Forgiving Yourself

 When life falls apart—through divorce, betrayal, loss, or a devastating curveball—we often carry a quiet, heavy guilt. Not because others blame us… but because we do.
“I should have known.”
“I should have seen the signs.”
“If only I had done something different…”

In this episode, we’re talking about the hidden burden of self-blame and why forgiving yourself is a crucial step in true healing. Letting go of that internal guilt isn’t denial—it’s freedom. And without it, we stay stuck in the past instead of growing into what’s next.

Transcript

Hello, my name is Tiffany, and welcome to the podcast, Working on Amazing. This is a podcast where we talk about the work that it takes to rebuild an amazing life. Now on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about forgiving yourself.

And that might sound a little odd, but here's the thing, when life falls apart, whether it's through divorce, betrayal, the loss of a loved one, or any other devastating curveball, we often carry a quiet, but very heavy guilt.

And it's not because other people blame us, it's because we do. We say things like, I should have known, I should have seen this coming. If only I had done something different.

This isn't something we talk about. It's something we hold very quietly, but we also hold it heavily. And it can be a barrier towards growth and healing, just the self guilt and the self blame.

And so today, I want to talk about that burden that we often carry, and why forgiving yourself is a crucial step to healing, and letting go of that internal guilt isn't about denial, it's about freedom.

Without it, we stay stuck in the past instead of growing into what's next, all right?

1:41

Understanding Self-Blame

So, there is a true silent way of self blame that often sneaks in after trauma.

When something ends badly, like I said, whether it's divorce or death, if it's betrayal, loss, any major life change, we don't just grieve what happened, we turn inward and we start interrogating ourselves.

Our mind replays what had happened over and over and over. You know this, your mind has replayed the worst experiences in your life over and over again. And why do we do that?

We do that because we're trying to feel safe again. We feel like if we can replay it and catch where we went wrong, then we can prevent that from happening again. It's almost like we're trying to maintain control.

If we feel guilty about what happened, if it was my fault, then I could have prevented it, and I can control what will happen in the future. Does that line of thought make sense to you?

Sometimes we put a lot of guilt on ourselves, and it really is an odd way of us trying to stay in control. Because if it's your fault, you can change what happens next time. You can't control maybe always other people, you can't control other things.

But guilt oftentimes is a way that we maintain some sort of control. And all I want to tell you is that most of the time, you really weren't even operating under the full picture as you know it today. What you knew then isn't what you know now.

You were acting on limited information. You were maybe acting on emotional attachment, hope, trust, love. You were acting on what you knew at the time.

It's so easy to feel guilty over something that we had, truly in reality, no control over. I was in an auto accident when I was 16, and I still to this day can struggle with guilt over that. It wasn't my fault.

I wasn't even driving. I was the passenger in the back seat. There was nothing about that.

It was under my control, and you can look at me and tell me that, but I could probably look at you and tell you what you're feeling guilty over is just as obvious. Sometimes, we've got to talk about it in order to do something about it.

4:41

Deconstructing Blame

Why are we so hard on ourselves? That's a good question. So we often expect perfection from ourselves in impossible situations.

Women especially are conditioned to be emotional managers of relationships. So when something breaks, we just assume that it's our fault. We have that inner critic.

I don't know if you have it, but I certainly have an inner critic who's always criticizing everything I do. But hindsight, when you see something after it's happened, it creates the illusion that the signs were obvious. But that is an illusion.

Just because you see it from hindsight doesn't mean you could have seen it from where you were before it happened. Okay?

So, when we feel guilty about something, like we should have seen the signs, and we're replaying these negative events, it's almost like shame feels productive.

Because if we analyze it enough, and we berate ourselves enough, we won't make that same mistake in the future. But let me tell you, shame is not productive. It actually paralyzes growth.

We often confuse responsibility with blame. And blame and shame, that isn't going to help move forward. Okay?

You didn't ignore red flags. I don't know what happened to you. I don't know if it was something like an auto accident, or if it was something like my husband cheated on me.

I look at that, and I think I should have seen the signs. I blame myself for a thousand things. There are a number of ways we blame ourselves when something negative happens.

But I'm here to tell you, you didn't ignore the red flags. You interpreted them through love, loyalty, hope, the desire to make things work. There was no red flag to get in the car that day when I was 16.

There was no red flag. But I look back now and say, well, because so-and-so called and said such and such, I really shouldn't have gone. And I act like I should have known something that there's no way I could have known back then.

It gets even more complicated when you put it in the context of a relationship, doesn't it?

7:30

Defining Self-Forgiveness

Self-forgiveness, I think, is often misunderstood. It's not saying that what happened didn't matter. If I forgive myself, it's not saying that betrayal didn't matter or it doesn't hurt.

It's saying it mattered, but I'm not going to destroy myself over it. Forgiveness is about releasing ongoing self-punishment. It's choosing compassion for yourself over condemnation.

It's acknowledging that you're a human. Yeah, I didn't do everything right. I mean, especially if you go back to like a relational context.

And when my marriage broke down, of course, there were things I did wrong. Of course, 100%. But I'm human, and that's OK.

It's separating who you are from what happened to you. OK, forgiveness, self-forgiveness doesn't erase accountability, but it ends that emotional self-abuse.

It means you stop requiring yourself to suffer forever for something that you've already lost. Without self-forgiveness, healing stays incomplete. You can move on externally, but you internally stay tied to the trauma through shame.

All right, so I can look like I've moved on, but if I haven't forgiven myself, I'm staying tied to trauma through shame. Guilt keeps your nervous system stuck in survival mode.

So every time you replay that really horrible conversation, that really negative event, that really bad thing that happened to you, your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. That's not how to grow and move on.

That's not how to build an amazing life. We've got to let it go, and guilt keeps us stuck there. Growth requires you to be emotionally safe.

If you're in survival mode, which guilt keeps you in, you're going to have trouble growing. You've got to feel safe in order to grow. And safety means you've got to forgive yourself.

You've got to let go of that guilt. Unforgiveness and self-blame blocks joy. It blocks intimacy.

It blocks self-confidence. It really does hinder. It doesn't do any good.

And I know we can lie to ourselves and think that blaming ourselves is somehow helpful. I've played those mental gymnastics myself. I understand.

But it isn't helping you. It's hindering you, and it's keeping you from joy and confidence. And it's a fulfilling life.

Forgiving yourself is one of the things that allows you to trust yourself again. After a big betrayal, after a major trauma, after a big loss, it can be hard to trust yourself again.

Do you trust yourself to make a decision, or will things go horrifically wrong like they did? Can you trust yourself?

And one of the ways we learn to trust ourselves is through forgiving ourselves, stopping blaming ourselves, letting go of that guilt and that shame.

11:14

Practicing Self-Forgiveness

You can't build a new life on the foundation of self-contempt. Self-forgiveness is the bridge between who you were and who you are becoming, all right? So, how do you begin to forgive yourself?

Well, number one, I think it's good to name your guilt out loud. Most of the time, we carry this guilt quietly. We don't say a word to anybody else about the guilt we carry.

It's something that happens with traumatic events. It's something that happens with major life transitions. But it's not something we talk about.

So, name it out loud. What are you actually blaming yourself for? I blamed myself for not being good enough.

I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't attractive enough. Therefore, my husband had to cheat on me.

It was my fault. That's what I thought. And when I said it out loud, when I acknowledged it, when I called it what it was, I thought, that's kind of ridiculous.

But as long as I kept it quiet and held it in my heart, it had power over me. When I said it out loud and said, no, no, no, it's not my fault what his decision was, he cheated on me. I didn't do that.

I didn't cause that. It was easier to tackle and address. It didn't make it go away like a magic eraser, but it was easier to identify.

It was easier to deal with. What are you feeling guilty for? Take a minute.

Say it out loud. Name it. Don't hold it quietly.

Mold grows in the dark. Don't hold something internally and not let it out. Let it out.

Put it in the light, even if it's just saying it out loud, even if it's just writing it down. What do you feel guilty for? I also want you to take the time to separate then from now.

So when we look back with the full knowledge of everything that happened, you're like, I should have seen the red flags. I should have seen the signs. And we really give ourselves a lot of guilt and shame.

And blame, right? But what did you really know at the time? You didn't have all this hindsight knowledge.

You only knew what you knew then.

And I want to give you a little bit of love and a little bit of compassion for who you were then, before everything fell apart, before you found everything out, before you knew that the world was going to turn sideways for a little bit.

You were doing your best, you were trying your hardest. And have compassion for who you were then, and don't give who you were then the responsibility of what you know now. There is two versions, right?

There's who you were then, and what you know now. And what you know now, you didn't know then, so you can't blame yourself for that, all right? Maybe you could work on rewriting your story.

Instead of saying, I should have known better, you can say, I did the best I could with what I knew and what I felt at the time. Give yourself a different set of words to repeat.

Because I have repeated to myself in my past, I should have known better. I had to replace that with something that was healthier, right? I did the best I could with what I knew, with what I felt at the time.

I did the best I could, all right? I want you to also practice compassion and self-talk. So the way we berate ourselves, the way we belittle ourselves, you should have known better.

I can't believe you did that. You were such an idiot. Okay.

Would you talk to your daughter that way? What about your best friend? If your best friend came to you and said, I am struggling with this, how would you respond?

If your daughter came to you and said, I feel guilty about this, how would you respond? Talk to yourself the way you would a best friend. Talk to yourself the way you would a daughter.

Give yourself the compassion that you deserve. And you're the only one who can do it. You're the only one who's in control of your inner self-talk.

Talk to yourself with gentleness and compassion. That matters. And one of the last things I would definitely recommend and say is invite God into the process.

Pray about it. God, I have carried this guilt. God is not the god of guilt.

You don't read that once in the Bible. God is not the god of shame, but he is the god of grace. And grace covers a multitude of sins.

Let the god of grace speak in to your situation. Whatever it is you feel guilty about, whatever it is you're carrying, this silent, heavy weight, talk to god about it. What does he say about it?

How does god respond?

17:28

A Journey of Becoming

I just want to say that you don't heal by staying angry at yourself. You heal by setting down that guilt that was never meant to be yours to carry.

Forgiving yourself isn't weakness, it's wisdom, and it's one of the bravest things you will ever do, I promise. If you are a journaler, I am a big journaler, and I feel like this is a journaling kind of topic.

You don't process self-forgiveness in five minutes, in a day, even in a week. This is something that kind of sometimes takes time with. The first part is acknowledging it, and that's a really big step.

But it takes time to process it. I've said before, forgiveness for another person is not a light switch. It's a journey, and it's the same for yourself.

So journaling and writing things down is often a good key part of working through that journey. So I've got a couple of journal prompts for you journalers. You can take them or leave them.

But one journal prompt is, what am I still blaming myself for?

I said it before, name it out loud, write it down, and even though you can name something out loud, generally that's a sentence, maybe two, when you write it, you expand on it, and you really help start to lance that wound, okay?

Write it out, talk yourself through it, walk through, what am I really blaming myself for? What is underneath all of this? Number two, go back through and write down, what did I truly know at the time?

And what did I only learn later? You know, I look back at myself as a young wife and mother, and I'm like, you're such an idiot, why didn't you know he was cheating on you? I mean, hello?

But I didn't know everything back then that I know now. I look at who I was in my 30s, and sometimes I roll my eyes and shake my head, and I give myself so little grace, because I know so much more now than I knew then.

Take the time to divide it out. What did you really know before your life fell apart, before your major traumatic event happened? Are you ascribing responsibility to something you really didn't know?

Hindsight makes it clear. Hindsight always makes everything clear. But what did you really know at the time?

Number three, if it were your best friend, or if it were your daughter in this situation, take a journal entry and just speak to yourself as if you were speaking to your best friend or your daughter. What would you tell them in your situation?

Have a journal entry that's just compassionate, that's just you telling yourself the way you see it as a mother, as a friend.

Not how you see it in your own shoes, living in your own skin, but pull yourself outside and speak as if it were somebody you cared deeply about, as if it were somebody you love. How would you handle it with them?

And the last journal prompt, I would say, is write down what it would look like if you release this guilt today. If you let it go, if you truly release this guilt, what would it look like? Would your life look different?

Would you feel different? Would you walk differently? Would you engage in your relationships differently if you didn't carry this guilt?

I know it's a heavy thing. I know that we feel guilty for things that nobody would ever blame us for. And it's such a personal and internal thing, the way we carry guilt.

And I know that it can't be released in a single podcast. I know that.

But I hope that today, we can start that journey of letting it go, of saying, you know what, I did my best, of stopping the cycle of repeating this negative scenario over and over and over, that we can press pause, make peace, and move forward.

Because the reality is, you are not broken, you are becoming. And forgiving yourself is part of becoming. And if you've listened to this podcast, I just want to say, I'm so proud of you.

You are on a journey. And the journey of self-reflection, of looking at why you feel guilty, or why you're self-blaming, that's not fun, and that's not easy. So I'm proud of you for taking a step on this journey that's ichy, but so worth it.

Growth and healing are on the other side. You are worth it, I promise. If you would like to reach out to me and share some of your story with me, you can find me online, www.workingonamazing.com.

You can also find me on social media. I have a page on most of the platforms, but I do hang out on Facebook the most, and that's just a business page, Working on Amazing. You can find me there, you can drop me a message.

I would truly love to hear from you. This is a journey. This whole process of starting over is a journey.

And I just want to remind you, you really and truly, you are not alone. Thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to talking to you next time.

Bye.