with that person too. So, break the chain of severity by being kind to yourself and trying not to want to live by the expectations that someone else would have for you.
When someone criticizes you for no reason, realize that this person has just made life harder in case she makes a mistake or if she fails to stay at the level of her own perfectionist ideals. At this point, remember where you come from and why you do not want to live like that anymore.
According to a frequent misunderstanding, forgiveness signifies forgetting and indulgence. This misunderstanding may cause a person to feel that it is not right to forgive themselves because if they do that, it will be like forgetting and/or showing indulgence towards past evil. If this is what keeps you from forgiving you, remember that forgiveness is a process of awareness in which you continue to remember what happened: you do not become indulgent at once and do not start thinking of something “bad” as something “good”
It’s quite acceptable to say, “I’m not proud of what I did (or how I downed myself), but I’m moving forward for my health, well-being, and people around me. It’s healthy to say that and it will break the self-destructive cycle in which you fell because you openly acknowledge what was wrong and express your intention to correct that.
8 – Consider Forgiveness as a Journey and Not a Destination.
If you tend to think that you are unable to “arrive” at forgiveness, you may be sabotaging your own chances of even starting your journey to forgiveness. It helps to tell you that forgiveness is an ongoing process and that you will have your days with and without your days, as is the case with most feelings and experiences in life. You may feel that you have reached a point of forgiveness, and at that moment something happens to you that makes you feel that it was vain efforts and that you are back to square one, angry and angry with yourself. The best approach is to let these relapses happen and to think of them as small defeats in a process that makes forgiveness easier.
Also, be aware that forgiveness has no agenda; instead you can do your best to prepare for the process and its beginning:
– Forgive yourself in progressive steps. Start by valuing yourself and decide that you will stop letting the past haunt your present and define who you are today.
– Learn from what you have done in the past, but value yourself in general (see previous steps on self-acceptance training).
– Consciously enjoy positive experiences and do not try to minimize them.
– Be grateful for what you already have – good relationships, home, family, education, skills, interests, hobbies, pets, health, etc. Look for what is good in your life.
– Have compassion for yourself. Make your thoughts more fulfilling and focus on values when negative blame emerges.
– Ask forgiveness from others if they have been involved and if you have not already done so, or if you have not done so sincerely. Only do this if you do not see things from your negative perspective and if it does not hurt that person.
Conclusion on How to Forgive Yourself
Train yourself to accept yourself as you are. You do not have to forgive yourself for being yourself. Self-forgiveness aims to target what makes you feel bad, not to condemn you as a person. Self-acceptance as a forgiveness technique allows you to recognize that you are a good person, even with your flaws. This does not mean that you ignore the flaws or that you are trying to stop improving, but rather that you value yourself above these elements and stop letting your faults slow you down in life.
The person we are is the result of the bad and good things that happened to us in life, as well as the good and bad things we did. The way we react to negative events is as important as the way we deal with happy events. A person who tends to ruminate and give importance to a negative event will be more inclined to live in anger and resentment and will have more negativity than a person who sees bad things as isolated incidents that do not affect who they are in general.
Think about how you have forgiven other people in the past. Learn from these experiences and apply them to your own situation. This is reassuring because it means that you now know that you are able to forgive, you just have to channel that forgiveness in the right direction.
Life goes on, so do not hesitate to forgive and forget. From now on, learn to forgive yourself.