How Guilt Sidetracks Forgiveness
Have you ever stopped to notice the way guilt gets in between you and forgiving yourself? Plenty of people struggle to let themselves off the hook when they feel guilty about something they did. That weight can be enormous, and it keeps them stuck, unable to move on. A lot of us carry the belief that being forgiven means the slate has to be scrubbed clean and the whole thing erased from memory. The logic follows: if I can't forgive myself and forget it happened, why would anyone else bother forgiving me?
For certain people, simply admitting they may have done something wrong feels like it wrecks their sense of worth. They become their own harshest judge, and conceding a mistake can be nearly self-annihilating. Over years spent doing psychotherapy, and years spent in it myself, I've seen that the things hardest to say out loud are the things we can't stop feeling guilty about. Therapy frequently hits a wall right at the point where one of those buried issues finally needs to surface.
Some people will quietly confess that they are, in private, their own worst critic. From there a strange expectation grows: since they punish themselves so thoroughly, others ought to reassure them that what they did wasn't really that bad. When that reassurance doesn't come, or isn't honest, the work stalls. The ache of their own remorse runs so deep that they assume no one could possibly ask them to take the next step and name what they did, thought, or said as genuinely wrong. The question underneath is always the same: how could anyone love me after that, when I can't even forgive or love myself?
There's something worse that can happen. To unconsciously prove the thing wasn't so terrible, a person sometimes keeps right on doing it, sinking deeper and deeper into guilt and self-blame with each repetition. Sexual harassment works this way. The person doing it can't picture himself as a careless creep, so his behavior never changes. It was only a joke, he tells himself, or the woman invited it by how she acted or dressed. What he misses is that responsibility lands with him regardless of who the other person is or what they do. And really, he's only reacting to his own perception of her, which may be badly distorted to begin with.
No one walking around on this planet is spotless and purely self-giving. (Christ is the exception, and he's present in spirit, not in the flesh the way the rest of us are.) Mother Teresa owned up to her own faults and never stopped working on them. I'd bet Pope Francis would say roughly the same about himself.
What breaks the cycle is forgiving yourself. Once that happens, the compulsion to repeat the behavior runs out of fuel. It also softens you toward other people, because you start to see that in certain ways you're no different from them. In Christianity, God extends forgiveness for people's sins, yet many refuse to take it, since accepting it would mean admitting they actually did something wrong. The forgiveness is offered at no cost. Whether you accept it is up to you.