Self-Forgiveness and the Real Second Chance

This was not a realistic scenario. He lived three thousand miles away from me. I had not been in touch with him and hadn’t known he was in a crisis. So why was I envisioning how I could have saved him?

Clearly a part of me was not ready to accept what had happened. The alternative mental movie, the one of the true events, was not one I wanted to see. I did not want to picture what he had done and see how oblivious I had been to his suffering.

I was shielding myself from profound regret. My mind was holding onto a wish that things had been different, and my heart was holding out for a do-over.

Which is a little crazy, because it’s so obviously futile. We can’t go back and change the past.

But since then, I see people unconsciously resisting reality this way all around me.

When we can’t stop thinking about the wrong career move we made, the hurt we caused our children, or the time we betrayed someone’s trust, we punish ourselves internally. So often my students tell a story from every angle until they finally get to the very bottom of their pain, saying “I just can’t forgive myself.”

They keep running that mental movie about how they could have, should have done better.

And that’s when the tears flow. Because that’s the stuck place, the place of absolute resistance to reality.

I think we get stuck in that place because there’s something we’re attached to there. As painful as the self-flagellation is, it’s actually preserving a fantasy and protecting us from something even more painful: self-forgiveness.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

, Mohandas Gandhi

We wrongly perceive that self-judgement and blame somehow keep us afloat, whereas self-forgiveness would lower our standards, would be giving up on ourselves by allowing ourselves off the hook, or settling for being a worse version of ourselves.

As the saying goes, forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.

But self-forgiveness is necessary for healing.

Self-forgiveness calls us to accept that what happened already happened, what is past is past. Self-forgiveness requires us to acknowledge our mistakes with complete honesty and sincerity, give up our image of the self who doesn’t make such mistakes, and grieve our lost innocence and the hurt that we’ve caused.

Only when we drop our resistance can we fully acknowledge and grieve. We have to allow the full impact of the grief to arrive inside us, let our minds comprehend it and our bodies process it.

Self-forgiveness takes courage.

As painful as this process is, it’s worth going through. It heals us from inner conflict to wholeness.

Accepting our mistakes may be humbling, but this humility offers profound benefits. It helps us stay grounded in reality and feel compassion for the other flawed beings with whom we walk this planet.

And it gives us perspective and strength to meet the real do-overs.

Life offers more challenges ahead, and we want to be whole as we meet them, not distracted by an inner vortex of self-judgment. We want to approach the next challenge with our previous experiences fully integrated and the lessons learned.

With self-forgiveness, instead of hoping for a better past, we can hope for a better future.

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