Notes on Self-Forgiveness

A few brief thoughts on the psychology of self-forgiveness…

1. Self-forgiveness is choice, not a feeling.

If you’ve intentionally done something seriously wrong, you will likely feel guilty. This is a normal human reaction. And if you have a functional memory, then you will occasionally be reminded of the action that triggered your guilt and continue to feel guilty in response. Over time, both the frequency and intensity of the guilt tend to decrease as the strength of the memory fades, but it’s naive to expect that the guilt will disappear entirely.

This is important because behind most people’s desire for self-forgiveness is an unrealistic hope to not have to experience guilt anymore. But short of some kind of neurological condition, that’s just not going to happen. Instead, think of self-forgiveness as resisting rumination.

Rumination is a form of unproductive negative thinking about the past. It’s when you dwell on your mistakes or failings even though it’s not productive or helpful. And in my experience, chronic guilt is always caused by this mental habit of rumination.

If you continue to dwell on your mistakes, they will continue to feel fresh instead of fading over time.

This means that self-forgiveness is something of an anti-skill: it’s about deliberately not engaging in the habit of ruminating on your mistakes and failing. Of course, breaking a major mental habit like rumination isn’t always so easy in practice, which brings me to my second point…

2. Self-forgiveness means taking responsibility for your attention.

You can’t control your emotions—not directly, anyway. You can’t control what other people think or feel either. And you certainly can’t control what happened in the past. All of which means that, when it comes to self-forgiveness, there are really only two things you can control: what you do and what you think. And once you’ve made amends for what you’ve done, the only thing you have left is how you choose to think.

Of course, resisting the pull to ruminate can be surprisingly tough. Usually, this is because rumination acts as a defense mechanism against helplessness: because there’s nothing you can do about the mistake itself, you feel helpless; but if you aren’t willing to acknowledge and accept that helplessness, ruminating on the event (analyzing why you did it, considering alternative possibilities, imagining how other people involved might feel, etc.) gives the illusion of control, and as a result, temporarily distracts from the helplessness. That’s why rumination sticks around as a habit.

But if you want to break the habit, you need to take responsibility for your attention and make the deliberate choice not to ruminate when that memory is triggered. And while controlling our attention is difficult, it absolutely is something you can do, especially with practice.

But it all starts with a clear-eyed acceptance of responsibility for your attention. Painful memories don’t trigger you; you choose to dwell on those memories, which artificially sustains the guilt. I get that this sounds harsh, but there’s no way out of the cycle unless you’re first willing to take responsibility for and control over your attention.

The decision to not dwell on the past is very much under your control.

3. Self-forgiveness is about your future, not your past.

As a psychologist, I’ve spent more than a decade hearing stories of people who struggle with chronic guilt and an inability to forgive themselves and let go of their mistakes. And when you hear enough of these stories, a strong pattern starts to emerge:

Dwelling on the past is usually procrastination on embracing the future.

Very often the underlying problem when people have chronic rumination and guilt is a fear of moving into the future—taking risks, trying something new, and leaving an old life behind in order to move into a new one. From this perspective, remaining stuck on past mistakes provides a psychological justification for not moving forward in your life. But you can’t let go of the past if you’re unwilling to move into the future.

The more authentically you move toward your goals for the future, the less hung up you’ll be on the mistakes of your past.

Besides committing to not ruminate, arguably the best way to forgive yourself is to live assertively and with agency.