How to Forgive Yourself: 8 Expert-Approved Techniques

Taking care of your mental health includes many things, including learning how to forgive yourself. Almost everyone has moments they can't seem to forgive themselves for that randomly resurface in their mind—the time you said an unkind thing; the time you turned in work riddled with mistakes; or maybe you cheated, lied, or stole.

If these memories taunt you—whether warranted or not—you haven't forgiven yourself yet, and no matter what you did, you should. Here, a mental health expert offers tips and strategies for finally letting go of the actions that haunt you and why self-forgiveness is important for your personal development.

John Delony, PhD, mental health expert, author, and host of The Dr. John Delony Show

The Importance of Self-Forgiveness

Forgiving yourself is important because if you don't, you risk letting these misguided actions redefine your sense of who you are, says mental health expert John Delony, Ph.D. There's a common misconception that refusing to forgive yourself proves you're more sorry, but what it actually does is hold you back, Delony explains.

"We may feel like approaching the world through the worst thing we've done buys us extra grace, but it doesn't. It actually causes us to enter into relationships in a down position. Perhaps more importantly, choosing not to forgive yourself is really choosing to live life less joyfully," Delony notes. From furthering your social and emotional development to improving interpersonal relationships, here are some reasons to forgive yourself.

Improved Self Esteem

By forgiving yourself, you can feel less guilt or shame about the action. In turn, this releases some of the emotional burden and negativity that replays in your mind. Continual self-critical thoughts like blame or guilt weigh heavily on your self-esteem. Reducing such thoughts and learning from mistakes can help you feel better about yourself and your worth.

Better Mental Health

Persistent feelings of self-blame can negatively affect your mental health, possibly leading (or adding) to anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions. Forgiving yourself encourages better overall well-being.

Closer Relationships

By being self-compassionate and forgiving yourself, you develop empathy and compassion for others and decrease judgmental tendencies. This leads to better relationships as you recognize that humans are not perfect and everyone makes mistakes.

Increased Productivity

Because failing to forgive ourselves for mistakes affects our emotional and mental well-being, our productivity is also affected. By accepting and learning from mistakes, and forgiving ourselves, we can be more productive at work and daily life.

Tips on How to Forgive Yourself

Now that you know why forgiving yourself is important and how it can help your daily life and mental well-being, try some of these strategies for achieving self-forgiveness.

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Embrace Your Feelings

How you feel is a normal part of the healing process, but you have to recognize and identify your emotions. While you may want to ignore the feelings and hope they go away, chances are they will resurface. Truly moving on means acknowledging your feelings, processing them, and accepting why you feel that way.

The important thing, however, is to not linger on them. You don't have to continue to feel bad. Once you determine what makes you feel a certain way, you'll need to come to terms with it so you can forgive yourself and feel better.

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Disconnect the Mistake From Your Identity

If you're beating yourself up for doing something wrong, and then beating yourself up for beating yourself up, you're never going to feel better. Instead, acknowledge that your guilt did serve a purpose, but that purpose isn't torturing yourself for eternity.

"Your brain has a vested interest in making sure at all times that you remember you're a person capable of hurting somebody so that you never do it again," Delony explains. This is why these mistakes feel so overwhelming to us—we don't want to make them again, so our brains harp on them to create a constant warning signal.

But if you can recognize that you haven't done it again and that the memory is serving its purpose, you can begin to stop obsessing. "It's hard because your body has such a vested interest in you not forgetting what you did," says Delony. "You have to decide: This is a thing that happened, not who I am." Rather than carrying around the fear you'll mess up again as a constant threat, suggests Delony, turn it into wisdom: I learned my lesson, and I won't do that again.

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Write Down Your Thoughts

Journaling is a powerful tool for all kinds of psychological healing, but it can be especially helpful here. "One of the things I suggest when someone is struggling with self-forgiveness is to write down their feelings and demand evidence from them," says Delony. "So you could write down, for example, I am a liar, I am not trustworthy. And then you'd look at that and demand evidence."

Ask yourself: Are you truly untrustworthy, or did you just do one untrustworthy thing one time? Explore the answer in your writing by, for example, listing the untrustworthy things you've done. You may find it's a pretty short list, dominated by the memory you haven't forgiven yourself for.

"My guess is, if that idea is still bothering you years later, you are a really trustworthy person [who] got caught up in a situation," Delony notes. Once you see that there isn't proof that you are inherently bad, giving yourself grace for your mistake becomes easier.

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Ask for Forgiveness

Odds are, if you did something bad enough that you haven't forgiven yourself for it, there was probably someone else involved. And part of forgiving yourself is letting the other party or parties know that you know you were in the wrong.

"The only way to feel whole is to be vulnerable and speak up," says Delony. "So if you do something really bad, step one is to say it out loud and take ownership of your role in what happened. And the next part is to ask for forgiveness. And you can't hinge your thoughts on whether you get that forgiveness or not. You don't get to decide what forgiveness looks like."

In other words, the other person or people may not forgive you, and that's OK. You've had a narrative in your head that you were wrong, and you've now let them know that you feel that way. What they do next doesn't have to stop you from forgiving yourself. They are entitled to their feelings, just as you are entitled to stop torturing yourself.

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Learn From Your Mistake

We know everyone makes mistakes in their lives, so forgiving yourself should include learning from such mistakes. Rather than criticizing yourself over and over for the error, you can turn it into a learning opportunity. Ask yourself: What circumstances led me to act in that manner? Examine the situation, what occurred, how you acted (or reacted), and what you can do better in the future.

Remind yourself that you acted based on the knowledge and tools you had at that time. Now, with increased knowledge, you can avoid the same act and improve how you handle a similar event. Knowing that you can do better and will not necessarily repeat the same offense can help you in forgiving yourself.

Verbalize your mistake and what you learned from it. Saying it out loud may help your brain remember the lesson.

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Accept the Consequences

Forgiving yourself means understanding you may have deserved the consequence you faced, but that the punishment doesn't have to weigh on you forever. "You may have been fired because of a lie you told at work. You have to be willing to divorce the consequence from your identity," says Delony.

But in this example, getting fired is a commensurate consequence for lying—you don't have to define yourself as a liar (nor do you have to assume that forgiving yourself means you were in the right). "Does that mean you're always a liar? No, it means you lied one time," Delony notes.

Delony suggests thinking of the consequences as a path to a fresh start: "Here's who I was. Who am I going to be in the future? That is the path to overcome guilt." Once you've laid out a vision for how you'll incorporate what you've learned from your mistake into your future, you'll notice you're less and less hung up on your old mistake.

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Imagine Giving Advice

Many times, it's easier to remove yourself from a situation and imagine it was someone else. If a friend or relative had made the same mistake, what advice would you give them?

You could even act out the situation with a trusted companion if it helps. Ask them to share your mistake as if it were their own while you provide advice on how to forgive themselves. Then, take your own advice and put it into action.

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Talk to a Professional

Forgiving yourself takes time, patience, and effort. But if you've tried several techniques and find you're still struggling with self-forgiveness, perhaps seeking professional help will be beneficial.

Talk to a therapist, counselor, or other mental health expert who can help you work through your thoughts and feelings. They can offer coping mechanisms, steps you can take, and strategies to try that will help you forgive yourself and move on with your life.

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