Forgiving yourself is important because if you don’t, you risk letting these misguided actions redefine your sense of who you are, says John Delony, Ph.D., a mental health expert and the host of the Dr. John Delony Show. There’s a common misconception that refusing to forgive yourself proves you’re more sorry, but what it actually does is hold you back, he explains. “We may feel like approaching the world through the worst thing we’ve done buys us extra grace, but it doesn’t,” says Delony. “It actually causes us to enter into relationships in a down position. Perhaps more importantly, choosing not to forgive yourself is really choosing to live life less joyfully,” he says. So if learning to forgive yourself is so important, how do you do it? Delony offers tips and strategies for finally letting go of the actions that haunt you. Instead, acknowledge that your guilt did serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t torturing yourself for eternity. “Your brain has a vested interest in making sure at all times that you remember you’re a person capable of hurting somebody, so that you never do it again,” he says. This is why these mistakes end up feeling so overwhelming to us—we don’t want to make them again, so our brains harp on them to create a constant warning signal. But if you can recognize that you haven’t done it again, and that the memory is serving its purpose, you can begin to stop obsessing. “It’s hard, because your body has such a vested interest in you not forgetting what you did,” says Delony. “You have to decide: This is a thing that happened, not who I am.” Rather than carrying the fear you’ll mess up again around as a constant threat, says Delony, turn it into wisdom: I learned my lesson, and I won’t do that again. Explore the answer in your writing, by, for example, listing the untrustworthy things you’ve done. You may find it’s a pretty short list, dominated by the memory you haven’t forgiven yourself for. “My guess is, if that idea is still bothering you years later, you are a really trustworthy person that got caught up in a situation.” Once you see that there isn’t proof that you are inherently bad, it becomes easier to give yourself grace for your mistake. “The only way to feel whole is to be vulnerable and speak up,” says Delony. “So if you do something really bad, step one is to say it out loud and take ownership of your role in what happened. And the next part is to ask for forgiveness,” he says. “And you can’t hinge your thoughts on whether you get that forgiveness or not. You don’t get to decide what forgiveness looks like.” In other words, the other person or people may not forgive you, and that’s OK. You’ve had a narrative in your head that you were wrong, and you’ve now let them know that you feel that way. What they do next doesn’t have to stop you from forgiving yourself. They are entitled to their feelings, just as you are entitled to stop torturing yourself. “Does that mean you’re always a liar? No, it means you lied one time.” Delony suggests thinking of the consequences as a path to a fresh start: “Here’s who I was. Who am I going to be in the future? That is the path to overcome guilt.” Once you’ve laid out a vision for how you’ll incorporate what you’ve learned from your mistake into your future, you’ll notice you’re less and less hung up on your old mistake.
