Notes

Ultimately, it’s about self-acceptance. I’ve also badly hurt some people in my life who I care about very much. I’ve caused them to lose self-esteem, to experience trauma and post-traumatic stress, and this has also led them into depression.

I hated myself for being the kind of person who could do a thing like this. I felt a great deal of shame. Eventually, my experience of self-shame drove me into a depression so deep that I was constantly thinking about suicide.

I’ve had many years of therapy, but it was a Buddhist therapist who finally was able to get me to see that I was the one shaming myself. No one else was doing it. I was mostly imagining what others thought of me, and punishing myself for being such a horrible person. I cut myself off from people who cared about me. I essentially created the hell I found myself in.

I did none of this on purpose, and in some ways, I wasn’t responsible for what happened to me. It was a matter of brain chemistry and bad habits of thought. Medications helped me get enough relief that I could start to see how my habitual patterns of thought were keeping me down, and I could start to see that maybe, if I worked hard, I could change these habits and start to accept that I was a person who could do such hurtful things.

I have done these things. I might do them again. I don’t want to and I am committed to staying mentally healthy enough to not do them again, but there are no guarantees.

Yes, I am a person who hurt people I love very badly. However, making a mistake, even a huge one, does not mean I am a bad person who needs to kill himself because there is no hope for finding the kind of connection I want in life. I can try again. I don’t have to keep punishing myself. There’s no law that says I have to punish myself, and no one is really asking me to punish myself. It doesn’t help rebuild my relationships.

It is, however, a way to be comfortable. I can just live in pain, thinking this is what I deserve, and that means I don’t have to risk trying to be happy or different in any way from how I am.

Not forgiving yourself is the hopeless way out. You put yourself in your own personal jail, to which you have the key, but you decide that the pain you know is better than the risk of going outside jail and hoping for something of an improvement. It’s a great excuse to stop trying. Believe me. I know. I wouldn’t try anything because I had condemned myself to failure before I even started. The possibility of success was also something I didn’t want to face, because if I was successful at reforming myself, people might want more from me than I could give. Far safer to stay miserable and hopeless, because I know those feelings well, and they aren’t a risk. Or at least, they are a slow road through hell. Unendurable, yet somehow endurable.

You can forgive yourself because you can accept that you have ruined someone’s life. You don’t have to do that again. You can work on yourself to try to understand what led you to do this thing and to change the way you think so you will be unlikely to do such a thing again. You can accept all parts of yourself. You can stop keeping your secret shames, and start talking about them and telling people who you are. You don’t have to beat yourself up all the time, either, in order to show people you’ve learned your lesson and so they won’t beat you up. You can simply accept that you are a person who has done horrible things, and that you are a person who can do other things in the future. Past performance is not an indicator of future behavior. Just like the warning that comes on mutual fund prospectuses.

Each time you find yourself beating yourself up, you remind yourself that you are a person who beats yourself up. You are a person who hasn’t forgiven yourself. This is ok. It doesn’t mean you have to stay this way. You can slowly stop beating yourself up by letting your feelings of shame go. This takes lots of practice. Years. It won’t come easily, but if you keep working at it, it will come.

Get therapy. Go to support groups. Do volunteer work to help others. Exercise. Get good sleep. Do yoga. Dance. Make music. Have fun. Let yourself have periods of time when you are absorbed in what you are doing.

It is very important that you see this as a process where you are learning an important life skill. You have to enjoy learning this, and not be impatient to get to the point where you finally forgive yourself. This is not about forgiving yourself. This is about living a life that you enjoy and feel like you are being yourself as fully as possible — the self you want to be and enjoy being, not the self you shame yourself for. Focus on becoming the person you want to be, and one day you will come to thee realization that you have forgiven yourself — but this will occur long after the issue has become irrelevant. Absorb yourself in becoming who you want to be, and the fear of not being that person and the never ending cycle of becoming more that awful person the more you fight being that person will evaporate gradually without you really being able to see the change.

You will change if you work at it, and if you stop fighting yourself and start practicing self-acceptance. As long as you call yourself names, you won’t change. All you have to do is recognize when you are calling yourself a name, accept that you are doing so, and turn your attention to something you want to do.