Forgive Yourself First
Forgiving might just be about the hardest thing you'll ever have to do, amiright? Sooo hard.
Just the word forgiveness has all sorts of stuff attached to it. I bet right now, you're automatically pulling up all kinds of memories. And as you're reading, there might be a slight restriction in your body somewhere. Maybe your breathing has gone shallow. Or maybe you just decided this is one blog post you won't read all the way through (it's all good!).
Forgiveness is a biggie. We teach children to apologize and forgive automatically but as we sustain emotional injury and pain over the years, it begins to feel anything but automatic. Maybe it feels like a script you just speak, but is empty of genuine meaning.
I've learned a few things over the years about forgiveness:
It's reeeally hard to forgive someone who hasn't asked for forgiveness or may not ever acknowledge or provide closure for what they did.
Forgiveness does NOT excuse what happened.
If you forgive someone, you don't owe them anything beyond that. You can forgive and also choose not to continue the relationship if you want to.
Starting with the intention to forgive someone often feels like too big a leap. I like to begin by taking it completely off the table and focusing more simply on seeing the situation from multiple vantage points- just to cultivate openness, not as part of a process toward forgiveness or anything else. No agenda. Just awareness.
You can absolutely choose not to forgive; just be aware of the consequences (for yourself) of that first. Whatever you decide to do, do it with intention, not complacency.
There's no timeline for forgiveness. Never rush into it. Instead, gently explore your resistance because that will serve you far more than trying to force yourself to forgive when you don't really want to.
So where do you begin?
Ask yourself what forgiveness means to you. Be brutally honest. Do you believe that forgiving automatically means you're weak? Are you “required” to forgive because of your religious or cultural or familial beliefs, but don't feel genuine about it? Is not forgiving a way to maintain power in the relationship? Does forgiving before you're ready allow you to stay stuck in a relational pattern instead of healing your attachment to the person?
There's so much to explore that is for YOUR benefit.
Forgiveness is all for you. Even if the other person is grateful for it and it brings them peace.
The person you forgive doesn't even need to be part of the forgiveness process at all.
And here's the biggest thing I've learned about forgiveness: it's super easy to focus on forgiving a person or circumstance and forget about the deepest wound of all. Forgiving yourself is often the very hardest part: for what you tolerated… for what you didn't honor in yourself first… for the person you wish you'd been but weren't… for what you did or didn't do.
It will serve you deeply to learn to forgive yourself.
Because only from that open and accepting energy can different ways of moving forward become possible. When you forgive, you release energy that could have been spent on defensiveness and staying stuck. That freed-up energy can then be allocated toward your own healing and growth. You can shift away from the previously-held attachments, patterns, and programming.
When you don’t forgive yourself, you simply can't be aligned with your true self. Refusal to accept yourself, and all the many mistakes and missteps that have served as your education, is self-betrayal- and that will NEVER result in authenticity, alignment, or clarity of purpose.
Start simply: see yourself clearly and forgive the winding path that brought you here. And watch as your vision clears and the path forward opens up in ways you never thought possible.
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