Self Help

You may ask, “Why should I forgive myself? I did nothing wrong. It was the offender who violated me.” But the issue here is not how you wronged him. It’s how you may have allowed him to hurt. you. How did you do this? What do you need to forgive yourself for?

You may want to start by forgiving yourself for such self-effacing, self-destructive behaviors as:

• Trusting blindly, and ignoring your suspicions.
• Having such a stunted view of yourself when you do not feel entitled to loyalty or love.
• Making unfair comparisons by idealizing the lover and degrading yourself.
• Dismissing your suffering and failing to appreciate how deeply you’ve been wounded.
• Believing you got what you deserved; viewing your mistreatment as punishment, and allowing it to shatter and shame you.
• Tolerating the offender’s abusive behavior.
• Refusing to forgive yourself, even when you’re innocent.
• Making peace at any cost, no matter how superficial or spurious it may be, or how unsafe or miserable the offender makes you feel.
• Losing time and energy engaging in imaginary, vindictive dialogues with him.

When You Refuse to Forgive Yourself

Lifting blame from the offender’s shoulders and transferring It to your own may be your way of protecting him and keeping your image of him untarnished and intact. Blaming yourself also simplifies your vision of the world and frees you from the role of victim. It puts you back in charge.

You may want to ask yourself, “Do I have a pattern of ‘unforgivingness’ toward myself, a lifelong tendency to berate myself for anything bad that happens, even those events over which I have no control? Am I unrelentingly tough on myself, tougher than I need to be or than the facts warrant? Do I ignore extenuating circumstances that aren’t my fault? Were my parents or guardians excessively punitive, shaming, or unforgiving? Did they go for the jugular and make me feel rotten about myself? Did I buy into their criticism?” Understanding these pernicious childhood patterns may help you grow out of them.

When a woman named Mary caught her husband, Sam, in bed with a neighbor, she could no longer deny what was going on. Sam seemed genuinely sorry, even relieved to be discovered, and worked hard to regain her trust. “For twenty years I knew he was cheating on me,” Mary told me. “Now that it’s out in the open and Sam is reaching out to me, I think I can forgive him. But what’s harder, much harder, is forgiving myself. How do I do that when I’ve been so stupid, so not there for myself for twenty years?”

What Mary found is that it’s sometimes easier to forgive others than to forgive yourself, sometimes simpler to accept their mistreatment than to confront your own self-denying behavior.