 How can we practice self-forgiveness? And why does it matter? That's the topic that we're going to be exploring in today's podcast. Let's jump right in. Self-forgiveness is a topic I find myself drawn to today because I haven't been doing it as well as perhaps I might or should just lately. We're going through a bit of a transition in our household at the moment as we move from school-school to homeschool. And as somebody who teaches and talks and researches a lot in the area of emotionally-based school avoidance and has spent many, many countless hours in fact teaching people how to enable their children to stay in school, I found this is slightly challenging transition personally to get my head around because I feel like I failed, if I'm perfectly honest. And I haven't. Objectively I look at it, I'm making the right decision for my daughter and it's the right thing to do, I believe. But it's hard to get over that feeling of failure. And I haven't voiced this until I met with my good friend Carl the other day who's my climbing buddy. If you're listening Carl I don't think you do but if you're listening Carl thank you for being such a good friend and such a great listener. He's my climbing buddy but you know also works in the field so we tend to have some really, really good and deep conversations together when we're climbing. As I've said on so many previous episodes, doing alongside is a really, really great way to get talking and to get past the kind of difficulties of knowing where to go with those conversations and allowing silences to naturally happen and so on and so forth. So we climbed and we talked and yeah I explained to Carl something which perhaps I hadn't quite addressed for myself that I felt like I'd failed. And he picked me up on that and we explored that a little and I've been reflecting on it since. And so hence I'm thinking today about self-forgiveness. It really, really matters and many of my episodes are more about how we can help the children and young people in our care and perhaps this feels a little bit different. But actually this forgiving ourselves, being kind to ourselves, showing self-care and kindness and compassion is actually a gift to our children as well as a gift to ourselves. So I think the first thing to remember when we're thinking about this about self-forgiveness, self-compassion, self-kindness, self-care is that when we're being harsh on ourselves in this way, perhaps like me, you feel that you should have done better at something, that you failed at something and you're generally beating yourself up about a decision that you've made or a way that you've done something. Maybe you're thinking back on an argument that you've had over the holiday period when tempers have risen and you haven't been quite the cool calm adult that you might have hoped to have been in your household. Maybe you're beating yourself up about that or maybe you've learned something recently and in your research, in your learning, as your knowledge expands, you look back and you think, gosh I've always been doing this wrong. I wish I would have known then what I know now and I wish I would have done things differently. Sometimes when people learn with me they even fear that they may have done harm to children and young people in their care completely unknowingly and completely unwillingly because they didn't have the knowledge, the information, the skills that perhaps I hope that they're going away with after one of my sessions. Self-forgiveness is something that we touch in on then because the thing is, you can only ever do what you can do at the time. You can only ever work with the knowledge, the skills, the information, the resources that you have now. You can't work with the resources or the skills of the future. You can't work with the resources of the past. All you've got is the present moment and so when we look back and we beat ourselves up for not doing something differently because we know something different now or we've learned things a better way, it's wasted energy. We can't change the past and we did the best that we could and so often, particularly if you've got big issues that you're kind of, you regularly return to when you beat yourself up regularly, what is really helpful is just to think well what could I have done differently at the time? What was available to me? What did I get wrong there? And so often we really think about it. We did do our best. Most of us, and by us I mean my amazing network and community, so many amazing people who tune into this stuff that I keep rambling on about. This population, I've gotten to know you well over the years and you're not one a modernist lump, you're all different, but you all share that you deeply, deeply care and you all share that when we begin to pick stuff apart, absolutely, I think without exception when I've started to look at these things with you guys, always you will have done the best that you could and there might have been all sorts of limiting factors, whether that is your knowledge, your skills, your resources, the emotional resources you had available at the time, what you were allowed to do, the confines of a role, whatever. Those things may have stopped you doing being what you might want to be or do now, but you did the best that you could and that's really really important to acknowledge and to forgive ourselves and just saying you know I did the best I could and then we look forwards rather than looking back because when we keep looking back and we have one for in the past, that's really really challenging. That leaves us with all these kind of big feelings that take up a lot of space guilt, shame, anger, sadness, these are all absolutely valid feelings, these are all things that we're allowed to feel and we should feel those things sometimes and we should process them and explore them and get curious about them, but they're big feelings. They take up a lot of our emotional energy and chances are if you're listening to this podcast then either professionally or personally you've got a lot going on with the children and young people in your life and you're giving and you're giving and you're giving and that's amazing and that's absolutely laudable, but if you're filling up your head space, your emotional space, your ability to manage things with these big feelings about your past things you can't change then really that's slightly wasted emotional energy. My friend Jo, I have a lot of good friends I'm really really lucky, my friend Jo who many of you will have heard me talk about before, the post-it note guy if you've heard the post-it note story, my friend Jo at one point when I was going through, it was a few years ago now, going through kind of beating myself up and we were in the lobby of where we worked, so he used to be my boss and we were in the lobby and there were TVs on with the news playing, it was a kind of shared charity type space, there were TVs playing with like sky news or something and it was you know one of those kind of constant news loops going on on the TV in the background, he just pointed up and he went right so this this war that's going on how's that your fault because everything seems to be your fault, you seem to take the blame for absolutely everything, no one else is culpable, it's all down to you so how are you responsible for that on the TV and of course I wasn't and I didn't feel I was but I suddenly understood from his point of view how I was presenting to the world like sucking up all this guilt, this shame, this blame from all the different things around me and sure things were pretty tricky at that time, this was when I was deeply struggling with eating disorder, suicidal issues, all sorts of stuff, it was prior to my diagnoses of autism and complex PTSD both of which I've had great support with since and things were really really hard and in particular as a parent I felt a lot of guilt because I didn't feel I could be the parent I needed to be but I was just then over generalising that everything became about me and it being my fault which is quite an ego centric and self-centred way of looking at things really and Joe said to me that day said it's a waste of energy, he said you've got so much that you're investing here in terms of that emotional energy and you're feeling really guilty about the parent you're being to your daughters why don't you try instead of using that energy upon anger guilt shame and looking backwards use that energy for love kindness care now or we're looking forwards into the future about how you want things to be and use it to motivate you for change from moving on from where you are right now but using it for looking backwards that is a waste of energy that is just throwing that emotional loose change down the drain and I found that to be a really helpful if quite harsh lesson sometimes we need quite harsh lessons because we don't hear them otherwise so I was wasting that emotional energy these are big feelings they take up a lot of space and time in your head and you only have so much capacity so I suppose that's the thing I would say is that it can feel like maybe we feel like we deserve to be beaten up about this stuff but if we've got other people in our life that we want to be able to give to and care for and enjoy being with then we need to create enough space to be able to do that and that might mean actually practicing a little bit more self kindness self care self compassion self forgiveness and just kind of moving on from something of that some of those feelings the other thing that I think we should think about is what kind of role model we're being so when we are full of remorse and regret and shame and we're kind of beating ourselves up all the time that can feel like it's just about us and that maybe you know we think we deserve it and there's all sorts of different stories that we might tell here but we don't live in a little box where no one can see and interact with us we're part of our wider community and network and we need to just think about what kind of role model we are when we're being awful to ourselves like that because what our colleagues see particularly those who are more junior to us and absolutely what our children see are ways that they learn of being when they see us behave in a certain way they learn this is an acceptable way to behave whether we are beating ourselves up for how we look maybe you've got body image issues and your kids whether in your class or in your home here you see you looking at yourself and wishing you look different and saying things about your weight or how you appear or maybe they observe you beating yourself up for not doing things better and feeling like a failure and just the little tics that we have each day where we kind of mean to ourselves I have to watch myself on this one I spend a lot of time going oh pookie and I tell myself off but when my kids see me do that when they see me beat myself up what that tells them is it's okay to be unkind to yourself and there's no way I would tolerate them being unkind to each other in the way that sometimes I can be unkind to myself and so if we don't want them to be unkind to each other we certainly certainly don't want our gorgeous wonderful lovely most of the time children to be beating themselves up so we need to just think what are we showing them what are we telling them through our words and actions about how we treat ourselves instead in an ideal world we would role model self-care self-kindness self-compassion think about how you want your children to be how you want their lives to be how you want them to feel about themselves the relationship you would like them to have with themselves that relationship is one you're going to have to role model and that's hard and maybe we need like a whole other episode on actually how we practice self-care self-kindness and self-compassion because today is about self-forgiveness and trying to move on from the really tricky stuff but moving on from that and then into this golden zone of actually being really nice to ourselves well that's that's quite a big big leap and can feel very hard particularly if you spent a lot of time beating yourself up in the past so let's today be thinking about how do we get to neutral and how do we try to stop beating ourselves up so much or at least acknowledge that we should try self-care self-kindness self-compassion these are things we would love our children to live by so we are going to need to show them how because they can't learn it if they don't see it but we might go there another day but it is just worth checking in just acknowledging that the children in your care whether they are your children in your home or your children within your professional role they need good role models they need to see what good looks like if they're going to be able to achieve it I mean they might get there eventually otherwise they might see it through other people less important adults in their lives they might pick these lessons up from they might kind of stumble there through some sort of journey of self-discovery but they'll get there a lot more quickly and a lot more soundly if we show them and teach them the right lessons and the other thing we need to remember is that as important adults in the lives of young children lessons that we teach them now are lessons that are really hard to let go of my husband and I were chatting about this the other day about how you so blindly take on the lessons that you hear and the lessons that you see and the things that you're told and shown by the adults in your life when you're very small and it can take till now I'm 40 and I find myself occasionally just picking myself up and questioning a very deep core belief that I'll have that's something that I learned from an adult when I was like four eight ten up to about that age just unquestioningly take these things on and we can use that actually to our advantage by role modeling the lives that we would like our children to grow up to have so they unquestioningly take on board self-care self-kindness self-belief matters or we can do the other thing and show them that it's okay to beat yourself up it's okay to be unkind to yourself it's okay to sit and dwell in these feelings of shame and anger and sadness we can kind of choose a little bit here and it doesn't always feel like a choice because sometimes we're overwhelmed and if you find yourself really overwhelmed with all these big feelings and you're thinking okay boogie I get what you're saying and now I feel guilty because I can't move on from the guilt and the shame this is the point at which we then need to think where can we go to start to unpack this maybe you're fortunate to have a friend like I do who you can begin to explore that with or maybe this is a moment when you think about some professional listening working through these things to begin to unpack them if you're not able to sort of begin to move on then actually getting some support there to really begin to unpack stuff can really help I did have to do that I've invested many many many hours of my life in therapy in looking back in order to enable myself to begin to look forwards and it's much much easier to do it day to day now but I'm not suggesting it's a quick and easy thing so we've thought about the fact that we make the best decisions that we can at the time with what we have we've thought about the fact that those big feelings take up a lot of space and actually we would like to inhabit that space with more positive things and we've thought about what kind of role models we are the final thing I just want to address before we wrap up today is the idea that when we have this kind of unkindness to self it doesn't just hurt us and it really does hurt us it really wears us down over time and feels horrible life's just a little bit less nice when you're being horrible to yourself all the time and but it doesn't just hurt us it actually kind of hurts all the people around us because people who love us don't want to see us hurting and even if we're trying really carefully to like limit how much of this we're actually sharing saying out loud if we're spending a lot of our time living in those kind of pools of regret and shame and guilt and anger itself that's not something that's going to not be observed by those around us they will worry about us they'll feel sad for us they would hope that we could be happier with them and so what we really want to be able to do if we can is to try to move on to at least some of the time some of those kind of happier feelings so that not only we feel a little bit better but actually it's really nice for everyone around us to be able to live with love with that person who's allowing themselves to be a little bit kinder to themselves who's not denying themselves joy and happiness and kindness and all the good things it can feel like we deserve to be punished this might be you know core belief that you have that you deserve this you deserve nothing better and it's all about you but just remember you're not the only person in your world and when you are mean to yourself it's not so nice for the people around you and I think this one I struggle with a little bit because actually I spend a lot of time trying to say you matter and you've got to put yourself first and you need to think about yourself before other people because you can't be the adult that you need to be to the children in your care if you don't first look after yourself etc etc etc but I know you guys well and sometimes the only way that you're able to give yourself permission and I say you and I mean I as well sometimes the only way we can give ourselves permission to do nice things for ourselves is when we know that that will be to the benefit of others and it would be great if we could move beyond that if we could do nice things for ourselves just for ourselves but that's difficult and sometimes that stepping stone is recognizing okay but actually I need to change what's going on here I need to change the record because this broken record is not just harming me maybe you feel like you can live with that but it's harming the other people in my life as well those people about whom I deeply deeply care and if you can't do it for yourself do it for them it's not just hurting you it's hurting the people around you and if you're able even just to have little windows where you allow the joy to creep in through the cracks and you allow yourself to feel that happiness where we just have a little go a bit of self-care self-kindness self-compassion you'll find that some of those relationships will begin to really move on you'll see so much joy and kindness reflected at you from those people around you it's hard and it's something that you you know you don't just make a decision one day and that's it this is a constant battle particularly if you've had a lifetime of engaging with these challenging thoughts and feelings about self but like many hard things it is a battle that's really really really worth fighting and my sort of top tip here I suppose is just to become a bit more mindful about the thoughts that are passing through your head all the time because when we notice what we're doing then we're more able to change it it's not instant but when we begin to notice some people that I've worked with that have supported do not even realize a tiny bit quite how much self-hatred, harm, nastiness is going through their heads all the time and when we begin to explore that and voice some of those feelings allowed we just think gosh you would never treat another person like this try please to treat yourself a little bit more as you would your child or your friend or your dog be a little bit kinder so start by noticing and getting curious about where did that come from what's an alternative or my favorite from good old Matt my therapist what's the evidence for that thought I find that as a scientist I find that the most helpful question what's the evidence for that thought and is there an alternative explanation do you know what there's usually very little evidence other than sometimes something I'm carrying around from a very abusive relationship in the past that's not evidence that's conjecture from someone who does not deserve space in my head and so there's often not actually any good evidence because we've got to be critical consumers of our evidence and there normally is another way of thinking if I'm prepared to look for it so to wrap up I think we can think about aspiring to how we would like to feel so thinking about this in the round thinking about okay let's try and move towards practicing a bit more self-forgiveness being a bit kinder to ourselves we want to make life feel not just better for ourselves but for those around us and to use our emotional energy on the good things rather than wasting it on the big challenging horrible stuff we'll do a little bit of that sometimes we need to but largely we want to spend ourselves in the here and now doing the good things and a way of doing that is to think okay how do I want this to feel to spend a little bit of time going there imagining it wondering about it exploring it being really curious about it and then trying to act as if acting as if is such a powerful thing to do because we can't necessarily change everything right now but we just ask ourselves the question okay if I wanted to feel like that what would that look like how would I act if I felt like that and we just get curious and we just do our best acting for a little while we act as if as if I love myself as if I was able to forgive myself for this thing that happened and we explore what would that look like and can I give it a try and just see how that feels and be a little bit curious about it and don't just be curious about how it feels for you be curious about how when you act as if that impacts on the other people around you as well as ever the regular caveat about you know not trying to encourage everyone to mask all the time this is a little bit different this is about trying to connect with a different part of self but yeah don't spend your whole time acting and masking that's not what I'm trying to tell you to do not not suggesting you know you've got difficult stuff going on park that be happy this is actually going a little bit deeper and thinking what would it feel like what would it look like day to day if I didn't hate myself if I didn't spend all day beating myself up about this thing that happened in the past what would that look like and can I act as if that were the case and get curious so be kind to yourselves please thank you so much for listening in I hope there was something here to make you think a little bit of a different exploration today thinking about ourselves a bit more but as I said at the beginning it's really not just about ourselves this impacts so much on those around us as well and we can be good role models to them and lives get better life gets better for them as it gets better for us but you know what it is okay to invest a little bit in ourselves just for ourselves too good luck with it I'd love to hear how you get on and if you have any tips or ideas for exploring these ideas around self-kindness care and compassion and drop me a line on the socials if you would like an episode around self-care and kindness and exploring what that really looks like and going deeper there I think that could be a really interesting one to explore if you're up for it okay until next time over