Wherever you self-abandon in your life, you will find you need to forgive yourself.

Maybe you are frustrated in your partnership, but fear what being alone would be like, so you stay and let the resentment and loneliness build. In this case, you may need to forgive yourself for:

• Thinking you aren’t capable, aren’t strong enough, to do it alone.
• The myriad of ways you stay silent in your relationship, not speaking up and recognizing your needs.
• Invalidating your feelings, spending years rationalizing or justifying your partner’s poor behavior.
• Not handling your emotions, lashing out in a way that you don’t even recognize who you are.
• Not believing you deserve more that you are worthy of love.

Maybe you wake up day after day dragging yourself into work in a place where you don’t feel recognized, and but to which you continue to give your blood, sweat, and tears at the cost of your personal wellness. If this is you, you may need to forgive yourself for:

• Failing to put boundaries in place because you believe your colleagues won’t like you, or you are easily replaceable, or you aren’t talented enough to get a better position. You don’t have your own back.
• Not protecting your health.
• Aligning your self-worth solely with what you do.
• Not speaking up and asking to be recognized.
• Not recognizing yourself by minimizing your achievements and wins.
• Playing small. Not believing enough in yourself to dream and play bigger than the job you hate.

Maybe you are a chameleon and don’t mix friend groups because they are too dissimilar, which implies you act differently in each group. You may need to forgive yourself for:

• Hiding or denying parts of yourself because you fear not being accepted.
• Not accepting who you are and fully and joyfully expressing that.
• Not honoring your needs and desires.
• Being ashamed of who you are and believing no one will like the real you.
• Denying or repressing the loneliness you feel.
• Ignoring your need for deep and meaningful connection.

Whatever the situation, where you sell yourself out – playing small, hiding aspects of your personality, silently screaming, choosing to ride the emotional rollercoaster – you will need to consider how you need to forgive yourself in order to start showing up for yourself. Awareness and forgiveness are the first steps toward change.

Kristin Neff’s self-compassion exercises and Gabby Bernstein’s Judgment Detox are great tools that help you learn to forgive.

If you recognize yourself in any of the examples above and want to explore how you can forgive yourself and find emotional and mental freedom, click here to schedule a free discovery call with me.

**

With gratitude to Vorden Art for his powerful painting entitled Mirror of the Soul. Get it here: https://1create.co.uk/vorden-art/.