00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 385: "Self-Forgiveness." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, my friends. So glad to have you here. If you are a follower, if you've listened to a lot of these and you love them and they're making a difference for you, I would absolutely love to have you leave me a review on Apple or Spotify. Either of those would be great. What it does is it helps other people to find this content. The last one I received was in May, and that's a while ago. And I would love to up that a little bit and help other people find this content. I just am such a believer that this changes lives because I see how this content has changed my lives, my life. And as I continue to learn and to grow and to share my insights with you as what this podcast is, is really a way to show you how I'm growing and how I'm developing and how I'm implementing these concepts more fully into my own life. I just know that these are concepts that will help others. So if you have not left me a review, please go ahead and do that. 

01:18 

Also, wanted to remind you quickly that if you're listening to this on the day it comes out, my class, my holiday, Destress Your Holiday class starts tonight, and I'm going to leave that up if it is not full. You may want to check on and get that if you've been putting it off. Also, if you're listening to this on the day that this comes out, tomorrow is Talk with Tanya, November 11th. This is just a free webinar. Anybody can come to this. You can find out what coaching is about. You can listen to coaching. You can get coach. You can ask questions about concepts. It's all free game. Anything. I'm a pretty open book. You can ask me questions on anything, my previous marriage, my divorce, my dating years, my marriage now with CONA. It's all fair game. 

02:01 

So that is tomorrow if you're listening to this on the day it comes out. The next one is scheduled for December 9th. It's always the second Tuesday of the month. So if you are interested in that, it is at 2 o'clock Eastern and 12 o'clock Mountain. It's always at the same time. If you can make it, I would love to have you there. We have some great discussions and get some great coaching done. 

02:25 

So that being said, let's jump into today's topic, which is self-forgiveness. So it is not uncommon for people to struggle to forgive themselves. And sometimes we will hold on to these grievances against ourselves for years and sometimes even decades. And there might be a circumstance from our past that we feel defines us, that we feel defines our goodness or our morality or even our worth as a person. And when our identity becomes defined by this experience, it can be very difficult to just, as some people say, "just let go of it" or "just move on." It's not that easy when it is wrapped up and entangled with our identity. And yet being able to forgive ourselves for our tumultuous past is a vital part of emotional health and being able to fully engage in our lives and our relationships with others and our relationship with ourself. 

03:26 

And sometimes we lack a sense of our own worth and we don't feel as though we deserve to be forgiven for such behavior that we engaged in. We feel that what we have done is so bad that it can't be forgiven. Or maybe we feel that if the other person is still hurting, that we also still need to be hurting. And thoughts such as these can keep us holding on to tough experiences, continuing to berate ourselves and refusing to let ourselves off the hook for something that happened in our past. And yet to live a full life, one that is capable of love and deep relationships and joy and fulfillment, learning to forgive ourselves is a key component. When a person has truly forgiven themselves, they don't just forget about the painful experience. 

04:14 

In fact, they may even still feel some sadness or maybe even some guilt for the situation. However, the emotions they feel about the event are much less frequent, much less intense, and they get to the point that the event no longer defines who they are. Now that's not to say that they aren't a different person because of the event or that it hasn't shaped their point of view or their opinions, but rather they have stopped seeing themselves as a sinner or a morally corrupt person or even just a mean or a thoughtless or an unkind person. They recognize that, yes, they have flaws and sometimes those flaws hurt others or ourselves or they create undesirable circumstances. And they also understand that despite these flaws, they are a good person. A person with a loving heart and a desire to do good in the world. To put it plainly, a person who can forgive themselves is a person who has a strong sense of self. We can struggle to forgive ourselves for seemingly big things that have occurred, or we can struggle to forgive ourselves for seemingly smaller things. 

05:22 

For example, if you've been divorced, you may struggle to forgive yourself for the way you treated your spouse during those difficult years, continuing to see yourself as a hurtful and a heartless person, and continuing to use a narrative like, "if I had done better, I would still be married." First of all, we don't know that that's true. And second of all, it's not a helpful thought because it does not help us move forward. 

05:50 

Okay, or maybe you're the one who initiated the divorce. And because your children are struggling, you are holding yourself responsible for their pain and challenges, unable to forgive yourself for being the instigator of their difficult lives. Maybe you didn't abide by the tenets of your religion when you were younger and you continue to view yourself as a sinner or an easily corruptible person who can't be trusted. Or maybe you said something that was hurtful to another person and you can't let go of the narrative that you are mean and thoughtless. Because what kind of person would hurt another person? 

06:26 

So have you ever noticed that when we hold on to a past situation, it will interrupt our thoughts seemingly out of nowhere, and we will ruminate and continue to judge ourselves for behaving in such a way. And then our whole mood and our whole day can shift into a difficult one because we remember what a horrible person we are. If we have forgiven ourselves, we're able to have those remembrances come up and go, yeah, not my best self. And I've moved on. I'm in a better place. If we have not forgiven ourselves, we will move into where having these recollections will impact our emotions. It will bring up for us all the thoughts about what a horrible person we are. 

07:17 

And the more that we replay the situation in our mind, this is interesting that the more our primitive brain keeps it current, meaning it continues to think of it as something that happened recently. Primitive brain is not so good at telling time, you see, so the remembrances are just as current as what happened yesterday, even if they happened 10 or 15 years ago. And then we can start to layer on the difficult emotions when we get frustrated with ourselves for not being able to let it go. So then we feel even more angst towards the situation and ourself. Not just the frustration for the original pain, but then the guilt, the shame, the anger for continuing to feel the original pain. Thinking we should be over it by now, and there must be something wrong with us. 

08:06 

This ability to hold a grudge against ourselves really only keeps us stuck in shame and victim mentality. And yes, I do believe that when we don't forgive ourselves, that we are in victim mentality. We are stuck in the problem and not moving forward with the solution, which is one way that I like to define victim mentality. In this place, we see our past self as the villain in our story. And because of our past behavior, we are stuck in this place of not being good enough, of not being strong enough or capable enough. We are stuck in being a hurtful person, a morally corrupt person. And when we see ourselves as this person, it can be extremely difficult to see a way out because it is our identity, after all. And when it is who I am, that seems very daunting to change. 

09:00 

When we want to move out of victim mode and into hero mode, it is important that we learn to move from the problem into the solution. We have to stop berating ourselves for our past and move into thoughts such as, so what's the next step? Or what do I want to do now? Or how do I move forward? And I'll tell you what, this is easier said than done. It's just like telling ourselves to get over it. Because guess what? We have reasons why we are holding on. And figuring out those reasons is some powerful work that has the ability to liberate us and get us moving forward in life again. This figuring out why we're holding on is part of being able to let go. 

09:45 

Sometimes our deep desire to hold on to it is evidence that we are looking, the evidence that we're looking for that we're a worthless or a horrible person. Because when we believe the thought that we are worthless or horrible, our brains will look for evidence to prove that it's true. And pulling up past situations that support that thought makes a lot of sense to our primitive brain. It's just evidence for what we've told our brain to look for, that we're worthless or that we're not valuable or that we're horrible. So when we have that narrative that we're worthless or horrible, our brain doesn't want to forgive ourselves. It wants to hold on to these things. 

10:26 

Many of us were also raised with perfectionist ideal thinking that it was possible to attain perfection in this life. And if we were just righteous enough, spiritual enough, it would happen sooner rather than later. I know that I believed that for a lot of years. But here's the deal. Perfectionism isn't really a thing. It's actually just a made-up concept. There isn't anything in this world that is perfect excepting Jesus Christ.  Even a newborn baby is not perfect because as soon as it is born, it is on the path to death with its first breath. Everything in the world is in entropy. And perfectionism is also heralded as a great thing in many social circles. 

11:12 

People will proudly proclaim themselves to be a perfectionist and as though it is something to be celebrated when in fact it's actually a very detrimental and debilitating thought process and one that is actually in opposition to God's plan of happiness. When we hold tight to perfectionism, we lose the ability to accept the inherent flaws of being a human, which is actually who and what our heavenly parents created us to be. Their plan is all about agency, about us making decisions when we are unlearned and inexperienced. And it is through these questionable decisions that we learn and grow and figure out how to live a more meaningful life. And we can't help but make questionable decisions when we are both unlearned and inexperienced. 

12:04 

The more that we can accept our humanity, the easier it can be to accept that we will make mistakes, both big and small, that it's actually part of the plan. When we don't embrace the idea of being a flawed human, then we can feel hopeless when we look at the gap between our behavior and our thoughts about who we thought we were or who we thought we should have been or what we should have known and what our actual behavior was. Sometimes we might also feel guilt or shame about situations where we actually weren't the ones to blame. 

12:40 

For example, maybe someone got hurt. And before that happened, we had a feeling that we should say or do something that might have kept them from being hurt. And now we feel responsible because we didn't say anything. Or maybe someone abused us in some way and the abuser told us that it was our fault. Or we might berate ourselves for thinking we should have known better, we should have seen it coming, or we should have been more courageous in standing up for ourselves. These types of situations can be really complicated in our minds because over the years, our brain has sought for and found a lot of evidence to prove that it's true, even if the evidence is faulty, even if we are not responsible. 

13:21 

What makes it even more complicated is that so much of this thinking goes on in the background of our brain and we don't have conscious awareness of the specific thoughts that are keeping us stuck. This is why working with a coach or a counselor can be so valuable. They can help you to see thoughts that you are not aware of, that are not true, but that are running the show behind the scenes. 

13:44 

So how do we learn to forgive ourselves? How do we finally make peace with our poor behavior of the past or even let go of responsibility for other people's poor behavior and move into the serenity of self-forgiveness? How do we accept that we are human and learn to offer ourselves grace for being what our Heavenly Father created us to be, which is imperfect humans? Even though some people will say to just let go and move on, it's difficult because our brain just doesn't forget and move on, even with time. 

14:16 

Our brain needs to make sense of the situation. And one reason we hold on to it is because our brain hasn't yet figured out how to make sense of what happened. How could we behave in a way that was so far from our value system? How could we not have really seen what was going on and speak up? How could we have been so crippled by fear that we couldn't stand up for what was right? How could we have been so blind to our dysfunctional behavior when it was so destructive to the people around us? 

14:47 

All of these questions and others like them are ones that keep us stuck in not forgiving ourselves. And here's what's so tricky. Those all seem like valid questions when in reality, they are horrible questions. They are horrible because there is no answer to those questions. And they will keep us stuck in victim mentality. They'll keep us spinning. From our current experience, our wisdom, our current perspective, it seems like we should have known better. 

15:18 

But guess what? Regardless of what your experience was, at the time, you were doing the best you knew how. You were acting in a way that your brain felt was going to keep you safe, to help you be part of the tribe, or to protect you from some threat. It is not human nature to intentionally work to sabotage or destroy our lives. Part of developing a stronger sense of self and forgiving ourselves is getting to learn to give our past self a lot of grace for doing the best she knew how, even if the best she knew was pretty crappy at the time. When we can look back at our past self with a lot of compassion for her struggle, when we can genuinely see that she was hurt or confused or scared, that she was in over her head in being able to see clearly a different path. 

16:09 

Then we can begin the process of forgiving ourselves. It's important that we see the situation for what it was, a normal human experience, that we make peace with and also that we figure out what we can learn from it. Offering ourselves grace is part of recognizing that we were a human having a tough but normal human experience. Often we want to think that we are the lone unicorn in the world and the only one to have found ourselves in such a tough situation. 

16:41 

But I can almost promise you that you are not the only one in the history of the world to have gone through your particular situation. Life is filled with challenges and trials, some just because it's life, some as consequences of our own choices, and some of these tough things come about as consequences of other people's behavior and choices. And all of this is part of being a human. Life will never be a sweet walk through a flower garden every day. There will always be struggle. There will always be weeds. There will always be tough people and situations in our lives when we can lean into our normal human experiences and really embrace the truth that we were created to make mistakes, that making mistakes is unavoidable, that making mistakes is part of how we learn and grow according to God's plan. 

17:33 

Only then can we stop villainizing ourselves for making these mistakes. Only then can we let go of the grudge that we have against ourselves that says we should have known better, that if we were a better person, we wouldn't have acted that way. Because guess what? That's just not true. We acted the best we knew how at the time. That's what it means to be human. We are making decisions with limited knowledge and limited experience, and only in making the mistakes do we gain the knowledge and experience to make a better decision the next time something similar happens. 

18:08 

And this is how we move into making peace with our past. We really come to understand that our intentions weren't to be hurtful or to make our lives worse. And along with this, we recognize that we can feel as horrible as we want. We can beat ourselves up every day, all day, and we will never change the past. What happened happened, and nothing can change that fact. And as I've reminded you many times, Byron Katie says, "when we argue with reality, we will lose, but only 100% of the time." Making peace with our past means that we accept what happened and we accept who we were, flaws and failings and inexperience and unawareness and all. 

18:54 

This doesn't mean we have to look back and be super happy that this experience happened, but we do need to get to a place that we accept that it did happen and that we stop fighting against it and wishing it didn't happen or believe that it shouldn't have happened. That if only we were a different person back then, things would have turned out different. But guess what? You weren't a different person back then. You were who you were, and you cannot go back and change that. Making peace with your life journey is the only way to move forward. It is the only way to be able to let go and forgive yourself. 

19:34 

The last thing then is to use the experience to shape your future, to change the trajectory of your past so you can bring your life more into alignment with who you really want to be. This is the place where we take accountability. If we did something hurtful to someone, feeling remorse or guilt is a helpful and a healthy response. When we can see our responsibility, step into it, and accept it, we can learn from this experience. This isn't always easy, but it's necessary if we are to really forgive ourselves. Our brains are always seeking to make meaning of every experience we have. And when we resist making meaning because we hold on so tightly to shame and self-loathing, our brain can't make sense of what has happened. 

20:21 

And so it continues to hold on and hold on and hold on, even to our detriment. When we can stop ruminating and beating ourselves down long enough to look for the gold nuggets, those small insights that help us understand ourselves better, that help us to feel more compassion for others who are struggling, the insights that teach us something about who we are and how we are, then we are taking responsibility and using the experience to uplevel our lives. 

20:51 

Several months ago, I was approached by someone to whom I had said something that was hurtful. Now, I would never hurt this person intentionally or any person, but I had, and I had hurt them deeply. And I felt a lot of remorse and pain for the pain that I had inflicted. And in the process of working through forgiving myself, I had to remind myself that it was not intentional, that I'm a human who will sometimes say things that are thoughtless, and that other people's interpretations of what I say may not even be what I meant. I wasn't trying to excuse my bad behavior, but rather accept my bad behavior as part of an inevitable human experience. 

21:33 

And also, I felt genuine remorse for the pain that I had caused and sought to accept responsibility for the hurtful words. Taking accountability  is an important part of being able to forgive ourselves. And in taking responsibility, I offered an apology. I acknowledged that my words were hurtful and unkind and had affected them in a negative way. 

21:55 

I had an opportunity as well to offer myself a lot of grace and also to offer this person a lot of grace for our human behaviors and responses. I got to make peace with my imperfections, with my thoughtlessness and my unkindness at the time. I definitely don't want to embrace and defend this behavior, but I do need to recognize that I will show up that way sometimes. I will get triggered by things that other people say and do, and I will react unkindly. This is what it means to be a human. I will initially see things from my perspective only, and I will struggle to see things from the other person's. We all do this. We all get myopic at times and in certain situations. And that's all part of what it means to be a human. Giving myself a space of grace and accepting my human limitations is part of being able to forgive myself. And then I got to figure out how to take responsibility for my hurtful behaviors, not just in feeling bad and apologizing, but also in going deeper to figure out why I had responded the way that I did in that situation. 

23:05 

And in this process, I asked myself some hard questions about what was going on in my head. What was I thinking that would cause those big emotions to come up? Why would I have pushed back so fiercely? What was it in me that was triggered enough that I didn't slow down, breathe, and respond more carefully? And I realized that something in our previous conversation had pushed a sensitive button that I have. 

23:32 

Here's the deal about buttons. People are always like, "well, they pushed my button." Yes, it's great when people don't push our buttons and people that we really love are not going to push them intentionally. But if I have a button, that is my responsibility to clean up that button, to get rid of it. So part of this process for me was figuring out why I have that button, why I was so sensitive in that particular conversation. I got to explore my reaction and what was behind it, and I discovered some pretty insightful thoughts behind my behavior and my feelings of defensiveness. 

24:10 

And I realized that the thoughts that spurred my seemingly erratic behavior in that situation were not even true thoughts. I realized that my thoughts had a lot of expectations of how other people should be showing up in regard to my life. And this process in figuring that out also brought me to a new understanding of repentance as well. I came to understand that just recognizing the pain and apologizing and trying not to do it again was not enough. I realized that true repentance also requires that I dig deep and I figure out what thoughts and processes were going on in me to create my hurtful response, i.e. figuring out my triggers, and clean those up as well. 

24:59 

And I believe that this process of figuring out why I was triggered and cleaning up that trigger button is not only part of my repentance, but also part of my self-forgiveness. And it's also important to realize that I can do all of this work. I can really struggle and clean up a lot of stuff. I can recognize my hurtful behaviors. I can dig deep to understand what my triggers are. I can clean up those thoughts and beliefs. I can apologize and do my best to show up better. And guess what? The other person does not need to forgive me. In fact, they may not forgive me. I can forgive myself without the other person's approval, without their forgiveness of me. Because me cleaning up my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is my lane. It is within my responsibility. Them cleaning up their thoughts and feelings and behaviors about the situation is their lane. It is their responsibility. 

25:54 

I cannot be responsible for whether they forgive me or not. I can do all the things. I can accept responsibility for my behaviors. I can apologize. I can be genuine. I can be sincere. But I can't be responsible for whether they accept that and whether they forgive me. I can't be responsible for what they think about me or what they feel towards me or how they behave toward me. I can't control whether they will want to continue a relationship with me or whether they want to cut all ties and never talk to me again. 

26:26 

And again, this is where a strong sense of self is so vital to the work that we do. Letting the other person respond how they respond, and even especially when it's not favorable, can feel super uncomfortable. And yet they get to respond how they want to, and their response has nothing to do with me. Staying in my lane means that I let them choose their experience, that I respect how they are choosing to work through the situation, and I focus on my own responsibilities, which are to manage how I think about the situation and how I feel and behave toward this other person. Sometimes other people are quick to forgive, quick to want to come back into connection with us, and sometimes they aren't. We get to let them go through their own process of forgiveness, of finding peace, their own process of making meaning of the situation and figuring out where they want to be. 

27:28 

Our job is to forgive ourselves, to learn how to show up in greater love and kindness, creating a safe space for this other person. We may not understand the ins and outs of what they have gone through in the particular situation. And to be honest, we don't have to understand it in order to love them and seek connection from our side. Another thought that Byron Katie always says is, "I love you and there's nothing you can do about it." So in this situation, we get to choose to love them and there isn't anything they can do about it. We get to treat them with kindness and compassion and they don't have a say. We get to show up in alignment with our values and desires and honor and respect the journey that they are needing to take to figure this out for themselves. So the other person doesn't need to forgive you in order for you to offer yourself forgiveness. Though you have a shared experience, what that experience means and how you get to work through it are two separate and distinct experiences. 

28:34 

And one last thought I want to share with you today. Have you noticed how often in this process of forgiving ourselves, I've used the word should today? When I step into the world of should, I have expectations of others and of myself. And when those expectations are not met, it causes a lot of angst. When I think that I should have known better, that they should have shown up differently, that I should have shown up differently, that I shouldn't have ever said anything unkind, all of these shoulds keep me spiraling in shame and make it very difficult to forgive myself. 

29:10 

When we can learn to let go of the shoulds and rather see situations for what they were or what they are, when we can offer ourselves grace for our humanity, make peace with said humanity, and then seek to take responsibility and clean up what we can within ourselves and apologize to the other person, we are more capable of letting go of the past. This doesn't mean it disappears from our memory. It doesn't mean we won't ever behave badly again, unfortunately. It doesn't mean we don't still feel bad that we behave the way that we did. What it does mean is that we no longer feel guilt and shame around our behavior. We recognize our shortcomings without beating ourselves down for them because we know that they're an inevitable part of being human. And we also know that we will circle back around and clean them up the best we know how and that we will do the work to show up better in the future. And even if the other person doesn't forgive us, we can still forgive ourselves. We can still move into a place of reconciliation between the person that we were, the person that we are, and the person we really want to become. 

30:23 

So where are you in your ability to forgive yourself? Where are you in your ability to take responsibility for past behaviors and clean up what you can? Where are you in allowing others the space to work through their own forgiveness process and still show up with love and compassion and kindness? If you see that you could use some help with this process, please reach out for a free coaching call. Let's clean up some stuff. Let's help you move into a cleaner place, a place that gives you space to be human and know that it's okay to be human. 

30:57 

You can access that free coaching call if you go to tanyahale.com. In the top right, there is a button that says free consultation. It's a 90 minute call, which gives us a lot of time to really dig deep into your situation. The vast majority of the call is me coaching you through your particular situation. And then at the end, we do talk about what coaching looks like, what it would, what it costs, how many weeks it is, all that stuff. We talk about all that. And I'm not a hard sell by any means, because if you are not all in and working with me, it's not going to be a good experience for either of us. So if it's if it's a good fit, it's a good fit. Let's do it. Let's make it work. If it's not a good fit, that's great. You've gotten some great coaching and some great awareness around your situation. And I have gotten to do what I feel called to do, which is share this information with the world and help people move more into alignment. 

31:52 

This coaching thing is the bomb and it has allowed me to grow up into my adulthood in a way that nothing else ever could. And I love this growing up. Okay, my friends, that's going to do it for me today. I hope this was helpful. Have an awesome, awesome day. And I will see you next time. Bye. 

32:16 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.