It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.

We need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn't do. All the things we should have done. You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.

In order to truly forgive oneself, one must either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that one’s behavior was wrong and accept responsibility or blame for such behavior. Without these elements, self-forgiveness is irrelevant and pseudo self-forgiveness becomes likely.

It is important that we forgive ourselves for making mistakes. We need to learn from our errors and move on.

You will forgive because you love yourself so much that you don’t want to keep hurting yourself for whatever happened. Whatever happened is done and cannot be changed. And we have to accept that and keep going with our life. — Don Miguel Ruiz

order to truly forgive oneself, one must either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge that one’s behavior was wrong and accept responsibility or blame for such behavior.

Forgiveness is the only way to heal ourselves and to be free from the past. Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound to the chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness, that person will be our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberator.

Forgive yourself.

We must forgive those we feel have wronged us, not because they deserve to be forgiven but because we love ourselves so much we don't want to keep paying for the injustice...when someone can touch a wound and it no longer hurts you then you know you have truly forgiven.

We must forgive those we feel have wronged us, not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because we love ourselves so much we don’t want to keep paying for the injustice.

You must forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did to you is unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer and hurt yourself every time you remember what they did to you. It doesn’t matter what others did to you, you are going to forgive them because you don’t want to feel sick all the time. Forgiveness is for your own mental healing. You will forgive because you feel compassion for yourself. Forgiveness is an act of self-love.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, but we cannot move forward if we're still holding onto the pain of that past and wishing it was something else. All of us who have been broken and scarred by trauma have the chance to turn those experiences into what Dr Perry and I have been talking about: Post Traumatic Wisdom.

Forgive yourself. Forgive them. Step out of your history and into the path of your future. My friend, the poet Mark Nepo says that the pain was necessary in order to know the truth. But we don't have to keep the pain alive in order to keep the truth alive. I made peace with my mother when I stopped comparing her to the mother I wished I had, when I stopped clinging to what should or could have been and turned to what was and what could be.

Because what I know for sure, is that everything that has happened to you, was also happening for you, and all that time, in all of those moments, you were building strength. Strength times strength times strength equals power. What happened to you can be your power.

Forgiveness is all about taking care of you, not the person you need to forgive. It’s about putting your desire to feel good before your desire to be right. It’s about taking responsibility for your own happiness instead of pretending it’s in somebody else’s hands. It’s about owning your power by giving all your anger, resentment, and hurt the heave-ho.