The December issue of The Oprah Magazine asked, “If you could give a gift to the world, what would it be?” Teresa Shupe of Mountain City, TN replied, “I would give all people a pardon for the biggest mistake they believe they’ve ever made.” She felt that, if we could let go of this baggage, we’d free ourselves to become gifts to the world.
I agree. Self-compassion opens us to building consensus, bringing peace into our own relationships. It’s easier to reach out to others when you know you’ll forgive yourself if the interaction doesn’t go as you wish.
Plus, forgiving yourself makes it easier to forgive others. But is forgiving others a gift to the world? Might it lead people who’ve hurt you to believe it’s okay to repeat the hurtful behavior?
Not if we understand what forgiveness really means. Forgiving doesn’t mean thinking or saying the offensive behavior was okay. It doesn’t mean you must let the offender back into your life. You don’t even have to express forgiveness to the offender because you don’t forgive for the sake of the offender. We forgive others for our own sakes.
Forgiveness simply means letting go of any grudge, ill will or urge to teach someone a lesson. We do it for ourselves because we’re the ones who suffer from carrying grudges.
Forgiveness rarely comes easy. It’s a process, not an event. But when you succeed in letting go of a grudge, you experience a freedom of spirit, as if a huge weight has been lifted from you.
Forgiving yourself can be harder than forgiving others. A grudge against oneself can lie so deep we don’t even realize it’s there.
Imagine that a dear friend is beating herself up for making the same mistake you made. What would you tell her? If she accepts what you say and forgives herself, how does that forgiveness affect the light she shines in the world?
Give yourself an early holiday present by forgiving a mistake you made. Say to yourself what you’d say to a friend who made the same mistake. Start now. It’s a process. You might have to repeat the words, modify them, meditate on them or process them with someone you trust.
If you forgive yourself by the time the holidays arrive, you’ll be a shining gift to the world.
The message in this blog was a gift to me. Beautiful and kind. My heart is lifted. Thank you so very much.
I’m so glad you found it helpful. Please stay in touch.
I’ve had people ask how I can be “friends” with someone who wronged me in the past. My answer is, “I can’t carry around the negative baggage of hurt or blame without it eating at me. So I have to let it go.” Forgiving myself, I’ll admit, is much harder. So I appreciate your message. And I’ll work on it.
I think self-forgiveness is harder than forgiving others for many people. I’m still working on myself in that regard, too. It’s a process. Just yesterday, in a phone consultation, I spoke to a man who is having trouble letting go of a woman who is hurting him, and she is psychologically incapable of changing. Perhaps the situation didn’t require self-forgiving, but it did require self-compassion. I suggested that he imagine a loved one in the same situation and write a letter of advice to the friend. (Client had already told me he’d advise the friend to cut and run.) I suggested that he then change the letter to address it to himself and sign it from his guardian angel.
Excellent, Margaret. And my experience is that often when people can’t forgive others, it’s this lack of being forgiven or self-forgiving underneath. There are extreme cases of heinous offenses to which this doesn’t apply or only applies in limited ways. But extreme cases make for bad law, and that includes bad day-to-day practice. Well said.
You got me thinking some more. I am wondering if, even in the heinous offenses, something closely akin to a lack of self-forgiving could be at work. I was thinking, in particular, a poor self-image or some haunting detail of one’s background could be at work. For example, if a child was emotionally abused by being constantly framed as bad, useless, a loser, someone who will never amount to anything, letting go of that self-image might be even more difficult than self-forgiving. How can the person, now grown up, forgive himself for something that is not about something he did, but rather, about who or what he is? You can repent and atone for something you did, but it’s harder to believe you can change what you are, and most sadly, that image is not what you really are, but what you were programmed to believe. It’s the difference between guilt (for something you did) and shame (for what you are). Is this what produces the Hitlers, the Jim Joneses?