Mining Nuggets: Self-forgiveness

During this pandemic I found myself choosing to do a lot of self-work. For example, I took on a number of 21-day challenges with Deepak Chopra, a 2-hour "zoom" workshop with Geneen Roth, as well as a four-week challenge with Oprah toward the middle of our sheltering-in-place period sometime in April [All this in addition to my weekly Facetime visits with my therapist]. I thought these might be helpful as I continue to develop my self-compassion skills. And I certainly have the time for it.

Most of the workshops and challenges deal with living in the moment and learning to feel gratitude. For example, in one of the meditation workshops with a trainer from the Chopra Center, we were frequently asked two questions: Where am I? and What time is it? - to which the responses were: Here, and Now. This exercise has become quite useful for times when I am feeling anxious about the future, or mournful about the past. I stop, breathe deeply in and out, and ask myself those two questions.

Geneen Roth taught us a very useful phrase to counteract the feeling that everything is all wrong. She suggested we breathe deeply in and out and then ask ourselves: "What is NOT wrong right now?" Oprah encouraged us to say to ourselves: "Right now I am well." These are all helpful self-soothing and comforting techniques to get through some anxious, difficult life moments. And certainly, as a behaviorist, cognitive therapy approach, it does help sometimes to practice these exercises over and over again in a "fake it till we make it" kind of way in order to teach the brain new techniques of perceiving the moment, our communities, or the world at large.

Rethinking the way I view or criticize myself is how I learn to have compassion for myself. I shift the script I learned about myself as a child with something more forgiving, tender, and supportive. The other day while having tea with a friend, we discussed how often we compare ourselves to people who are so much more accomplished than we are. She suggested that we might choose instead to compare ourselves with people less accomplished. I laughed heartily at the idea that I might not be as bad as I always think I am. I thought that was a good example of self-compassion.

Along with creating this new type of inner dialog with myself, I find that I often feel anger at the way I was treated as a child, or even how at times I still allow myself to be treated by others. My in-depth therapist does not spend time with the gratitude and be-here-now stuff. Rather, he helps me hold still with uncomfortable feelings of anger and pain so that I can validate those very important human emotions and accept myself for having them. He has been instrumental in helping me understand that feeling those emotions and acting on them are two very different things. I can choose how to express them. But having the feeling in the first place is simply part of how we are all human. There is nothing bad or good about feelings. They simply are part of our humanity. This has been extremely helpful for me, albeit quite painful at times when confronted with the depth of my emotions. More importantly, though, validating my feelings has enabled me to forgive myself for all those past regrets. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and of course when I look back I can think of dozens of ways I could have done everything better. But dwelling on that does not help me in the present.

And so, I conclude that in order to be here now or realize what is not wrong right now, I have to first or, at least always, accompany those exercises with in-depth validation of the complexity of my emotions including anger and pain.

In short, I am not able to forgive myself unless I have first experienced and validated my emotions. And, when I am able to forgive myself for what I could not have done better with who I was in the past, I become more able to hold still in the moment and experience genuine gratitude.