Sometimes I think the person that’s been the hardest upon myself is really me. Throughout my life, I have had the tendency to beat myself up about various things I’ve done that I’m not very proud of. In recent years though, I’ve come to see how this type of self-abuse does nothing good for me whatsoever. Because of this, I’ve started practicing forgiving myself on a regular basis and am finding much better results.
Up until just a few years ago, I did a lot of things in my life that one would probably give a label of “pretty bad” towards. You might say that many of those things I did were filled with a tremendous amount of darkness and brought a lot of pain to other people’s lives, because the reality was they did. And for years, I punished myself over them by launching many waves of verbal assaults straight at my heart or falling deep into spirals of anxiety, depression and despair. In fact, it became common for others to see me living in self-pity on most days. The idea of forgiving myself for all those things I did which hurt others seemed too difficult to do, so I fell into a guilt and shame based life. By doing that, I ended up constantly repeating the same behaviors over and over again, which only led to me hurting even more people, including myself.
So what was the value of living with this guilt and shame from those terrible things I’ve done? And what good did it really do to punish myself time and time again over them? Was was it so hard for me to fully forgive myself for any of those terrible things I did?
I think the answer to all three questions was always the same. It’s my belief that my ego often convinced me that if I lived with guilt and shame and if I kept on punishing myself instead of practicing forgiveness, that I would never do any of those terrible things again. But it didn’t work. It just led me into doing other dark things and living in even more darkness, which in turn led me back into more guilt and shame, and more self-punishment. It was a vicious cycle that never ended.
The only way I ever found to end this vicious cycle once and for all was to seek God’s help. Left to my own vices, I was never able to find forgiveness for myself for any of the terrible things I did in life that brought great pain to others. But through God, I discovered the one thing lacking in my life was a deep love for myself.
You see, the more I did those terrible things, the more I didn’t love myself. And the more I didn’t love myself, the more I did even more of those terrible things. But when I started seeking God so much more in life, I started loving myself a lot more. And the more I began loving myself a lot more, the more I stopped wanting to do those terrible things. That’s only because that new and improved self-love helped me to see just how sick I became when I punished myself and lived in all that guilt, shame, despair, anxiety, and depression.
I’m totally convinced that forgiveness for any terrible thing we’ve done begins with asking God for help. I’m also convinced that God forgives us instantly and it’s only our egos that believe God doesn’t forgive us. The help I received from God after asking for it was to love myself so much more than I ever did previously in my life. In all those years when I didn’t have much love for myself, I really chose to live in a lot of dark behavior that ended up hurting so many of God’s children. But through God’s help, I turned all of this around and learned how to love myself so much more. Over time, that self-love showed me how to forgive myself for all those past terrible things I’ve done, but even more importantly, it prevented me from wanting to do any of those terrible things ever again.
So are you someone like I once was, who is living with a lot of guilt and shame, anxiety and depression, or despair and self-pity because of terrible things you’ve done in the past? If you are, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and know the only thing standing in your way of healing from them, is yourself. Ask God to start helping you love yourself a lot more and I can promise you that in time, you will. And when you do, I know you will begin to see that punishing yourself is not a very self-loving action. Instead, you will find that forgiving yourself is and that’s when you’ll experience true-freedom from all of your past transgressions.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson