05/20/2026
As a therapist, I often tell clients that you cannot judge your past self by the standards of the person you’ve become. Yet somehow, this has remained one of my own deepest stuck points.
I recently shared with someone that one of the quiet pressures of being a therapist, someone who helps people live healthier, fuller lives, is wrestling with the fact that when it was time to face my own struggles, I could not help myself in the ways I thought I should have been able to.
What I didn’t realize was how much I carried the weight of my profession into my personal life. I judged myself not just by what I personally knew, but by what I was professionally trained to recognize.
And self-forgiveness becomes difficult when you begin to see the ways you abandoned yourself. The ways you betrayed your own needs, ignored your own pain, and minimized your own humanity.
It is easier to direct anger outward for what was done to you than to sit with the grief of what you allowed, tolerated, or normalized at your own expense.
That kind of reckoning is painful.
But lately, I’ve been leaning deeply into radical acceptance and self-compassion. Because self-compassion allows us to hold judgment and mercy at the same time. Mercy for the blind spots. Mercy for the immaturity. Mercy for the survival strategies. Mercy for the naïveté. Mercy for the version of ourselves that was simply trying to make it through with the tools we had at the time.
Self-compassion makes room for our humanness instead of punishing ourselves endlessly with self-criticism.
And I am learning that while forgiveness of others may not always be necessary for healing, self-forgiveness is.
