Forgiveness is an especially tough one. The need to forgive can be masked by so many other emotions like guilt and even anger. We need some real time to reflect in order to discern what we need to forgive ourselves for. For me a big one was to forgive myself for being such a lousy mother for so many years. (I still make many, many mistakes i must forgive myself for, in spite of my huge improvement).
We carry around this guilt or anger or feeling of
uneasiness or dissatisfaction. Something
is nagging at us and won’t give us any peace.
Usually when I feel that way I know I have done something “wrong”. It takes a little bit of soul searching to
figure out what it is and then more soul searching to actually forgive
myself. It means that I have to admit I
am not perfect and I actually made a mistake. (See my last post). Then I have
to tell myself I am human and we all make mistakes. That is how we learn and grow after all as
mistakes are our great teachers. True
forgiveness means I can’t call it up at a later time and chastise myself for
this mistake or failing. Often I find I
say I have forgiven myself only to catch myself beating myself up at a later
time. Identify, forgive, learn the
lesson and then close the door on the recriminations, guilt, anger, etc. We want to dispassionately remember the event
or mistake so we can call up the lesson but we don’t want to continue to berate
ourselves for making the mistake.
It is so true that until we can learn to forgive
ourselves we can’t possibly forgive others.
Is this another aspect of self-love perhaps? We often confuse forgiveness of others with
simply accepting bad treatment from them.
There is a difference.
Forgiveness means we let go of any anger or judgment. The false forgiveness may simply be a lack of
boundaries where we are willing to “forgive and forget” bad treatment or
behavior. Forgiveness is not easy or
automatic. We develop a forgiving heart by forgiving
ourselves and then when we have acquired a forgiving heart we can also forgive
others.
