Can you forgive yourself? Let go of a past mistakes or wrong doing?
People who have trouble letting go of their own past misdemeanors, trouble forgiving themselves, may unfairly treat themselves worse than they treat others: ‘I’m very hard on myself!’ is the typical refrain of such people. Yet not being able to forgive yourself, and allow for the fact that you are human and therefore prone to err, is - in a sense - a sort of arrogance. ‘Believing yourself to be the worst person in the world is just as conceited as believing you are the best.’
Forgive yourself: The limits of self punishment
It’s great to expect great things from oneself, but it’s counterproductive in all kinds of ways to constantly beat yourself up over something. The new session Forgive yourself from hypnosisdownloads.com is all about learning from the past but then moving on. Eternal self blame helps no one. It just produces guilt and shame. There needs to be clear and defined limits to punishments and this also includes self punishments.
Forgive yourself: The tyranny of thought
When we forgive ourselves it doesn’t mean making excuses or letting ourselves off the hook. The session we’ve produced here focuses on learning from the past so we can be different in the future. A typical characteristic of people who habitually find it hard to forgive themselves is that they think in very all-or-nothing, or black-and-white ways. Something is completely, absolutely, totally… this or that. They don’t do ‘shades of gray’. ‘I’m totally useless because I made this mistake’. This type of ‘completely this’ or ‘completely that’ thinking is also present in the psychology of many depressed people.
Feeling bad about something is the price you pay, but there is an upper limit to the price of everything. The other aspect of self blame this download addresses is what we call ‘locus of control’.
Forgive and forget
If we don’t have a clear sense of what we can control or influence in life and what we can’t, then we can end up blaming ourselves for things that are outside of our control (or less easy to influence). I recall working with a woman who became upset when her twenty-two year old student son wasn’t working for his exams. She blamed herself almost entirely for this state of affairs! Being fairer to oneself - no matter what you’ve done or think you’ve done - means knowing and feeling the truth of the fact that to be human is to make mistakes sometimes.
Mark
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