Self Forgiveness, a Path to Inner Peace

Self Forgiveness, a Path to Inner Peace

by Brigid Bishop

Guilt is a heavy burden to carry around.

We have all done wrong in our lifetimes, not one among us is without “sin”, but do you let your past mistakes and transgressions haunt you, or are you able to forgive yourself and let go?

If you lay in bed at night and think of the past and a painful memory of something you did that caused another pain surfaces, are you able to look beyond it and get some rest that night or do you ruminate, run it through your head over and over and build that sick feeling in the pit of your abdomen, robbing yourself of sleep.

Few of us are able to forgive ourselves easily. The narcissist is likely the only personality type that has no issue with self forgiveness as they are only concerned with when others will seek their forgiveness, as they can only see how others hurt them.

Barring the fact that we suffer from a narcissistic personality, how do we begin to forgive ourselves and lay our past sins to rest?

First, we must acknowledge that we have done wrong, project ourselves into the emotions of the person or persons we may have knowingly or unknowingly damaged (and this includes ourselves). Allow yourself to empathetically feel the pain that they may have felt and acknowledge to ourselves that it was wrong to put another human being into that state of emotional distress.

We do not try to justify our actions is any way, we simply feel their pain.

Now, we look at what we could have or should have done differently given that situation were to be duplicated. Odds are that in retrospect we have gained much clarity and can see how perhaps a different course of action or no action at all would have been a better path.

We are not looking for excuses for our poor behavior, however, we should look at the person we were at the time the incident occurred and compare it to the person we are now. We may want to gain some psychological insight into our behavior by considering our state of mind, our age, our level of intent to cause harm, our emotional state and so forth, remember, we are not trying to justify our actions, we are simply trying to gain an understanding of them.

Once we are clearly able to identify the dynamics of the incident we must allow ourselves to heal, yes heal, guilt damages us from the inside just as much as outside influences affect us when inflicted in a negative way.

Now that we have accepted our wrongdoing and understand it a little better, we can forgive ourselves and let go, bringing ourselves to true “Inner Peace”. We can look back, see the error of our ways, and move forward without our burden of guilt holding us back emotionally or psychologically.

It need not matter whether the person or persons we have harmed forgive us from the outside, at times, others may need to hold onto their anger. What matters is that we have forgiven ourselves.

 

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