Forgiving Yourself

Beverly Flanigan

Description

Guilt and self-blame can be incapacitating feelings that only deliberates self-forgiveness will dispel. Forgiving Yourself identifies various types of actions that call for forgiveness, and offers a step-by-step program for eliminating self-defeating behavior so what we may learn to forgive our mistakes, heal our relationships, and get on with becoming our best selves.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• développement personnel
• Self-help
• Personal Growth

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 août 1997
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620458570
• Langue: English

Extrait

Forgiving Yourself
Forgiving Yourself

A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Peace with Your Mistakes and Getting On with Your Life
Beverly Flanigan, M.S.S.W.
Copyright 1996 Beverly Flanigan, M.S.S.W.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Book design by Anne Scatto/P IXEL P RESS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Flanigan, Beverly.
Forgiving yourself: a step-by-step guide to making peace with your mistakes and getting on with your life / by Beverly Flanigan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-02-538682-4
1. Forgiveness. 2. Self-evaluation. 3. Peace of mind. I. Title BF637.F67F535 1996 96-1106 158 .1-dc20 CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: What Is Self-Forgiveness?

P ART I: Your Own Worst Enemy: The Challenge of Self-Forgiveness
C HAPTER 1: Do You Need to Forgive Yourself?
C HAPTER 2: Meeting Our Limitations
C HAPTER 3: Wrongdoings, Excuses, and Justifications
C HAPTER 4: Wrongdoings That Kill
P ART II: Forgiving Yourself
C HAPTER 5: Confronting Yourself
C HAPTER 6: Holding Yourself Responsible
C HAPTER 7: Confessing Your Flaws
C HAPTER 8: Transformation
P ART III: The Limits of Forgiveness
C HAPTER 9: The Limits of Forgiveness
Notes
Appendix
Index
Foreword
I began my examination of forgiveness in 1980 as part of my work as a fellow of the Kellogg Foundation. Since that time, I have lectured on, written about, and counseled people who have been successful in forgiving themselves and others.
My first book, Forgiving the Unforgivable (Macmillan Publishing, 1992), describes a six-phase process that people can employ to forgive others who injure them. Information for the book was gathered from interviews with people who had been successful in forgiving children s murderers, spouses who abandoned them, parents who abused them, and a profound and frightening plethora of injuries perpetrated by loved ones.
Information for Forgiving Yourself was gathered from some of the same people who described the concurrent process of self-forgiveness they engaged in as they struggled to forgive those who injured them. In addition, data were gathered from two other sources. During my workshops on forgiving others, I asked people who had faced the task of forgiving themselves to complete a four-page questionnaire on self-forgiveness. Questions elicited information about people s age, educational background, family constellation, religious affiliation, and specific descriptions of the situations people forgave themselves for, including the process they used. These questionnaires were also distributed by professional colleagues and personal acquaintances who gave them to their work associates, church groups, and friends for completion. The data, then, are not scientifically gathered, but do reflect the experiences of approximately 110 people. Moreover, some materials presented in the following pages are drawn from clinical experiences of my own, or my students , clientele. Names have been changed throughout the book to ensure anonymity. I am grateful to all who shared their stories. Case examples I have developed for teaching purposes are also used. Statements in quotation marks are direct quotes from interviewed persons or questionnaire participants.
Self-forgiveness may be at the very core of peacemaking. When people forgive others, they stop hatred in its track and refuse to allow it to pour onto others. When people forgive themselves, they also stop hatred in its track and refuse to allow self-loathing to dominate their lives and to spill over onto their children, spouses, friends, and neighbors. A person s self-loathing can be every bit as lethal to others as hatred in any other form. Hatred poisons, no matter to whom it is directed.
It is my hope that Forgiving Yourself will provide damaged people the tools to put self-hatred away and return to the human community. If the book serves this purpose, then another source of information about individual healing will have an impact on something even more important than personal well-being: it will also serve to play some small part in healing us all.
I would like to thank my agent and all the friends, coworkers, and editors who supported and helped me through the process of writing this book. I would like to give special thanks to the people who cared enough about other people to respond to my call for interviews and to talk with me about their experiences.
Introduction
What Is Self-Forgiveness?
If you selected Forgiving Yourself from a bookshelf, you are probably a person who knows too well the pain of recognizing that something you did or are has damaged your life and the lives of others. The damage may be to your close relationships, to people you barely know, to your spiritual relationship with a higher power, or to your relationship with yourself. If your words or actions have driven loved ones away; if blindness to your limitations has resulted in hurting someone else; or if your reluctance to see yourself realistically has resulted in a rupture with what you have assumed about yourself, then you are poised to begin the process of forgiving yourself.
What is self-forgiveness? How does it happen? Is self-forgiveness just accepting yourself? Is self-forgiveness arrogant or dangerous? Some would answer that others must forgive us or that God must forgive us before we can forgive ourselves. Self-forgiveness can restore peace within a person, and when peace is restored and hatred eliminated-even self-hatred-good things can result. Self-forgiveness is a process that can coexist when others forgive us for hurting them, or when God is at work. But being forgiven by another does not preempt the need for self-forgiveness.
Self-forgiveness is a specific process that results in several outcomes. First, self-forgiveness results in your being able to finally feel that you have paid your debt to those you think you have owed. Second, self-forgiveness ends the desire to continue punishing yourself for letting your flaws or mistakes hurt other people. Third, self-forgiveness requires a commitment to personal change, and once you change, you will feel better about yourself. Finally, when you have forgiven yourself, the things you have believed about yourself and other people begin to make sense again. Your ideas about life are no longer troubling or incongruent. Your life and its meaning seem to fit again into the big picture.
The process of forgiving yourself is not easy. Self-forgiveness results from an honest, sometimes very painful, confrontation with ourselves that being forgiven by another person does not require. Other people may forgive us, but they may not know us as well as we know ourselves. Only we can know how mean or arrogant or blind to our limitations we have been. It is this knowledge that makes self-forgiveness so hard, maybe harder than forgiving another.
What Self-Forgiveness Is and Is Not
Self-forgiveness always has to do with relationships. Forgiveness of oneself is called for when relationships have been permanently altered because of our actions, inactions, words, and some might argue, even thoughts. Self-forgiveness does not apply to aspects of yourself that have hurt you, and you alone. For example, a person does not need to forgive herself when she has gained too much weight to fit into a favorite dress or when she has failed a test as a result of not studying hard enough. She may regret these situations and be faced with accepting her flaws, but self-acceptance is not at all the same as self-forgiveness. Each requires a very different healing process. Self-acceptance focuses on oneself and discovering or creating a better self-concept. Self-forgiveness focuses on other people and allows us to transform ourselves into better people for the sake of others. Self-forgiveness does not result in the conclusion, I m okay; you re okay. On the contrary, self-forgiveness requires a person to acknowledge that something about herself has not been okay, and, in fact, has damaged important parts of one s life and the lives of others. Self-forgiveness is the process of self-examination that results in the conclusion, I must change. I m not okay. Who benefits from self-forgiveness? Isn t self-forgiveness a dangerous and even cynical way for a person to let herself off the moral hook and give her license to offend other people again? No. People who suffer after they have harmed their relationships are not able to let themselves off, morally. Instead, they are burdened down with guilt or regret for what they have done. A person brave enough to confront her flaws is a potential asset to others, not a danger. One who is blind to the parts of herself that can wound others is dangerous.
PEOPLE WHO SEEK SELF-FORGIVENESS
People who seek to forgive themselves are people of conscience. People who lack conscience, by contrast, have no concept of the pain they may cause others, or may feel no particular concern even if they know they have harmed other people. Sociopaths and psychopaths feel no need to forgive themselves; they are unconcerned about the pain they may cause. People who struggle to forgive themselves for the mistakes they make are, by contrast, people with ordinary or even extraordinary consciences and well-developed senses of right and wrong. We can easily see the difference between the mugger of an old woman sneering at the court cameras and the shriveled, guilty-looking man who, in hunger, broke into a house to steal money. For the first person, non-forgiveness is not an issue. Having little conscience and therefore little empathy for his victim or remorse for his violence, he will see no need to forgive himself. By contrast, the sec