I get this A LOT! I’ve struggled with self forgiveness with certain traumatic events from when I was a growing up, and although I know I didn’t have the capacity to change certain circumstances, I still feel like I should have been able to.
I actually can’t even utter things like that because it feels too hard to, it’s easier to just sit in the “I must be a bad person so I need to do everything perfect to make up for these events in my life that I had no control over, but still feel responsible for,” but with ERP it’s gotten easier to stay less rigid and stay in the grey area more.
Maybe if I had put up a fight, someone else wouldn’t have gotten hurt by this other person, or maybe even if I had, the end result would be the same. Maybe I’ve been trying to figure this out for over a decade and even if I do figure it out, how do I get a Time Machine to go back? Really it’s me trying to figure out the degree of self punishment to give, but I’ve already been giving myself the punishment for most my life, so really it’s like being in my own purgatory, and either I can let this ruin the rest of my life, or I can try to make the most of it knowing that not everyone gets another tomorrow to try.
So it’s one step at a time, moment by moment trying again, and then again, and then again. I try to actually truly live, truly connect, and be present because of that. Not everyone gets another tomorrow, and I think a lot about how those people would want me to live, even though they can’t. It won’t ever stop, I know my mind will never stop, and it will replay every traumatic moment on loop over and over again trying to make the future safer by anticipating every what if scenario possible, and how to prevent the past from ever happening again, but I try to remember everything that PTSD and OCD has taken. I’ve lived most of my life terrified of the world that I haven’t really had much time to enjoy it, so even though today I might feel like I don’t deserve to eat, or get a promotion at work, or whatever the good thing is, I try to remind myself of those times where I didn’t feel that way, and how it was better for those around me, and how if I didn’t have a tomorrow I’d want my son to still make the most of his life, even without me in it. And if he had made a mistake, I would want him to learn from it of course, but I also would really want him to learn to forgive himself too, because sometimes that can be even harder. So I keep practicing the ERP skills, because he will learn to be more self compassionate if I model that behavior for him as well, and maybe these skills will also help him one day too.
I don’t know if this helps at all, but for me this helps me a lot more than just telling myself that I’m a good person, because I know I’ll never believe that, and my brain will just double down on trying to prove all the reasons that I am awful and then I get stuck in a loop of whether or not I should exist, and then frantically trying to figure out all of my flaws so I don’t ever hurt anyone ever, so I just want to make sure I’m not providing you with something that will make you feel the same way and put you in the same thought loops, but I wish you the best of luck! It’s a rough spot to be in, and I hope you give yourself some grace!