Forgiving Yourself For What You Did
Kristyn Meyer is on a journey to make herself the best human that she can be. These posts are a reflection of that. She welcomes your support via reading and through commissioned affiliate links within her posts! To stay up to date on all of her shenanigans, please subscribe to her email list! (psst…there’s a free gift involved)
I have guilt.
I’ve had guilt for years, on a wide range of issues.
To start with, I have always felt anger towards myself for how everything went with my first child. As a reminder, we adopted him when he was 14. I have always felt like I dropped the ball with him and with my husband. Regularly I have beat myself up over being a crappy mother, shitty wife, and just overall horrible human being.
Fast forward a bit, and I bring a beautiful little girl into this world. Guilt surrounds me in everything with her. I hate that I only took a short maternity leave, that I was a working mom, that I wasn’t patient enough. Mom guilt to the millionth level.
A bit later, another small child into the world. Guilt surrounds the fact that I felt like I had a million things happening during my maternity leave with him. And that I was a ball of stress for most of his first two years of life.
As you can imagine, walking around with all of this self-anger and guilt inside of you for literal years weighs heavily on your mind.
It affects you mentally, emotionally, and physically. The act of forgiving yourself doesn’t come easily.
I could never find the right way to alleviate the emotion. For many things I was able to do internal reflection and come out okay on the other side. Sitting with this pain and emotion was too much for me. I could only spend a few minutes at a time sorting through the events that troubled me. And because of that, I could never reach a resolution for myself.
But over the past few weeks I have really been wanting to find a way to move past it all. It seems like the anger has been popping up more frequently and I’m just over it. I want to be okay with everything that happened before and just move forward.
Internal peace with my past would be really great about now.
So then randomly I decided to turn on a guided meditation the other night. Remember when I said it helped my anxiety from time to time? As I was looking through the Youtube listings, I saw one that said “Self-Love Meditation“. I was like – bingo! I preach self-love, this will be perfect!
But guys.
It wasn’t JUST about self-love.
It was also about self-forgiveness. Forgiving yourself for things you have done wrong.
As it played on, it talked about putting your past behind you. Part of it talked about putting your focus on having a better future. All in all, it told me everything I needed to hear.
But then it unknowingly provided a breakthrough moment for me.
During a deep breathing time, my mind wandered – because that’s who I am as a person. But this time it was productive wandering. I was thinking about the things that the narrator had brought up in my mind. And then, like a bolt of lightning, this one statement came barreling at me.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
That is IT. What has been pushing me down for so many years? The fact that I hurt others with my actions is what has been at the core of my guilt and anger for so long. But I didn’t realize that.
I couldn’t think it all through because just a few minutes of doing so would make my anger level rise.
When I would try to weed through it all, I had to shut it down before I got too emotional.
And it was because I was so mad at myself. All this time I was so angry that I caused pain to those that I love most in the world.
For so long I have been carrying this burden with me unknowingly. I have struggled to elevate my self-worth and my confidence, and this was a big part of it.
It took a perfectly timed Youtube video to help me through it.
Forgiving yourself via Youtube. A new way of life?
So from my world to yours, please go easy on yourselves. Let my errors be wisdom to you. Maybe if I had forced myself to work through the emotions that I was feeling even though it was uncomfortable, I would have come through it sooner? I’m not going to waste time hemming and hawing on it, but what I will do is carry it forward with me.
No longer will I let myself carry around such heavy baggage as I did. It got me nowhere. From now on, I will address the issues internally as they come up, show myself some self-love, and work to make the situation better.
And I recommend that you do the same. Showing yourself grace and mercy is a big part of a healthy life.
Comments
Amazing post. Let go of guilt and shame. Keep it up 🙂
This is such a lovely post, Thank you for sharing. So important to forgive yourself!!!
I actually don’t live with guilt at all. I am very lucky that I don’t because I know so many people that do and then it causes a whole host of health issues.
I can be a guilty person and I really resonated with this post. I appreciate you sharing this.
I appreciate this post. I completely agree, being a guilty person affect you mentally & emotionally!. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Great post..! Self forgiving and acceptance about our flaws or mistake is so important. It’s hard to live our life full of regrets.
Thank you for your candor. I know that it will help many. I had to go to a few years of counseling to stop beating myself up over every little thing.
This is so deep heart touching…Fighting with yourself is the worst thing ever..facing others is somehow easy but facing yourself huhh most difficult thing ever…Am glad you have finally been out of that..
I don’t know what you did that you feel so much guilt inside you…. we don’t deliberately do things, we don’t act because we want to hurt others. If that happens, is surely wasn’t your intention to do so. You don’t have to be so hard on yourself.
Loved this post. Live happy life long… Thankyou for sharing
You’re not alone. It’s hard to believe that some people don’t feel guilt. I feel that as a mom, there is always guilt. You’re a working parent, you feel guilty for not staying home. You’re a stay at home parent, there’s guilt for not working. You’re strict with the kids, there’s guilt in that. You’re too lenient, guilt there too. Life is such. It is what it is. I feel guilt often, but luckily I don’t beat myself up over it.
I also have guilts! I struggle with these guilts to be honest but you’re absolutely right, to move forward we need to forgive ourself.
I sometimes have guilts to myself and honestly, I learned from this post not to feel bad to yourself accept your mistake forgive yourself for your wrong doings and move forward..
Lets start to forgive what we did and stop worrying for our future, be at the present and enjoy every second and minutes.
As difficult as it may seem, learning how to forgive yourself and let go of guilt and shame is a necessary part of moving on from any mistake.
Congratulations! Forgiving is a liberating act, though sometimes it’s really a hard thing to do, we should–to avoid more suffering especially if it’s within ourselves.
Amazing message as I have struggled with lingering guilt before. I still do. I will try to “get rid of it” but it is hard.
This is a really helpful message for me, I agree that it’s important to forgive oneself but still remember your lesson as we go one stop towards being a better person 🙂
This is really a beautiful message. Forgiving is really a great attitude that people must have. But one thing we need to learn is the lesson we bring in our life.