Forgiving Yourself

 Something I learned from joining the Orthodox Church was repentance. I thought I knew about it. I even wrote a piece into my pretrial detention journal.

However, reading Nathaniel Wade's How to forgive yourself from Psyche crystallized some thoughts that I had about the days of when my depression went untreated.

As psychologists who have long been interested in this subject, we developed a process to help people work toward self-forgiveness. The process includes four parts, which we call the Four Rs of Self-Forgiveness. In working toward self-forgiveness, a person does the following:

• takes responsibility for harming another person;
• expresses remorse (while also seeking to minimise shame);
• engages in restoration, through repair-oriented behaviours and a recommitment to personal values; and
• achieves a renewal of self-respect, self-compassion and self-acceptance.

Forgiving yourself does not mean condoning your own actions, forgetting what you have done, or minimising the impact it has had on others. True self-forgiveness involves both taking responsibility and moving toward self-compassion.

It is the self-compassion that I did not feel, and I am not sure that I actually feel now. Resignation towards the costs of my taking responsibility feels a better a description of my own feelings. That is better than the hatred I had for myself, the hatred for having trapped myself in a world I found more and more disgusting, the hatred for my continued existence.

For those with depression, consider reading the full, article, please. 

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