Forgive yourself

The most common thing I hear when I open up about the incident is:

“You have to forgive yourself”.

I have heard this so many times, but today the statement prompted a new question within me: do I actually WANT to forgive myself?

I’m not sure I do. If I was being harsh, I would call this wallowing or enjoying the pity party. But now is not the time for harshness. Instead, I believe this lack of want falls into these categories:

• I don’t deserve to forgive myself.
• I haven’t yet worked through the pain enough to forgive myself
• I could forgive myself if the mistake wasn’t so basic, so stupid
• Perhaps I like having a scapegoat for my troubles  (I’ll write a whole post on scapegoating soon)
• (There’s probably more, but self-forgiveness is very new for me)

Until today, it never occurred to me that ANY of the people who said I had to forgive myself actually MEANT it! Sure, everyone else should forgive themselves, but not me. My internal dialogue would be something like, “Yes, but if you knew how dumb the error was, if you knew how much I shouldn’t have been doing that job with my kind of personality, if you knew how much of an accident-waiting-to-happen I was/am.”

But that’s the point. I need to forgive myself for the exact things I’m blaming myself for. It doesn’t matter how I frame it,  I need to forgive myself within that frame. They mean it, forgiveness needs to occur. I’m not ready yet, but at least for the first time today I heard the words and realised they were for me.

Progress.