Episode 199 -- March 10, 2022

Three Steps Toward Forgiveness

The statement "Nobody's perfect" may sound cliché and overused, but it's true. We have made mistakes in our past, and we will continue to make mistakes as we move forward in life. We must learn to forgive ourselves and extend grace to others as well. Recovery involves learning along the way. When we remain teachable there's room for mistakes as well as forgiveness.

In their book What Went Right: Reframe Your Thinking for a Happier Now, Dr. Michael Wetter and Eileen Bailey offer advice about how to change the self-critical stories in our minds. We can reframe our thinking to gain self-confidence and a more fulfilling life in recovery. We do not have to carry any burdens from the way we lived before sobriety.

In this excerpt, we explore ways to forgive and accept our mistakes. We can use our past to forge a better path to long-term recovery. Wetter and Baily share real-life examples of how overthinking our mistakes can negatively affect our daily lives. This excerpt helps us realize that a wrong decision or misjudgment does not make us a bad person with a bad life. It only makes us human.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

ACCEPT PAST ACTIONS AND BEHAVIORS
If you're like most people, you probably have a list of regrets: times you have treated other people poorly, times you didn't spend with family and friends, times you felt you didn't do your best. You might regret negative things you have said to family or friends in anger or out of hurt. You may have a long list, or there could be certain times of your life when you feel you were at your worst. You might walk around each day carrying a heavy load of guilt. These regrets are possibly holding you back from moving forward in your life. They could be dragging down your self-esteem.

You may be tempted to shove all of these moments deep into the back of your mind, where you don't need to think about them. But when you do that, they remain there, feeding the negative way you think about yourself. As painful as it may be, the best way to get past your regrets is to face them. Then you can use your mistakes to propel positive change in your life.

FORGIVE YOURSELF
Realizing your mistakes isn't the same as forgiving yourself. You still need to find a way to live with what you have done and find a way to move forward. You must accept that while you can't change the past, you can accept that these things have happened, and the lessons you learned can make you a better person.

Think about learning to walk or ride a bike. You made many mistakes: you probably fell, and you may have hurt yourself. Even so, you kept getting up, brushing yourself off, and trying again, no matter how many tries it took. Life isn't any different—you keep trying, making mistakes, learning, and becoming better. Forgiving yourself is acknowledging your errors, picking yourself up, and trying again.

Many people confuse forgiveness with condoning a behavior. You can forgive yourself while still acknowledging that a behavior was hurtful or wrong. Imagine that your son was caught shoplifting. You're angry that he did this. You discuss it, and the two of you agree that he needs to make amends and face the consequences of his actions. But you'll probably also tell him that this action doesn't make him a bad person. You might tell him that he is a good person who made a mistake. You aren't going to hold this against him and punish him by withholding your love. You'll acknowledge that he must accept the consequences of his actions— being arrested, apologizing, and going to court—but you're going to continue to love him, and you want him to continue to love himself. This is the same treatment you should give to yourself: acknowledge a mistake, make amends if needed, and realize that this mistake doesn't define who you are. You are still deserving of love from others and from yourself.

When reviewing our mistakes, we often overgeneralize, seeing a single mistake as part of a larger problem. This is what happened with Ned.

Ned didn't think about the fact that his behavior tonight was an exception rather than the rule and judged his parenting as bad based on one incident. You might judge yourself based on an individual incident, using it to reinforce your low opinion of yourself. Try to look at the big picture and keep in mind the reasons behind your actions.

There are times you might believe that you don't deserve to forgive yourself. You believe that what you have done is so terrible that you deserve to continue punishing yourself and to live with the guilt, regret, and pain. You believe that if you forgive yourself for this awful deed, you're letting yourself off the hook. This often becomes a vicious cycle. When you continue to believe you're a horrible person, you continue to treat yourself and others based on this mind-set. Your behavior reflects your negative feelings. When you react negatively to others, they react negatively to you, increasing your belief that you are a horrible person. You will remain unhappy and stuck. Instead, you can resolve to change and make a commitment to yourself that you won't repeat this type of behavior and will continue to take steps, such as recasting your thinking using the tools you're learning here, to make sure it won't happen again. If you sense that the feelings and thought patterns behind these regretful actions are so ingrained and deep seated that you can't make the necessary changes on your own, seek professional help. With the help of a competent counselor, using cognitive-behavioral therapy and other methods, many people have worked through some of the most difficult traumas and found healing.

Consider what happens when you don't forgive yourself. It takes time and energy to deal with the guilt and regret. You become preoccupied with fear, resentment, anger, hurt, and blame. You use up your energy on negative emotions. You don't have any energy left for really taking care of yourself and growing as a person. Carrying around these emotions leaves you drained of any positive energy and feeling defeated. When you change how you look at your mistakes—from using emotional reasoning and self-blame to using rational thinking and self-acceptance—you focus on self-improvement.

FORGIVE OTHERS
Just as important as forgiving yourself is learning to forgive others. You wouldn't think holding on to your judgments and negative feelings about another person's poor behaviors would have an impact on your self-esteem, but it does. When you can't let go and forgive others, you carry around anger and resentment. These emotions leak out when interacting not only with the person who wronged you but also with others. Your relationships, your wellbeing, and even your health can suffer when you can't forgive.

One misconception about forgiveness is that once you forgive someone, you must go back to how things used to be and renew your relationship with him or her. Forgiveness doesn't necessarily go hand-in-hand with a continued relationship. Forgiveness is about accepting that the other person made a mistake (accidentally or deliberately) and that this action could have had more to do with his own personal dysfunctional thought processes than with who you are. You can forgive someone and still say "I forgive you, but I don't want you in my life."

STEPS TO FORGIVENESS
Here are some steps you can take to forgive yourself and others.

• Accept that forgiveness is needed. Look at the facts of the situation and accept that you're angry, resentful, or bitter. Accept that in order to free yourself of these feelings and move on with your life, you need to practice forgiveness for whatever action or behavior occurred.
• Accept that anger and bitterness are holding you back. There are times when you feel your anger is justified, and it might be. But these types of emotions keep you locked into negativity, and you can end up punishing yourself, giving more power to the person who harmed you.
• Make a conscious decision to release the emotions while holding on to what you learned from the situation. Every person we meet, every experience we have, has the potential to teach us something about ourselves and gives us the opportunity to grow. Times we are hurt or angry sometimes teach us more about ourselves than times of peace. Focus on what you learned about yourself during the difficult time.

About the Authors:
Dr. Michael G. Wetter is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in adolescent and adult populations. He has served on the faculty and staff of several leading national medical organizations including Kaiser Permanente, is on staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and is a subject matter expert for the California State Licensing Board of Psychology. Dr. Wetter is a nationally recognized expert in the field of psychology and is a guest lecturer, training other psychologists and mental health professionals. Dr. Wetter has served as an expert consultant on numerous television programs, as well as to newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as to magazines like Men's Health, Forbes, Prevention, and Redbook.

Eileen Bailey is a freelance writer specializing in mental and emotional health issues. She writes for numerous health and wellness websites and is lead writer for both ADHD and anxiety on HealthCentral.com as well as a contributing writer for ADDitude magazine online (www .additudemag.com). She is the co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adult ADHD, Idiot's Guides: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, The Essential Guide to Overcoming Obsessive Love, and The Essential Guide to Asperger's Syndrome.

© 2016 by Michael G. Wetter and Eileen Bailey
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