I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it. The second most cliché advice out there behind “Just love yourself”, is “You have to forgive yourself.” And yeah, that sounds great in theory, but just about everyone who’s ever received this little snippet of wisdom has immediately countered with the question: “How?!?”

What, exactly, is forgiveness, and how does one forgive oneself? I mean, in practice? Why do we have such a hard time accepting forgiveness, especially from ourselves? Since I haven’t spoken about this subject in quite a while, I thought it was about high time I broke down the mechanics of self-forgiveness. If there’s something you’ve been beating up on yourself over, today’s video is definitely for you.

Transcript

Hello, my happy shiny puppies. This is Melody Fletcher and I teach the Technology of Reality, and The Law of Attraction, to highly intellectual overthinkers, just like you, in a way that actually makes some friggin’ sense.

And today, I want to talk to you about Self Forgiveness, or Forgiving Yourself. I’ve had a lot of emails lately about this topic, so that tells me that it is the right timing to revisit this topic.

Feeling bad is just an excuse

So, what is forgiving yourself actually? What is the act of forgiveness? This might sound a little bit shocking, but when you understand energy and how it actually works, this explanation is going to make a lot more sense. What forgiveness actually is; is no longer using something the person did, said, or whatever, as an excuse to feel bad. That’s it! So, when we can’t forgive someone else, or we want to forgive someone else, we’re feeling badly about something that they did in the past. We’re feeling badly, and we’re using whatever they did, or said, as an excuse to continue to feel badly. We might be feeling blame, or anger, or guilt, or judgment, or whatever. Well we’re feeling that, and we’re using that as an excuse until we, kind of let them go. And so, when we’re forgiving somebody else, we’re really letting ourselves off the hook by letting that go and saying, “I choose to feel better, even though this thing has happened; I choose to feel better anyway.” That’s what real forgiveness actually is. So, when you’re forgiving somebody else, you’re actually doing it for you, not for them. And, when you’re forgiving yourself, of course, you’re doing it for yourself as well. But the structure of it, the mechanics of it, are the same. You’re using something that you did, as an excuse to feel bad.

And often, the bad feeling that you’re experiencing isn’t, necessarily, so much because you did that thing. You’re, sort of, heaping insult to injury. But there’s something else going on underneath that caused the entire event, and that you’re’ holding onto. When you don’t step into self-forgiveness, when you’re not letting that go, you’re actually holding onto the initial pain that caused the entire event. And so now you’re not shifting out of it. So essentially, when somebody else forgives you, they’re giving you permission to feel better, because you’re using this excuse to not feel good. And, when they come along, they might say, “You know what? It’s ok.” And, if you actually feel better, then you use that as an excuse to feel better. They’re giving you permission to feel better.

Give yourself permission to feel better

So, self-forgiveness is really about giving yourself permission, which is the only person who ever can, really, truly give you permission. You can use permission from somebody else to give yourself permission, but you’re still giving yourself permission. So, what we want to look at then is: How do you give yourself permission to feel better, when you’ve done something really, really bad?

So, we need to differentiate between guilt and shame. When you feel guilty about something, you feel like you’ve done something bad. When you feel shame about something, or ashamed of something, you feel like you are bad. They are slightly different when you go after them. Shame is worse than guilt, basically. It’s more encompassing.

Something always happens for a reason

So, one of the things you want to understand is that nothing happens randomly, nothing just happens. Everything happens for a reason. And, I don’t mean that in the tried, “Everything happens for some mystical reason, because there’s fairies out there, and they’re pulling the strings. And, we just can’t understand it.” No, we can friggin’ understand it! That’s my whole job here, is helping you understand it. It happens for a reason and we can find that reason.

So, you didn’t say something hurtful to someone. You didn’t have an outbreak, you didn’t make that mistake because you’re a bad person, or because it just happened, or because you’re stupid, or because you’re broken, or because you’re evil, or because you have an anger problem that you can’t seem to address by squashing it. If that is you, please, please go and watch my video on anger releases. So, those aren’t the reasons why they happen; those are the reasons that we want to jump to. “I just did this because I’m weak, and I’m stupid, and I have no willpower, and I’m a horrible person.” All of these different justifications, none of them are the truth. When you hit upon the truth, it sets you free. So, if something that you’ve come up with doesn’t set you free, it’s not your truth. What you want to assume is, you want to kind of look at yourself through the eyes of compassion. Compassion is acceptance without judgment.

Why getting triggered can make us feel bad

So, suspend your judgment for one minute. Suspend your judgment, because if you’re blaming yourself, if you’re not forgiving yourself, there’s a lot of judgment. So, suspend your judgment just for a minute, pretend that you’re looking at someone else; someone that you love, someone that you really, really, really love a lot. Who could not do anything so wrong, that you would never love them anymore. Pretend that you’re looking at them. Run it through that filter and give yourself the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, you had a really valid reason for reacting the way that you did. Now, maybe that reason would no longer seem valid to you today; that is possible, but at the time it was valid. Now, that reason may not have been conscious, that is, probably, pretty much guaranteed to be true; but it doesn’t mean that you didn’t have a reason.

So, what happens is that we get triggered by something. Now, we often get triggered by things, that are unknown to us. We get triggered by people, and they don’t even know that they triggered us, because to them it’s not a trigger. Somebody says something, somebody does something, some circumstance has unfolded (again, not by accident), to trigger you, and in that trigger, now you have started to feel bad. What’s happening in that moment is, actually, the thing that you’re wanting to take a look at. There’s a part of you that is holding onto an old belief, a limiting belief, something that is not serving you anymore. But, a part of you believes that this is going to cause you great pain, if you were to look at it. Maybe it’s a vulnerable part of you, and other people are definitely going to attack you, whatever. But there’s a belief in there that says, “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t; don’t go there!” And so, you develop defensive mechanisms.  Defensive mechanisms come up, and go, “Hey! No.” And, they’re usually the ones that bust out and say something.  It is a defensive mode. It might look offensive, as if you’re going on the offense. You’re trying to push people away, but really, it is a defensive thing. You’re defending yourself, even if the other person, and even if you yourself, don’t even know what you’re defending yourself from. Even if it’s absolutely not logical, these things never are. It’s like there’s a wounded animal inside you that has just been threatened and just lashed out, because it was scared and threatened. Just like a wounded animal would.

Does that make the wounded animal bad? No! Can we understand if we were to see the wound? You see a cat, or a dog, with a wounded paw, and there’s blood, and you’re like, “Oh God, that’s got to be painful.” And you try to go near them, and like, no, no, no, no; no. They bark, or they hiss, or whatever. Would you not understand that; would you not be able to have compassion for that wounded animal? Or, would you go, “Well, if you don’t want my help.” Probably not, most of us wouldn’t do that. We would be like, “It’s ok. Its ok, I’m going to wait until you trust me. We’re going to do this together; I’m going to help you.” You would have compassion and empathy for that wounded animal. So, you want to bring that same compassion and empathy to yourself. So, you understand that there’s a wounded part of you that lashed out, out of fear and pain. And, that wounded part of you, can cause you to do all kinds of things. It can cause you to do things like, even stealing, or things that you even consciously know are not good things. It isn’t just about putting your fist through a wall, or saying something mean to someone that you love, it can cause you to take bad actions, where you’re thinking, “Why am I doing this?”

Actions are a stage 5 manifestation

This is also what happens when you find yourself, despite what you really want to do, despite your best efforts, at 3 o’clock in the morning, you open up the refrigerator and you’re eating your cheesecake that was supposed to be for a party tomorrow, or whatever. And you end up scarfing it down, because you just can’t seem to help yourself. And the thing is, you can’t help yourself. Because actions are a manifestation, and they’re a stage 5 manifestation. Which means they come at the end of a progression of manifestation. And, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll put a link in the description about The Progression of Manifestation and what that is; how manifestations actually become physical. But for now, actions, your actions included, are a stage 5 manifestation; they come at the end of this cycle. So, you get some energy going, and it starts to progress, and it starts to grow. At the end of that, once there’s already a lot of momentum going, it causes you to take action. So, when you’re just trying to suppress the action, “I should shut up; I shouldn’t do that.” It doesn’t work; it doesn’t work. You have to start earlier in the progression. Again, trying to change your reality through action, is a little bit like trying to get healthy by putting vitamins in your poop. It’s too late, you need to start earlier.

So, what you actually want to look at is, what got triggered. That original pain; you want to look for that original pain. You want to sit with that idea, you want to dissect it. You don’t just want to push all that away and go, “Well, that was bad, I was wrong. I’m a bad person, I did a bad thing, and I should just feel guilty for the rest of my life.” Actually, look at what really happened. What were you really feeling? Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Why did you react that way? What were you really reacting to?  Because when you find that, you forgive yourself. It’s just like seeing the wounded animal. The wounded animal is barking, hissing, lashing out, and then you realize, “Oh! Their paw’s broken.” Would you still feel badly about that? Or would you go, “Oh! That’s totally understandable. I would have done the same thing.” That’s what happens. You start to understand why you did what you did, and then you can learn from that. And you can release that, so that you don’t have the same defensive reaction again.

Self-forgiveness is not carte blanche to hurt other people

I know, whenever I talk about this topic of self-forgiveness, and letting ourselves off the hook, there’s always going to be a few people out there who say, “Well, that’s just like giving everyone carte blanche, to do whatever they want. There’s going to people out there who clearly want to hurt others.” (That’s actually not true; nobody really wants to hurt others. Yeah)? “But people who want to hurt others, who are going to go out and use this as an excuse, as a carte blanche to go, well, I don’t actually have to feel bad about anything. I can just pretend that I was triggered by something, and I never have to take responsibly for hurting anyone ever again.”

First of all, anybody who would think like that, would probably not make it to this blog. Those kinds of people, don’t tend to attract this kind of information to them. But also, very few people actually think like that. We have this conception that there’s people out there who are just crazy, and who think like that. But very few people actually think like that. Some people pretend to think like that, but don’t actually think like that. And very few people in the world, outside of sociopaths and psychopaths, actually really get pleasure from harming others. They might feel a little bit more empowered by getting control over others, but that’s not quite the same as being a total sadist.

Actually, most people when they hurt others, do it because they don’t think that there’s any other way to get what they want  to get. It does happen that you bump up against that a little bit, and you have a choice to make. And often, you make the only choice you feel like you can. It’s the less powerless choice. And then, you want to judge yourself in hindsight. Because in hindsight you see more choices that you could have made, but you didn’t know that at the time.

Bottom Line

So, don’t look at yourself through the eyes of the hindsight goggles. You want to look at what you actually felt at the time. But again, this isn’t a carte blanche, because most people don’t actually want to hurt others. But also, it’s not a carte blanche because I’m not talking about just harming others and going, “Well, I must have been triggered.” I’m talking about using it as an opportunity, to actually take a look at what was really going on and shifting out of that. Because, as you do that, you’re going to have these experiences less, and less, and less, and less; because you’re actually learning from them. You’re actually shifting the underlying energy. You’re healing the wounded part of yourself that needs these defensive mechanisms. And then the defensive mechanisms can go away, they can just fall away.

This is actually ultimate responsibility, rather than shirking responsibility. When you find that underlying reason, when you find the reason why you did what you did, you will be able to step into forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t actually an emotion, it is the LACK of the beating up on yourself. It is the lack of using something as an excuse to beat up on yourself; to feel badly about yourself, to feel guilty, and to feel ashamed.

So, I hope that this video was useful for you, and that you learned something. Why not tell me, below in the comments, what you thought about it, and what kind of aha moments did you get from this. Have you forgiven yourself for something in the past? Or do you need to forgive yourself for something now? And, maybe try doing what I just said, and see how far you get, and let us know in the comments.

These videos are often inspired by me seeing questions in comments, and via emails and the contact form on the blog. So, if you have a question you’d like me to answer in a video, like this, go ahead and let me know. I read all of the comments, even if I can’t respond to them all, myself. I read every single one, because I want to know how you guys are doing; and that is my crack!!

Alright, until next week, sending you, big, smooshy, smooshy, smooshy, happy shiny puppy hugs. And thank you, for bringing your light to the world.