How to Forgive Yourself

If you struggle to forgive yourself for something, it might be because of the way you’re thinking about forgiveness itself.

In this essay, I’m going to walk through three key insights about the psychology of self-forgiveness so that you can let go and move on.

And to start, we need to clear up the biggest misconception about forgiveness out there…

1. Forgiveness is a commitment, not a feeling.

If you’ve intentionally done something seriously wrong, you will probably 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 feel guilty again 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 so long as the memory persists.

This is important because behind most people’s desire for self-forgiveness is an unrealistic expectation that if they do things just right—say the right prayers, repeat enough positive self-talk, hammer themselves with enough self-compassion—then they don’t have to feel guilt anymore. But short of some kind of neurological condition that wipes out your memory, that’s just not going to happen.

Here’s an alternative way to think about it:

Self-forgiveness means 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 (and what many people describe as the inability to forgive themselves) 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…

• When a memory of that time you said something deeply hurtful to your sister pops up, you acknowledge and validate the feeling of guilt, then refocus your attention on whatever it is that’s meaningful or important in the moment.
• When you unexpectedly find yourself thinking about the affair you had in your previous marriage, you briefly acknowledge and validate the guilt, then move your attention onto something else.

Of course, breaking a major mental habit like rumination is usually quite difficult in practice. And in my next point I’ll share what I believe is the key to breaking the rumination habit.

But first, a quick suggestion: Practice validating your guilt.

Remind yourself in the moment that even though guilt feels bad—and what you did may have been wrong—the feeling of guilt itself isn’t bad, and in fact, is just your brain’s way of trying to help you not do that thing you feel guilty about again. The better you are at validating your guilt, the less intense it will be, which means the less strongly you’ll feel the need to ruminate on it, and the easier time you’ll have letting go.

Okay, let’s get to the second major point you need to know about self-forgiveness…

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 to the extent that it’s possible, the only thing you have left is how you choose to think.

Of course, like we talked about earlier, resisting the pull to ruminate can be surprisingly tough. Usually, this is because rumination acts as a defense mechanism against helplessness.

Here’s how it works:

• 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, then 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—it helps you cope with helplessness.

But if you want to break that habit and stop reinforcing your guilt, 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 them, which sustains your guilt.

I get that this sounds harsh, but there’s no way out of the cycle unless you can accept that. The decision to not dwell on the past is very much under your control, but only if you take responsibility for it.

Before we end, I have one more point on the psychology of forgiveness that’s very counterintuitive but arguably the most important of the three.

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 or identity 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.

Here’s an example from an old therapy client of mine:

• Jessica had struggled for over a decade with intense guilt and an inability to forgive herself because she had cut her father out of her life. Years later she learned that the reason she cut him out was based on information that turned out to be false, but when she tried to get back in touch and re-establish a relationship, she learned that he had passed away. She spent the next 11 years in a state of almost constant guilt and self-criticism.
• But the thing that became apparent to me after just a few sessions with her was that after she found out about the death of her father, she essentially put her life on hold. She broke up with a man she was engaged to be married to, stagnated in her career, and gave up on her biggest passion in life, travel.
• She came to work with me in coaching because she thought she needed to learn to forgive herself so that she could move on with her life; but in the end, it was the reverse: she needed to get on with her life in order to forgive herself! We started experimenting with small little acts of re-engaging with parts of her old life that gave her joy—she did some short road trips to places in her state she’d always wanted to visit, started taking on optional new projects at work, and even went out on a date which she had avoided for close to a decade.
• And sure enough, the more she started re-engaging with her life and moving forward, the easier it was to let go of her tendency to dwell on the past.
• Of course, the guilt never went away entirely. But it became far less consuming than it had been once she made some small decisions to move forward in her life despite feeling guilty. And that’s key: you’re never going to feel ready to move on; it’s only by moving on that you start to feel better.

The big takeaway, I think, is this:

You can’t let go of the past if you’re unwilling to move into the future.

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

To wrap things up, let me pose one very important reflection question:

If you didn’t feel guilty any more, what would you be doing differently in your life?

Whatever the answer to that question is, that’s what you need to start doing if you really want to forgive yourself.

We forgive ourselves by moving on.

Learn More

If you enjoyed this essay, here are a few more from me that might be helpful:

• Why You’re So Self-Critical
• 3 Habits Making You Indecisive
• The 5 Types of Overthinking