Consistent practice and making an effort towards mastering the arts and techniques of self-forgiveness is a key component of not just life in general, but also from a mental health point of view.
As already hinted, it is an art that takes time, patience and a level of understanding one’s self that is not basic.
In a world that is often unforgiving in its nature, it only makes sense that the forgiveness is sourced from within us, in order for us to recover, grow and mature as we move into the latter years of our lives.
We may have to forgive ourselves for a lot of things: Failed relationships, our differences in family background and upbringing, feeling like an incompetent parent or relative or even our everyday intrinsic insecurities.
The examples are limitless, further highlighting how deep a feature of an individual’s psychology this is.
Often, the difficulty in allowing yourself to forgive your-self hinges quite heavily on the fact that we tend to assume responsibility for whatever happened and, in the process, hold ourselves accountable for way longer than we should, which then stunts our psycho-emotional growth.
Admittedly, the psychology of an individual goes to deep depths in terms of complexity and this topic is no different. Self-forgiveness is primarily just ‘letting go’ and the psycho-emotional act of ‘sieving’ the negativity attached to an experience for the purposes of your own growth.
Normally, many people live well into adulthood, bearing burgeoning burdens that have accumulated throughout their lifetimes and you find that the problem with this is that, these people slowly morph into sad, emotionally bitter people; who find it hard to live peacefully amid others.
Interpreted in the terms of psychology, what builds on the inside, will (more often than not) eventually start to show on the outside, meaning, the self-hatred, condemning and self-pity that forms from not forgiving yourself for the past (or the present) changes your entire worldview, thus altering who you become.
This is not to pass judgement or to be hypercritical, however, it is just to raise a bit of awareness and enlighten the many traumatised souls that have had to endure a bit more than the rest of us - the healing process is achievable.
With (all) that being said, it is important to again reiterate how beneficial it is, especially in our households and communities that, we, as individuals are able to find it in ourselves to ‘let go’ of some of these negative things to make room for warmer, more pleasant psycho-emotions that allow to be more pleasant members of society to be around.
Also, just because the past is written in stone as it is, there is very little to nothing that you can do about it, which only means the only way is forward. It all starts with forgiving yourself.
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