Why self-forgiveness is so important in your mental health journey

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Think about the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life and how much you hurt your loved ones. What are the emotions that come up when you recall this memory? Do you feel shame? Self-hatred? Anger towards your younger self? 

I’ll go first. One of my darkest moments was in 2018 when my elder sister announced that she was pregnant, and I told her that I honestly couldn’t be happy for her because I felt like she was abandoning me while I was going through a very rough period of my own. A few weeks later, she miscarried. While cognitively, I know that her miscarriage was completely out of our control, I cannot shake the irrational thought that I somehow willed it to happen and killed her unborn baby with my negativity. Watching my sister - my favourite person in the whole world - suffer, and feeling like I was the sole reason for her suffering, caused me to spiral into a deep, dark hole of depression for many months. 

The power of shame

Guilt and shame are two very different things. Guilt is an emotion associated with a direct action or behaviour of ours, and it makes us take responsibility for how we have hurt the people around us. Guilt makes us think, “I’ve done something bad”. Shame, on the other hand, is the internalisation of this statement as “I am bad”. Shame causes us to focus inward and to view ourselves in a negative light. It causes us to judge and criticise ourselves and results in self-loathing and low self-esteem.

Shame causes us to believe that there is something deeply wrong with us and that we are bad people compared to others. It makes us internalise negative and untrue things about ourselves and can be very damaging to our self-worth. When left to fester, it can lead to depression and anxiety which are linked to a deep sense of worthlessness. 

Shame has the power to control the way we feel about ourselves and, therefore, how we react to others. It acts as shackles that prevent us from moving forward, as we get stuck in a never-ending cycle of self-blame and self-hatred.

Self-compassion as the antidote to shame

Self-compassion means that we are kind and understanding towards ourselves when we make mistakes or encounter personal failures. It entails treating ourselves with mercy and grace instead of ruthless criticism. When we practise self-compassion, it leaves little room for shame to take over and attack our self-worth. My favourite analogy for self-compassion is this; “talk to yourself the way that you would talk to your best friend.” Simple, yet so profound. 

According to Dr Kristin Neff, renowned psychologist and author of the book Self-compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, there are three elements of self-compassion:

#1: Self-kindness - recognising that we are imperfect humans and that mistakes and failures are inevitable. Self-kindness means that we are gentle with ourselves when confronted with our darkest moments rather than getting angry and blaming ourselves excessively. By meeting our failures with warmth instead of hostility, we are able to comfort ourselves in times of suffering and pain. 

#2: Common humanity - realising that we are not the only ones who make mistakes or fail, but that everyone falters at some point in time, and therefore seeing our own experience as part of a larger human experience, not isolating or abnormal. We can all agree that suffering is a common human experience on a rational level. But if we do not internalise this beyond the cognitive level, we become very self-absorbed and believe that we are the only ones who are “bad”, which could lead to self-isolation.

#3: Mindfulness - being receptive to instead of judgemental of our thoughts and feelings and observing them as they are without over-identifying with them. This allows us to see our situation from a larger perspective and take a more balanced stance towards our failures instead of exaggerating negative emotions towards ourselves.

With self-compassion comes self-forgiveness

When we have self-compassion, we are able to treat ourselves with empathy and forgive ourselves for our failings. Forgiveness does not mean letting ourselves off the hook, condoning or ignoring what we have done wrong. Rather, it is the acknowledgement of how our actions have hurt our loved ones and the intentional journey we take to grow from these mistakes, to become better, and to move forward with our lives. And this all starts from self-compassion. If we cannot be kind to ourselves, we will always find it difficult to forgive ourselves. 

Curiosity saved (not killed) the cat

Our greatest mistakes should never be ignored, and we should not suppress or deny the feelings we experience because of them. We should pay attention to the pain we feel when we hurt others, and with the lens of self-compassion, be curious as to why we are the way that we are, and why we do the things we do. Many of us are a product of our own unaddressed trauma (be it small ‘t’ or big ‘T’), which often shapes how we react to certain situations that might be triggers for us. The “bad” things we have done in the past could have been a trauma response, a reflex we have learned over time for self-preservation. For example, now I can see how my reaction to my sister’s pregnancy news came from my deep fear of abandonment, an emotional wound from childhood. When we do the inner work to understand ourselves - what makes us tick and why - we will become more aware of our actions and take time to respond rather than to react to situations that may be triggering for us. 

Self-forgiveness is a process

Self-forgiveness is not easy. It does not come naturally nor immediately. It is a long and painful process that is rarely linear. Five years later, I still have difficulty forgiving my younger self for what I said to my sister before she miscarried. Sometimes, I am able to come to terms with it, and I choose to focus on all the loving things I have done for her rather than on that terrible incident. But there are definitely times (albeit far less now that I have put in the work to process this experience) - when I am consumed by shame and self-criticism - “I said such a cruel thing to my sister, therefore I am a cruel person”. 

This is where self-compassion plays a huge role. As with all difficult things, we need patience and kindness, and we need to direct them towards ourselves. Our darkest moments are critical parts of our story. When we learn to forgive ourselves and slowly let go of the shame, these negative experiences become rich soil for immense growth. To quote John Kim, known as ‘The Angry Therapist’, self-forgiveness feels like “shedding”. Just like a reptile sheds its old skin, there is a shedding that happens when we no longer define ourselves by the worst things we have done in life, and we grow a “new skin”. Self-forgiveness allows us to make our darkest moments work for us so that we become better versions of ourselves, i.e. a “new skin” can grow in place of the old. 

Self-forgiveness improves our mental health

Our mental health is intrinsically linked to how we see ourselves. If we think that we are worthless and that everyone will be better off without us, it can be very isolating. Instead, when we forgive ourselves for our mistakes and allow them to teach us to be better people, our self-esteem improves, which in turn improves our mental health in general. We are less likely to fall into (or stay in) depression or anxiety, as we now see ourselves as worthy. We are at peace with ourselves and can move on from the terrible things we have done in the past.