Self-forgiveness
Self-forgiveness is letting go of punishing ourselves for something we did wrong, while still owning it. Researchers separate it from excusing ourselves, which drops the punishment by dropping the responsibility, and from self-punishment that never lets up. In the genuine kind, the wrong stays in view and the attack eases.
A father shouted at his son and called him stupid. He apologized the next day and has kept his temper since. For a year he still called himself a bad father every night. Lately he notices the regret without the name-calling.
It is about a wrong we did, and it doesn't fit harm done to us. People who were hurt by someone else, in abuse for example, often blame themselves for what was done to them. That self-blame is a different thing, and the idea of forgiving ourselves doesn't fit it.
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How it shows
At work
Owning a mistake to the team, fixing what can be fixed, and taking the next decision instead of avoiding every one. Its absence shows both ways: someone still turning down responsibility years after one error, or someone who never mentions the error at all.
In close relationships
Being around the person who was hurt without groveling or avoiding them. Apologizing once and meaning it, without needing the other person to say it's fine before the self-attack stops.
In ourselves
Remembering the act with regret and without the old flood of shame. Self-talk that names what was done without calling ourselves names.
How it differs from similar ideas
Self-compassion
Self-compassion is a general kindness toward ourselves whenever we suffer or fail, whether or not we did anything wrong. Self-forgiveness is narrower: it follows a specific wrong we did to someone, and it includes owning that wrong. The two tend to rise together, and in a small counseling trial described below, self-compassion rose along with self-forgiveness.
Guilt
Guilt is the painful sense of having done a specific wrong, and it tends to pull toward repair. Self-forgiveness is what can follow once guilt has done that work. In a study that followed people through eight waves, self-forgiveness rose as guilt fell.
Rationalization
Rationalization explains the wrong away with reasons that sound good. In the research's terms it belongs to pseudo self-forgiveness, which brings relief by shrinking responsibility. Genuine self-forgiveness keeps the wrong in view and still lets go of the punishment.
What it doesn’t mean
It isn't letting ourselves off the hook. Researchers separate genuine self-forgiveness, which keeps responsibility, from pseudo self-forgiveness, which feels better by playing the act down, making excuses or blaming others. In their studies, only the genuine kind went with better outcomes for the person who was hurt.
It doesn't need the other person's forgiveness. Feeling forgiven by the person hurt can help, and studies count it among several factors. Whether they forgive is up to them, and self-forgiveness can happen either way.
An example: Marcus, a safety check he didn't do, and three months
Marcus is a shift lead in a warehouse. One night he signed off a forklift check he hadn't done. The next morning a worn brake gave out and his coworker Ana hurt her wrist. She was off work for three weeks.
- The first week Marcus tells himself the check was really the night crew's job, and that a brake can fail on a checked machine too. He says nothing to Ana. The thought sits easier. He starts taking his breaks in his car.
- The second month The excuses stop working. Now he lies awake listing what is wrong with him. When his manager offers him a bigger team, he says, “I can't be trusted with people.” He still hasn't spoken to Ana.
- The third month He tells his manager what happened. He tells Ana he ticked a box for a check he never did, and that he is sorry about her wrist. He changes the sign-off sheet so a check needs a second name. Ana says she is still angry, and that she's glad he told her.
- Six months on He still winces when he passes that forklift. When the morning comes back to him, the thought is “I did that,” and it no longer runs on into “so I'm worthless.” He applies for the next lead role.
In the first week, Marcus felt better by making the wrong smaller. In the second month, he kept the wrong and turned it into a sentence passed on himself. In the third, he kept the wrong, told the people it touched and changed something, and only after that did the attack on himself begin to ease.
The three stretches match the three responses Lydia Woodyatt and Michael Wenzel describe. The first is what they call pseudo self-forgiveness: relief from playing down responsibility or blaming others. The second is self-punishment, which keeps the responsibility and adds a running attack. The third is the genuine kind, which keeps the responsibility and lets the attack go. In their studies, people who owned up to the person hurt and reaffirmed the value they broke could accept responsibility with less harm to how they saw themselves. Ana's words may have helped too: in a study that followed people over eight waves, feeling forgiven by the person hurt went with more self-forgiveness. Marcus didn't wait for it.
A different story would point elsewhere. If Marcus had done nothing wrong and still blamed himself, as people often do after a death they couldn't have prevented, the pages on bereavement guilt and hindsight bias may fit better. If the attack had spread past this one act into a sense of being bad all through, shame describes it. And if he had kept skipping checks and kept forgiving himself for it, the study of smokers below, which its authors called a dark side of self-forgiveness, is closer.
What the research shows
Most research on self-forgiveness asks people, through questionnaires, how they feel about themselves after a wrong they did. The studies below cover what owning up does, the three-way split between genuine self-forgiveness, excusing and self-punishment, what self-forgiveness goes with across many samples, and one study that found a cost.
Owning up and reaffirming broken values went with a smaller drop in self-regard when people accepted responsibility, and the genuine kind of self-forgiveness went with better outcomes for both people. Across 65 samples, self-forgiveness went with better well-being. In one study of smokers, forgiving themselves went with less movement toward quitting.
Owning up to the victim softened the drop in self-regard that came with accepting responsibility
In 2012 Michael Wenzel, Lydia Woodyatt and Kyli Hedrick ran two studies. The first was a role-play experiment with 90 people, in which participants either confessed a wrongdoing to the victim or didn't. Across the sample, the more responsibility people accepted, the lower their reported self-forgiveness, measured as how positively they saw themselves. That link was weaker in those who confessed, which the authors read as a way of reaffirming the values they had broken.
The second study followed 74 people who reported wrongs they had really done. Accepting responsibility went with lower self-forgiveness and lower self-esteem in those who did little to reaffirm the values they broke. In those who reaffirmed them more strongly, the link didn't appear.
Doesn’t show Two small studies, the first a role-play. The second relied on people's own accounts of what they had done. Neither study asked the people who were hurt.
Genuine self-forgiveness went with repair on both sides, and excusing and self-punishment showed no benefit
In 2013 Woodyatt and Wenzel set out three ways a person can respond to themselves after wronging someone: self-punishment, pseudo self-forgiveness and genuine self-forgiveness. In their account the genuine kind involves working through the offense, taking responsibility, and accepting themselves while admitting the failure.
In the first of two studies that followed people forward in time, the older questionnaires, which measure only feeling good about oneself in the end, failed to capture the genuine kind. In the second, self-punishment and pseudo self-forgiveness showed no benefit for restoring either the offender or the relationship, and showed some harm. Genuine self-forgiveness went with better self-esteem and more empathy for the victim, and with outcomes the authors counted as restorative for both people.
Doesn’t show Both studies tracked people's own reports, so they show what went together and can't show that genuine self-forgiveness caused the better outcomes. The measure of the three responses was the authors' own and new at the time.
Across dozens of samples, people who forgave themselves more reported better mental and physical health
In 2015 Don Davis and colleagues pooled the studies that had measured self-forgiveness alongside health. Across 65 samples and 17,939 participants, the correlation between self-forgiveness and psychological well-being was .45. Across 18 samples and 5,653 participants, the correlation with physical health was .32. Both are moderate links by the usual yardsticks.
They also estimated the links with specific mental health measures and with relationship outcomes.
Doesn’t show A meta-analysis of correlations, so it shows how strongly self-forgiveness and health go together and can't show which comes first: feeling well may make self-forgiveness easier. Woodyatt and Wenzel's point applies here too, since questionnaires that measure feeling fine about ourselves may count excusing as self-forgiveness.
Smokers who had forgiven themselves for smoking were less likely to be moving toward quitting
In 2011 Michael Wohl and Andrea Thompson asked 181 smokers how far they had forgiven themselves for smoking, and placed them in the stages of change, which run from not thinking about quitting to taking action. The more people had forgiven themselves, the less likely they were to be moving through the stages toward action.
The authors read this as a cost of self-forgiveness when it is granted for a harmful habit that is still going on, and called for a fuller account of its benefits and costs.
Doesn’t show One sample of smokers, measured with questionnaires, so it shows a link and can't show cause. It concerns an ongoing habit that harms the smoker, which is a different situation from a single wrong done to another person. It came before the three-way split above was proposed.
Try it: the act, and what I do to myself about it
Think of something you did that hurt someone and still weighs on you. Write three short notes.
- What I did, and what it cost the other person, in plain words
- What I have done about it, or could still do, if anything
- What I say to myself about it now, word for word
If the first note is hard to write without an excuse in it, what the research calls pseudo self-forgiveness may be close. If the first two notes are full and the third is a list of names for yourself, the research would call it self-punishment. In these studies, genuine self-forgiveness looks like a full first note and a third note that names the act without attacking the person.
What is self-forgiveness?
Letting go of ongoing anger and punishment toward ourselves for a wrong we did, while still owning the wrong and what it cost others. Researchers separate it from pseudo self-forgiveness, which brings relief by playing the wrong down or blaming others, and from self-punishment, which keeps the responsibility and adds a running attack.
Is forgiving yourself the same as excusing yourself?
The research treats them as different routes to feeling better. Excusing, which researchers call pseudo self-forgiveness, gets there by shrinking responsibility. Genuine self-forgiveness keeps the responsibility and lets go of the attack. In studies by Lydia Woodyatt and Michael Wenzel, only the genuine kind went with outcomes they counted as restorative, for the person who did the wrong and for the person hurt.
How do people forgive themselves?
The research describes what goes with it more than a method. Accepting responsibility went with lower self-regard, unless people also reaffirmed the values the act broke, for instance by owning up to the person hurt (Wenzel and colleagues). Over time, self-forgiveness rose as people made amends and felt forgiven (Hall and Fincham). In a small 2015 trial, 26 adults with unresolved feelings about a past offense were randomly assigned to start an emotion-focused counseling program at once or after a wait. Those who had the counseling ended with less self-condemnation, more self-forgiveness and less distress, and the gains held two months later. Only 21 finished, so it is a first test.
Why can't I forgive myself?
The research names some things that go with self-forgiveness staying low. In a 2008 study that followed 148 people over eight waves, self-forgiveness rose on average as guilt and the sense of how serious the act was fell, and as people felt forgiven by the person hurt and made amends to them. A sense that the whole self is bad, described on the shame page, may also keep self-punishment going. Where the self-blame is for harm someone else did, the care note above applies.
Is self-forgiveness healthy?
Across 65 samples, self-forgiveness went with better psychological well-being, a correlation of .45, and across 18 samples with better physical health, .32. Those are links, and which comes first is open. For a harmful habit that is still going on the picture may differ: in a study of 181 smokers, more self-forgiveness for smoking went with less movement toward quitting.
What is pseudo self-forgiveness?
Feeling better about a wrong by shrinking responsibility for it: excusing it, blaming others or playing down the harm. Julie Hall and Frank Fincham named it in 2005. Questionnaires that only ask whether someone feels fine about themselves may count it as self-forgiveness, which is why later researchers measured the process instead.
Where the idea comes from
Forgiveness research grew fast in the 1990s, and most of it was about forgiving other people. In 1996 the psychologist Robert Enright described what he called the forgiveness triad: forgiving others, receiving forgiveness from others, and forgiving ourselves. He argued that counselors meet all three, and that each has its own process.
In 2005 Julie Hall and Frank Fincham called self-forgiveness “the stepchild of forgiveness research,” because so little had been written about it. They defined it, set it apart from forgiving others and from what they called pseudo self-forgiveness, and proposed a model of the feelings, thoughts and features of the offense that make it more or less likely after someone wrongs another person.
From 2012, Michael Wenzel and Lydia Woodyatt, in Australia, argued that most questionnaires measured only the end point, a person feeling fine about themselves, and so couldn't tell genuine self-forgiveness from letting themselves off the hook. They measured the process instead and separated three responses: self-punishment, pseudo self-forgiveness and genuine self-forgiveness. That three-way split is the one this page uses.
The question it adds
When the self-punishment won't stop, or stopped suspiciously fast, this idea asks where the responsibility went.
Have I kept the wrong in view, and let go only of the attack?
Robert Enright, 1996 (the forgiveness triad). Julie Hall and Frank Fincham, 2005. Michael Wenzel, Lydia Woodyatt and Kyli Hedrick, 2012, and Lydia Woodyatt and Michael Wenzel, 2013 (genuine and pseudo self-forgiveness)
Questions to carry
- What would I still owe, if anything, before I'd let myself put this down?
- What does punishing myself protect me from having to feel or do?
Situations where it comes up
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