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It took me a long time to understand what forgiveness is. I had always heard that forgiveness isn’t for the other person, it’s more about freeing yourself, but I didn’t really understand what that meant.
I thought forgiving someone was like letting them off the hook for the pain they’d inflicted. I wanted them to feel the same pain they caused me. I wanted them to understand my hurt.
Eventually, I grew to understand that you can’t change the past. You may want someone to apologize and take ownership for their actions, but that may never happen. Which is why holding onto feelings of being a victim, keeps you stuck. You are just holding on to your pain until the perpetrator finally comes to their senses and frees you with a recognition of your hurt.
It took me losing my father to see how pointless that was. I couldn’t argue with him. He couldn’t apologize or come to his senses or hear my side of things. If I held onto anything from that point on, I was just punishing myself. So I had to forgive him and let it go.
When you need to forgive yourself.
I was so busy focusing on what people had done to me, that I completely ignored where I needed to forgive myself for my own self-betrayal.
I was the one still loving people after they had disappointed me again and again. It was me giving too much and trying too hard to get love from others. I was burning myself out to feel loved. I couldn’t see how much I was neglecting myself or how much of an apology I owed myself for putting other people’s needs before my own.
Following some deep introspection, I understood I had been programmed to look outside myself and devalue my feelings. As I rebuilt my self-worth, I saw that I too deserved forgiveness.
This was not an overnight or easy process. After years of not prioritizing myself, it took a long time for me to put myself first.
I had a lot of shame.
Shame is like a cancer that attacks everything good within you.
There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt can be healthy. It implies empathy. It’s an awareness that you did something that you now feel guilty about. Guilt focuses on your behavior.
Shame uses your behavior to prove you’re a bad person. It wields harsh words and judgments to make you feel like you have committed a terrible crime, even when you haven’t.
It doesn’t take into account your lack of awareness or any pain you may have been through. It is the harshest judge and jury and swiftly sentences you to forever pay for every minor infraction. Every infraction after that is further proof of your defectiveness.
Yet many of us think that shame and not guilt motivates us to be good human beings. Shame definitely has an impact on our behaviour, but there is always an internal backlash that can last for years.
I meet a lot of people, especially men, who still carry some level of shame which they use to beat themselves up.
An ex-boyfriend of mine was a bartender and I would often wait for his shift to end while sitting at the end of the bar. Many of those nights I found myself in deeply personal conversations with men who were drowning their sorrows.
One man told me a story about the shame he felt from cheating on his wife while he was serving abroad in the military. He said he came home and could barely face his wife. She forgave him, but he never forgave himself. Eventually, their marriage crumbled because he didn’t feel he deserved her, even though the infidelity happened 20 years earlier.
Some men continue to emotionally and mentally punish themselves for years, either by making poor choices or by not allowing themselves any success or happiness. They hold themselves to a level of perfection that is unachievable and view their failures as much more devastating than they need to be.
We all make mistakes.
Some of us betray ourselves over and over again, and some of us betray others. If we learn and evolve from those mistakes, then there is no need to continually abuse ourselves. We can forgive ourselves for what we didn’t know or how we dealt with our pain.
Even financial debt falls off your credit report after 7 years. There is no reason why a mistake has to be a stain on your soul for eternity.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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