Exhale the Past Forgive Yourself

Learning How to Forgive Yourself

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Forgiveness is a powerful life skill. It enables us to let go of the turmoil of our past and focus on the future ahead. When we hold on to emotional pain, many aspects of our lives suffer. We can have a difficult time trusting and opening up to people. Our relationships are not as fulfilling. Our total outlook on life can have a negative shadow cast over it. This is why learning to forgive yourself when you make mistakes is so important.

What Does it Mean to Forgive Yourself?

Relieving emotional pain through forgiveness can be incredibly powerful. Contrary to what many believe, forgiveness is not saying it’s okay that something happened. To forgive is to simply allow what happened to exist while releasing any negative emotions you hold about it. In short, it’s letting go of the past, and moving on for your own mental well-being.

Letting go of negative thoughts about yourself can give you to strength to move forward. When you spend all your mental effort dwelling on the mistakes you made, you struggle with taking the next steps. Self-forgiveness can free you so that you can carry on without being worried and expecting you’ll fail again.

Why Self-Forgiveness is Difficult

So why is it so hard for us to forgive ourselves? For many of us, it can be much easier to forgive others. If you’re like me, you expect others to mess up, but hold yourself to a higher standard. Setting high goals and having a perfectionist mindset can play a major part in this. You may compare yourself to others and think, I’m trying so much harder than everyone else, why am I failing?

Understand that self-love is difficult. You can see all of your flaws, even the ones no one knows about. You’re aware of all the times you made a goal for yourself and missed it. It can become easier to feel compassion for yourself once you realize other people make goals and fail them too. We all have our own unique difficulties that we need to work through every day.

Letting Go of the Past

Marianna Pogosyan from Psychology Today describes here that being kind to ourselves requires a supportive inner voice. One which understands that we are useful and valuable, regardless of mistakes we’ve made. Talk to yourself like you would a friend. Be that friend who knows that everyone makes mistakes, even the best of the best.

When these things happen, it’s okay to tell yourself “This happened, it’s my fault and that’s alright. Here’s how I can do better next time.” It’s also okay to believe it! Believe that it is acceptable to make a mistake. There’s nothing good that comes from punishing yourself. Mistakes exist so that we can learn to move past them.

"To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you." – Lewis B. Smedes Click To Tweet

No Matter What, Forgive Yourself

Self-forgiveness is necessary for a healthy mind and relationship with ourselves. While learning how to forgive yourself is not an easy thing to do, letting go of the past will give us the freedom to carry on. Once you’ve learned this valuable life skill, you’ll have a less stressful and more successful life.

Start by speaking to yourself like a friend, and understanding you can’t make things better by beating yourself up. In reality, progress can only happen when you are able to move on from your mistakes. So, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and let’s keep going!

Have you made any mistakes that you have trouble forgiving yourself for? Talking about it can help! Let me know in the comments.

That’s it for now everyone. If you’ve found some value in this post, please share it to inspire others too! Thanks!

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References:

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21 thoughts on “Learning How to Forgive Yourself”

  1. That’s such an important point that forgiveness doesn’t mean saying something is okay. Forgiveness is a way to stop the past preventing you from moving forward.

    1. Oh my gosh! Your comment went into spam and I just found it. There’s literally nothing spammy about it. Also, that’s my favourite point of this whole post and I’m so glad you like it too.

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