As we head into the end of the year, slowing down, wrapping things up – both literally and figuratively – we also reflect on the year gone by.
Maybe you are taking note of what you are bringing with you into 2024 or determining what to leave behind in 2023. Within these reflections, perhaps you are re-evaluating some of your relationships, deciding who to bring closer and who to put some distance between.
One of the exercises that I think is super helpful is clearing the slate of all the things perhaps that didn’t go well this year and celebrating all of the things that did! We don’t spend enough time celebrating our wins, our successes and our accomplishments. It’s so important to take the time to do that so that we focus on the positive and provide evidence to our mind that we can do the hard things, we can grow, create, achieve and expand despite the challenges that we may have experienced.
Spend a little time writing down the list of things that you’re grateful for, what you accomplished and achieved. This may prove more difficult as, we tend to beat ourselves up more for the things we didn’t accomplish, the things we did or didn’t do that held us back, rather than taking note of what we have accomplished, howe we have grown, etc rather than celebrating our achievements. Therefore, it’s important to also write down all the things that didn’t go well, perhaps the mistakes we made, the regrets we have and what we didn’t accomplish so that we can FORGIVE ourselves for it.
Or perhaps maybe you’re holding a grudge towards someone that betrayed you, hurt you, or disappointed you this year. Carrying these resentments and regrets forward leaks our energy into things we cannot change. It's only when we acknowledge, accept, feel our emotions, and forgive ourselves and others that we can move forward feeling lighter, happier, and healthier.
Now If self-forgiveness is foreign to you and you’re not sure where to begin, you're not alone. Many of us feel that way because it's not something we are used to giving ourselves. Let’s dive deeper.
Imagine you are a mirror. Every time someone hurts you, they leave a little crack. You also hurt yourself every time you don't trust, love, accept, or value yourself or even when you allow someone else to mistreat you. I'm not saying this to shame you. We all betray ourselves when we act inauthentically, when we accept breadcrumbs or when we doubt ourselves. We end up with little cracks in the mirror of our being, and in toxic relationships, you may feel shattered at some point.
So what can you do? You may look around at all the broken shards of glass lying on the floor, inspecting each one to try to understand what happened, how it happened, who was at fault, etc. Focusing on all of the details isn’t necessarily helpful (and I’ll caveat by saying that yes, of course, it is important to understand your trauma but harping on all the details and specifics of every incident is not helpful. It keeps you stuck in a narrative that you are trying to recover from, reliving it and obsessing over it, and that won’t help you heal. All you can do, is pick up the pieces and, one by one, try to put yourself back together. They may not all go back in the same place or fit together the same way, and that's okay. You are still whole.
This reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where they use gold to put back pieces of broken pottery together. It serves as a metaphor for embracing your flaws and imperfections, all the past experiences, growth, and healing that have made you who you are today. All of these things make you even more beautiful as you now reflect back all the wisdom you have learned, the growth you’ve experienced and the light that can now shine through!
With this in mind, you can forgive yourself for actions that kept you in unhealthy situations, where you self-abandoned out of fear. When you view things you're not proud of through a trauma-informed lens, understanding the core wounds you were acting from, you can cultivate self-forgiveness, self-empathy, self-love, and self-acceptance.
I am going to share a story of one of my clients. This story is being shared with permission; however, all personal details have been changed to protect their identity because it is deeply personal. We are going to call my client, Maria.
Maria had been married for nearly 15 years when she realized that she was in a toxic relationship. Her relationship had its ups and downs but about 10 yeas into the marriage, Maria fell into something that was analogous to depression. She was never formally diagnosed, but suffice it to say, that she was deeply unhappy, lost her motivation in her day to day and struggled to find joy, even in the moments that typically would be associated with joy like family vacations, Christmas, birthdays etc.
She started questioning her relationship and began to recognize that she and her partner were falling into unhealthy patterns where they would have these mind-spinning and mind-numbing arguments that left her feeling like she was never heard or understood and would go continually unresolved. She felt like a scapegoat. Everything was always her fault and when she tried to defend herself, she would get shamed and blamed, making her feel so terrible that she would walk away wondering how they got to this point. She started questioning everything wondering – was it her fault? Was she being selfish? Was she making things harder? Was there something she could do to make things better? She hated that every argument ended without any kind of resolution.
Every time she tried to broach the topics that went unresolved with her partner, she was met with resistance. It was never a good time – he was either tired or too stressed out or she was being “ too emotional”, “too sensitive” or “ruining a nice day/weekend, etc” whenever she tried to bring up their issues. Eventually, she stopped trying. She stopped communicating and decided to try his tactic of just sweeping things under the rug, hoping somehow that things would get better. Of course, it only got worse.
Her partner was becoming increasingly critical of everything Maria did. He would belittle her in front of their children and make her feel insignificant and unappreciated. It wasn’t until her children started repeating the terrible things their father said back to her that she realized things were bad and really unhealthy. There had been other signs and red flags along the way, but if Maria was good at anything, she was really good at making excuses and minimizing the red flags. It’s what kept her in the unhappy marriage for so long.
Maria decided she had to do something to fix whatever was broken in her relationship. She began consuming relationship podcasts and reading books to make sense of what was actually happening in her marriage and what she could do to make things better. During her search for answers, she finally realized that what she was experiencing was narcissistic abuse.
It was around this time when Maria reached out to me. She had come across a masterclass I had taught about how to identify and recover from narcissistic abuse. After she watched the replay, she immediately couldn’t believe how it explained and validated so much of what she had experienced. She recognized that she was, in fact codependent.
In one of our more recent sessions, I walked Maria through the Shattered Mirror metaphor and
then encouraged her to take 10 minutes to write down all the things that she was angry at herself for, all the things that left her feeling some sort of shame, resentment or emotional charge towards. She wrote down a series of self- transgressions including – not having seen the red flags sooner, for accepting treatment that robbed her of her self-esteem, for allowing her husband to belittle her for as long as he did, for taking sole responsibility for making her marriage work and beating herself up when it didn’t, for allowing her toxic relationship to impact her kids by modeling unhealthy love.
The list went on and on. She felt a little overwhelmed once she was done writing. We did some somatic practices to help her stay connected to her body so she didn’t shut down from the overwhelm, and then I asked her to write down another list of all the things she has achieved and accomplished this year, including all the ways she’s grown and what she’s discovered about herself as a result.
When she was done, I asked her how she felt about what she had written and the exercise of making the 2 lists. She then made the connection I was hoping for – she realized that, she had to begin using the “GOLD” to put herself back together and feel whole again. She realized that the way to do this is by FORGIVING but the only person she had to forgive - was herself!
And then she asked how!? Which I totally expected because after all, as I said most of us aren’t familiar with practicing self-forgiveness. We often don’t feel worthy of our own forgiveness.
SO, we did a little Ho’oponopono ritual (which is a traditional shamanic Hawaiian practice of forgiveness.) where Maria read each item on her list out loud and repeated the Hawaiian mantra of: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you, and then crossed it off her list.
I then asked her to write down a list of all the things she accomplished and achieved this year as well as all the ways she’s grown and the person she’s become!
In the end, she was able to see that she didn’t know what she didn’t know. She wasn’t aware of what her vulnerabilities and insecurities were, so she could see now why she attracted people into her life that took advantage of her. She was also able to see how far she has come in the last 8 months. She realized that she had to have the experiences she had, in order to WAKE UP (in her words) and become a more healed version of WHO she really is. She realized that she didn’t know any better and that she had been accepting breadcrumbs because that was what she was used to from childhood, growing up with a parent who never met her emotional needs
Now notice that we didn’t address forgiving her husband. In time, Maria may choose to forgive him (and she can use the same ritual) but for her overall sense of peace and contentment, forgiving herself was much more important. When you forgive yourself, you release yourself from the shame, guilt and blame that you have been self-inflicting. Sidenote: You may never forgive someone for abusing you and that’s okay.
While forgiving someone is not excusing them for their behavior, it is accepting them for who they are and recognizing that they may never change and perhaps that they, too, have been acting from their deep wounds and insecurities, just that it was in a way that was abusive and hurtful. Please know that it can be really hard to forgive someone who has hurt you so deeply, so please don’t feel that it’s necessary or required for you to heal, recover and move on. In time, you may forgive them, but that doesn’t mean you have to forget what they did either.
I hope you’ll try this forgiveness ritual for yourself so that you can self-forgive and find more peace, grace, compassion and joy. Remember, you are WHOLE and while your past experiences may have caused some cracks and fractures, you are filling them with gold like the art of Kintsugi when you learn to self-forgive, accept and love yourself despite your past experiences, mistakes, transgressions and flaws.
As always, I hope this helps. To your healing and recovery, with love and healing light. Until next week, be well!
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