Happy New Year! Welcome to 2019! Through our Instagram page, we shared two of our new year’s resolutions with you:
1) Make myself a higher priority.
2) Forgive myself for my past.
In this blog post we’re going to focus more on forgiving yourself for past.
Often, we set new year’s resolution or plan to make changes to our lives and they inevitably fail. We will go into more depth about actual goal setting in a later blog post this month. In this blog post, we want to focus on the foundation of the goals we set.
Often, the goals we have set are unrealistic especially in comparison to our current behavior. For example:
Person: “My resolution is to go to the gym five days a week and work out for one hour each time”.
Me: “How often are you going to the gym now? How long do you currently work out?”
Person: “I do not go to the gym at all right now.”
This is not to say that you should not make a resolution of going to the gym; however, it is unrealistic that you would be able to go from zero hours of working out to five hours a week of working out. A more realistic goal would be to try to workout 30 minutes a week and increase once you have mastered that goal. However, this is not often what happens. We often set unrealistic goals and then we beat ourselves up and call ourselves a failure for not being able to meet the unrealistic standard with which we began.
I often tell my clients that people have a tendency to treat ourselves horribly. We tell ourselves mean things, punish ourselves, and expect ourselves to be perfect despite how horribly we treat ourselves. In many ways, we treat ourselves in a way that we would never allow someone else to treat us. Why?
I do not pretend to have all of the answers, but what I can say is that it is easy to be mean to ourselves. Usually, other people are not privy to our internal dialogue. There is no one to referee our statements to ourselves. I often ask people to think about their body as a separate person (a little odd put go with me here).
Imagine your body was a separate person with their own voice. What would your body say back to you?
Would your body tell you that your expectations are unrealistic? Would it tell you that it wished you were nicer? Would it want you to be more patient? More understanding?
As it relates to our past, we often have a list of things that we “should have”, “could have”, and “would have” done differently. We often beat ourselves up for mistakes that we have made in the past. While there are often lessons to be learned from the past, we can also blame ourselves for things that we could never have known. Just because hindsight is 20/20 does not mean that you could have seen all of the warning signs in real time. It is easier to find the red flags when you know that there are red flags. It is harder to know if something is a red flag in real time.
I often encourage clients to have a kind and realistic approach to themselves in the present and in the past. I think it is important to have both perspectives when examining yourself and your thoughts. I feel it is one of the healthiest ways to address oneself and one’s past. Here are the steps:
Forgive Yourself: Understand that the past is the past. You can learn from it, but you cannot change it. Beating yourself up for things that you should/could/would have done differently will not help you move forward. It is more likely to keep you stuck in a place of anger/resentment. Imagine that you made the decision you made with the best information you had at the time. It is possible that you would have made a different decision with different information, but that is irrelevant. You made the decision. You are wiser now.
Be Kind to Yourself: Once you have come to a level of acceptance and forgiveness about the decisions you have made in the past. Stop beating yourself up about it. This does not mean that you absolve yourself of all responsibility for past actions, that is not what we are talking about. This means that you recognize your actions, recognize your responsibility, and understand what to do about it going forward. You can do this without beating yourself up and talking down to yourself. Accept that it happened and all you can do is make adjustments in the future.
Be Realistic:This is often the most difficult step as it is difficult to determine what a realistic response/reaction would be especially when we have a tendency to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves. I often tell clients to imagine a friend came to them with this exact same scenario. What would you tell that person? Does what you would tell that person match what you would tell yourself? Often, we are able to give great advice to other people but struggle to take our own advice. The gap can come from the unrealistic expectations we place upon ourselves. We can understand realistic and rational limitations of other people; however, we struggle to recognize realistic and rational expectations of ourselves. This last step may be difficult but making the effort to “practice what you preach” can help you work on setting more realistic expectations for yourself.
What would it look like for you to forgive yourself for your past?
What would it look like for you to be kinder to yourself?
What would it look like for you to be more realistic about the standards and expectations you set for yourself?
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