Forgiving Ourselves and Others: Breaking Free from the Shackles of Regret and Mistakes

Hi Karine,

There is no other option than to forgive yourself. If you don’t, you will keep feeling the way you are feeling right now - that awful unsettling feeling caused by self-doubt and regret. Remember, always, always, always forgive yourself and others immediately. If you do not, you are opting to be stuck in life where you are now.

Self-Forgiveness: The Path to Healing

If you are suffering from regret, never have any regrets about anything. Here's why: all a person can ever do, think, or say is based on what they know or understand at the time they did it. There is no point in looking back now you have a better understanding of the situation and judging actions with the advantage of hindsight. Everyone can only do their best at the time, with what they know. Accept it, and you won't have any regrets.

If you find yourself in a similar situation today, you would handle it differently. It's called learning. Regrets don't help you move forward; they keep you in the past. Be kind to yourself and others. Forgiving others can be difficult, as it is often misunderstood. You don't forgive someone because what they did is acceptable; it wasn't. You do it for yourself, to let go of resentment and anger. Forgiveness is a decision to unburden yourself of negative thoughts and the mental and emotional energy they consume. You don't even have to tell the person you have forgiven them, as it's your private decision. Don't ask for or expect an apology, and truly let it go.

A Journey to Self-Understanding and Forgiveness

This question already tells me that you're a good person. If you weren’t concerned with your mistakes, you wouldn’t bother to seek forgiveness. It’s easy to fall into a slump when you've made many mistakes but recognizing such monumental mistakes that leave you struggling to forgive yourself is a step in the right direction. You can't allow your mistakes to define you; they are merely parts of your journey.

Sometimes, we have to make big mistakes to grow into the person we're meant to be. I know, because I made big mistakes that most people would judge, but if I allowed the judgment to bother me, I would stay in a constant slump and never be able to snap out of it. I would end up depressed and miserable, telling myself I'm an epic failure. The end result is always more mistakes and you end up feeling even worse. The cycle goes on and on if you allow it.

I wasn't able to forgive myself for my past mistakes until very recently. When I say very recently, I mean within the past six months, or even less. I started examining myself, my life, my mistakes, my wife's mistakes, how our mistakes have impacted each other, and why she was able to make such drastic changes so long ago and why I seemed to make more and more mistakes. I didn't realize all the things that were holding me back for the longest time. I made very drastic lifestyle changes several years ago, so I made huge progress, but my mental state still wasn't what it needed to be. I spent so many years ignoring my problems and pretending neither of us had done the things we had that I never truly processed them how I should have.

Essentially, I had to release all the things I had been ignoring. I spent months depressed and couldn't go a single day without crying about something. I even cried about the time I screwed up the plans to take my son fishing when he was four - he's now 25. I was a mess over that. I'm sure if you've read some of my older posts, you can see that I was releasing my emotional baggage and trauma. It’s therapeutic and helps a lot, but I probably shouldn't have made some of it public.

Eventually, I worked through it all and decided to give myself a break. I realized that almost all, if not all, of my mistakes and failures have something to do with trauma I didn't even know was affecting me. Finding the trauma, spotting the ways it holds me back, and releasing it was a huge step towards healing. Acknowledging that my biggest mistakes were driven by my subconscious made it a little easier to accept things I had done. I realized that I deserve to be happy, I deserve to have a peaceful life, and I deserve to have a clear conscience. I don't deserve a constant state of suffering and I don't deserve to torture myself over things I won't ever be able to change.

I've always been better at forgiving others than I am at forgiving myself. There have been times I quite literally ran away because I couldn't face everything I had done. I realized it’s not healthy to run from my problems, and pretending I didn't make big mistakes doesn't help. But it's also not healthy to be miserable because I can't forgive myself. Of everyone I know, I can say with certainty that I caused my wife more pain than I have anyone else. She is still here, she still loves me, and she has forgiven me for anything I've ever done to hurt her. In a way, that made it a little bit harder to forgive myself. The reason for that is I didn't know how to love myself for a long time. I tried so hard to make her hate me as much as I hated myself. I didn't even realize that was what I was doing. When she forgave me so completely, I didn't feel like I deserved it, which made me hate myself just a little bit more.

The only way to forgive yourself is to care about yourself enough to feel like you deserve to be forgiven. Care about yourself enough to make peace with things you can't change or take back. Care about yourself enough to give yourself a break. You should also care about yourself and the people you love enough that you don't make the same mistakes again. If you're hung up on the past, you will be depressed 100% of the time. If you're constantly worrying about the future, you will have anxiety 100% of the time. The only way to have the life you deserve is to live in the present. When you catch yourself slipping, find ways to ground yourself. Find something to occupy your mind and focus on things that bring you joy.