Self-Love Starts with Self-Forgiveness

In this series, we’ve been focusing on self-love and its importance. You now understand the ways in which loving yourself can dramatically improve your life. You’ve learned ways to silence your inner naysayer and to embrace self-love. In today’s post, I want to focus on one of the most important components of self-love, and that’s forgiving yourself. Self-love starts with self-forgiveness. Forgiving yourself is a process that requires a great deal of introspection.
 
Fortunately, you’ve already done a great deal of the work throughout this challenge. You’ve worked to learn to recognize and manage your inner critic. You’ve focused on self-awareness and confidence. You understand that having a sense of purpose is important to cultivating love for yourself. These lessons and so many more have helped to prepare you for the challenge of learning self-forgiveness. Read on to discover what it truly means to forgive yourself, why it matters, and how to make it happen.
 
About Self-Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a concept that is difficult. Letting go of anger, hurt, and resentment caused by others can take years. It’s often even harder to forgive yourself, but it’s also necessary. Self-forgiveness involves recognizing past actions that may have been harmful and accepting responsibility for them. It also requires moving on and getting past the negative emotions that can come with regret. Letting go is a requirement of self-forgiveness.
 
Why It’s Important
Self-forgiveness and moving on is a requirement for healing. You can’t begin to feel better and to live in healthy ways if you’re stuck in negative emotions surrounding past events. You deserve forgiveness as much as anyone else – in fact, even more so. You know your true nature and your motivations. You understand the reasons for your errors, and you understand how hard you’re working to improve yourself. Forgiving yourself lets you know you’re worthy of great things. It’s freeing. You can go on to do better and be better once you’ve truly forgiven yourself for your past. You need to forgive yourself before you can fully love yourself.
 
How to Forgive Yourself
You can begin to forgive yourself by showing yourself the same compassion you would show others. Forgiving yourself doesn’t mean that what you did was okay. It simply requires you to understand that you’re a different person now, that you’ve learned, and that you’re ready to do better. Allow yourself the compassion and the grace to do that. Also, go easy on yourself. Understand that self-forgiveness won’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes time. Recognize the work that you’re doing to improve. This can go a long way toward helping you to forgive.
 
Self-forgiveness is a major part of loving yourself. Hopefully, you now understand just what that means, why it matters, and how to work toward making it happen. Once you begin to forgive yourself, you’ll find that love comes more easily.

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