Reckoning with ourselves
Exploring the complexity of self-forgiveness in a world that often teaches us to be hard on ourselves
Sandra Barefoot
Programme Development Lead
20 December 2023
Reckoning with ourselves
Exploring the complexity of self-forgiveness in a world that often teaches us to be hard on ourselves
Sandra Barefoot
Programme Development Lead
20 December 2023
Reckoning with ourselves
Exploring the complexity of self-forgiveness in a world that often teaches us to be hard on ourselves
Sandra Barefoot
Programme Development Lead
20 December 2023
As Lead Facilitator and Programme Manager in our prison programme ‘RESTORE’, I was constantly reminded that to ask ourselves to reckon with all the harm we had caused and, in the same breath, consider forgiveness to ourselves was a near impossible ask.
How can we begin to consider that we deserve or are worthy of forgiving ourselves when our actions are tied up with a deep-rooted shame of believing ourselves to be ‘bad’? How can we begin to untangle our histories of shaming, both on a personal and societal level, that serves to keep us locked and stuck in a position of unworthiness and belonging where there is no air to breathe into forgiving ourselves?
It is this reckoning with forgiving ourselves that I believe is one of the hardest routes to take, as it is inextricably linked to shame and guilt we hold in our relationship to ourselves and others.
‘I used to blame myself for quite a few years after my mother passed away…that it was my fault…and it’s that aspect of self-forgiveness, the pain I put my mum through was in some way the hardest to forgive myself for.’ – Jacob Dunne
For many people I have worked with, there lies a deep confusion as to why anyone who has been harmed would need to forgive themselves – “What have you got to forgive yourself for?” Is commonly asked.
I remember speaking to a man in a prison programme I was facilitating, who had chosen to forgive the person who killed his son. I tentatively asked him “have you ever looked at forgiveness to yourself for not being there to protect your son as a father?” He gasped and said “Never. No one has ever asked, and I live with this question every day. I don’t even know where to begin to look at this”.
In our series of conversations this year on Self Forgiveness, each of the storytellers described in detail how half of the process of self-forgiveness is occupied by reckoning with their relationships with others: That, though their lived experiences are incredibly unique and quite isolating, how deeply socially engrained this reckoning was for them.
I am reminded of Samantha Lawler’s reflections: ‘Throughout the series I was shown how in my particular case it isn’t necessarily the big stuff, but rather the day-to-day relationships and situations that I realised forgiveness of self, or another could really offer me some peace, mercy, or grace. So, the series was very helpful for me to breathe new life into some stale areas of my current relationships with self and others.’
After a traumatic event, you are at the mercy of how to reconcile with yourself just as you are with the reactions of others which means that self-forgiveness is as much about untangling your own perception of yourself as from others’ perceptions.
This makes me reflect on how trauma and shame is relational – and it is in this place of the internal and external gaze of self and others that can leave us with a deep internal sense that I did something wrong – with the question: Why me? What could I have done that might have prevented this trauma? Am I accountable or responsible in anyway? How can I make meaning from what has happened?
It is in the place of making meaning that can crucially offer a direction toward forgiving ourselves. In conversation with Ruchi Singh, who was a victim of domestic violence, she describes how anger kept her asking the right questions – ‘Why me? Why am I taking this? I used to tell myself I’d be damned if I cannot give meaning to this pain, I’d be damned if my pain is swept under the carpet’.
I was struck by the resilience of Ruchi’s life force as she took hold of this pain in a refusal to be another ‘Domestic Violence statistic’ and challenged those who asked her ‘What did you do?’ Why didn’t you just leave?’ Ruchi presents a powerful force of resilience to shame, as she found the capacity to zoom out and contextualise her own positioning within the wider social context of violence towards women and in doing so gave her the strength and courage to understand her experience was part of wider society.
This critical awareness that our being in the world is not separate from the cultural and social norms we are situated in is a vital perspective to always be considering when exploring self-forgiveness – as Masi Noor, Professor at the University of Keele shares: ‘…we must be mindful not to shoehorn forgiveness into a solely individual decision, for neither self-forgiveness nor forgiving others takes place in a social, normative, or political void.’
Lis Cashin spent over 30 years of her life feeling her actions at 13 years old at her school javelin sports event where her throw killed her friend Sammy, was her fault. In reflection Lis shares ‘I was trying to find meaning in something that made no logical sense. And so, for me I then internalised the blame – if there is no logical explanation then it must be something wrong with me’.
Lis reckoned with the question ‘could I have done something differently?‘ as an attempt to search for a reason as to why this happened. This curiosity and search to find meaning played a vital role for Lis to fight for her own life and validate the reality there was nothing she could have done that would have changed anything that day – ‘I didn’t do anything wrong’. The responsibility lay entirely with the school. This realisation became a critical place for Lis to turn toward her journey of self-compassion, kindness and self-forgiveness.
As I reflect on these writings, I am also reminded of how the emotion of anger can often be the first element that has the potential to lead us toward a journey of self-forgiveness if we don’t get stuck in it. Underneath anger there lies a deep well of grief that offers space and breath for healing and perspective taking as Dunia Shafik, whose son is serving 23 years in prison for murder shared in conversation with Jacob Dunne:
‘I weaved a special jacket for grief and managed to wash it off from a year of crying’. Dunia expressed this place of grief was an essential part of her journey toward making meaning ‘If I want to sit down for the next 21 years and cry how dare me to ask my son to have hope and belief in life if I can’t do it.’
Jacob Dunne expressed how he needed to dismantle his shame first, from ‘What have I done?’, to make a tool of his grief as a man that led him to throw his fatal punch that was situated within an engrained toxic masculinity and gang culture. This grief intensified even more for Jacob when he became a father. As he stepped into these shoes of parenting, Jacob became reflective of his own mother’s vulnerabilities and difficulties of becoming a parent, that in turn impacted on him as a child growing up. Embracing this grief of intergenerational suffering and harm, Jacob said ‘Just lots of crying kind of helps you eventually put your head above the water of your own tears’.
In this conversation with Dunia and Jacob, I was also struck by their understanding of where guilt played a crucial role alongside grief. Dunia described: I feel guilt, I don’t push it away, I keep it close to me as it is a reminder of my own responsibility and accountability as a mother and it’s a compass to orientate me in the right direction’. Jacob, also spoke of his accountability to himself – ‘I don’t want to put anyone else through any harm but if I’m going to do that, I can’t harm myself either.’
This place of accountability and its importance reminds me of the powerful difference around self-acceptance and self-love versus self-forgiveness quoted by Stephen Cherry in The Forgiveness Project’s Founder, Marina Cantacuzino’s book chapter ‘Forgiveness from the inside out’: ‘The reason why self-forgiveness is better than self-acceptance is about cultivating self-love, is that self-forgiveness admits in its vocabulary that something that cannot be ignored is wrong and that it needs to be put right.’
As I ponder on the power of accountability and its relationship to self-forgiveness I keep thinking of a recent difficult conversation I had with a friend, and as I came to see my part in creating confusion and misunderstanding between us – I simply said ‘I’m sorry, it’s really hard being me sometimes’.
I notice how these words of apology for myself – for being me, offer a sense of grace in my own accountability for being an imperfect, fallible human being. And ultimately, I believe it’s a practice of kindness, that can potentially lean us closer towards forgiving ourselves – of which Anne-Marie Cockburn shares so poignantly in her reflections in our creative writing workshop:
‘I discovered that in all my actions and behaviours over the past 10 years, I have in fact been apologising to myself over and over for not being able to save my daughter and for only managing to make it as a mother for 15 years and 9 months. Self–apology, rather than self–forgiveness is more manageable for me, perhaps one day I will be able to achieve self–forgiveness.’
Forgiving ourselves is a deeply personal, complex and intricate process that this series, as Marina shares, asks us to ‘grapple with self-judgement and what it means to reconcile with our imperfect pasts’. And for many of us forgiving ourselves may not be possible yet simply raising our awareness to its possibility maybe the very thing that allows us to one day find ourselves there.
As one woman’s extract from her poem ‘The Sands of Time Waits for No Woman!’ written in our prison programme RESTORE echoes:
As lead facilitator and programme manager in our prison programme RESTORE, I was constantly reminded that to ask ourselves to reckon with all the harm we had caused and in the same breath consider forgiveness to ourselves was a near impossible ask.
How can we begin to consider that we deserve or are worthy of forgiving ourselves when our actions are tied up with a deep-rooted shame of believing ourselves to be bad? How can we begin to untangle our histories of shaming, both on a personal and societal level that serves to keep us locked and stuck in a position of unworthiness and belonging where there is no air to breathe into forgiving ourselves?
It is this reckoning with forgiving ourselves that I believe is one of the hardest routes to take as it is inextricably linked to shame and guilt we hold in our relationship to ourselves and others.
‘I used to blame myself for quite a few years after my mother passed away…that it was my fault…and it’s that aspect of self-forgiveness, the pain I put my mum through was in some way the hardest to forgive myself for.’ – Jacob Dunne
For many people I have worked with, there lies a deep confusion as to why anyone who has been harmed would need to forgive themselves – ‘What have you got to forgive yourself for?’ is commonly asked.
I remember in a prison programme I was facilitating, speaking to a man who had chosen to forgive the person who killed his son. I tentatively asked him ‘have you ever looked at forgiveness to yourself for not being there to protect your son as a father?’ He gasped and said ‘Never. No one has ever asked, and I live with this question every day. I don’t even know where to begin to look at this’.
In our series of conversations this year on Self Forgiveness, each of the storytellers described in detail how half of the process of self-forgiveness is occupied by reckoning with their relationships with others: That, though their lived experiences are incredibly unique and quite isolating, how deeply socially engrained this reckoning was for them.
I am reminded of Samantha Lawler’s reflections: ‘Throughout the series I was shown how in my particular case it isn’t necessarily the big stuff, but rather the day-to-day relationships and situations that I realised forgiveness of self, or another could really offer me some peace, mercy, or grace. So, the series was very helpful for me to breathe new life into some stale areas of my current relationships with self and others.’
After a traumatic event, you are at the mercy of how to reconcile with yourself just as you are with the reactions of others which means that self-forgiveness is as much about untangling your own perception of yourself as from others’ perceptions.
This makes me reflect on how trauma and shame is relational – and it is in this place of the internal and external gaze of self and others that can leave us with a deep internal sense that I did something wrong – with the question: Why me? What could I have done that might have prevented this trauma? Am I accountable or responsible in anyway? How can I make meaning from what has happened?
It is in the place of making meaning that can crucially offer a direction toward forgiving ourselves. In conversation with Ruchi Singh, who was a victim of domestic violence, she describes how anger kept her asking the right questions – ‘Why me? Why am I taking this? I used to tell myself I’d be damned if I cannot give meaning to this pain, I’d be damned if my pain is swept under the carpet’.
I was struck by the resilience of Ruchi’s life force as she took hold of this pain in a refusal to be another ‘Domestic Violence statistic’ and challenged those who asked her ‘What did you do?’ Why didn’t you just leave?’ Ruchi presents a powerful force of resilience to shame, as she found the capacity to zoom out and contextualise her own positioning within the wider social context of violence towards women and in doing so gave her the strength and courage to understand her experience was part of wider society.
This critical awareness that our being in the world is not separate from the cultural and social norms we are situated in is a vital perspective to always be considering when exploring self-forgiveness – as Masi Noor, Professor at the University of Keele shares: ‘…we must be mindful not to shoehorn forgiveness into a solely individual decision, for neither self-forgiveness nor forgiving others takes place in a social, normative, or political void.’
Lis Cashin spent over 30 years of her life feeling her actions at 13 years old at her school javelin sports event where her throw killed her friend Sammy, was her fault. In reflection Lis shares ‘I was trying to find meaning in something that made no logical sense. And so, for me I then internalised the blame – if there is no logical explanation then it must be something wrong with me’.
Lis reckoned with the question ‘could I have done something differently?‘ as an attempt to search for a reason as to why this happened. This curiosity and search to find meaning played a vital role for Lis to fight for her own life and validate the reality there was nothing she could have done that would have changed anything that day – ‘I didn’t do anything wrong’. The responsibility lay entirely with the school. This realisation became a critical place for Lis to turn toward her journey of self-compassion, kindness and self-forgiveness.
As I reflect on these writings, I am also reminded of how the emotion of anger can often be the first element that has the potential to lead us toward a journey of self-forgiveness if we don’t get stuck in it. Underneath anger there lies a deep well of grief that offers space and breath for healing and perspective taking as Dunia Shafik, whose son is serving 23 years in prison for murder shared in conversation with Jacob Dunne:
‘I weaved a special jacket for grief and managed to wash it off from a year of crying’. Dunia expressed this place of grief was an essential part of her journey toward making meaning ‘If I want to sit down for the next 21 years and cry how dare me to ask my son to have hope and belief in life if I can’t do it.’
Jacob Dunne expressed how he needed to dismantle his shame first, from ‘What have I done?’, to make a tool of his grief as a man that led him to throw his fatal punch that was situated within an engrained toxic masculinity and gang culture. This grief intensified even more for Jacob when he became a father. As he stepped into these shoes of parenting, Jacob became reflective of his own mother’s vulnerabilities and difficulties of becoming a parent, that in turn impacted on him as a child growing up. Embracing this grief of intergenerational suffering and harm, Jacob said ‘Just lots of crying kind of helps you eventually put your head above the water of your own tears’.
In this conversation with Dunia and Jacob, I was also struck by their understanding of where guilt played a crucial role alongside grief. Dunia described: I feel guilt, I don’t push it away, I keep it close to me as it is a reminder of my own responsibility and accountability as a mother and it’s a compass to orientate me in the right direction’. Jacob, also spoke of his accountability to himself – ‘I don’t want to put anyone else through any harm but if I’m going to do that, I can’t harm myself either.’
This place of accountability and its importance reminds me of the powerful difference around self-acceptance and self-love versus self-forgiveness quoted by Stephen Cherry in The Forgiveness Project’s Founder, Marina Cantacuzino’s book chapter ‘Forgiveness from the inside out’: ‘The reason why self-forgiveness is better than self-acceptance is about cultivating self-love, is that self-forgiveness admits in its vocabulary that something that cannot be ignored is wrong and that it needs to be put right.’
As I ponder on the power of accountability and its relationship to self-forgiveness I keep thinking of a recent difficult conversation I had with a friend, and as I came to see my part in creating confusion and misunderstanding between us – I simply said ‘I’m sorry, it’s really hard being me sometimes’.
I notice how these words of apology for myself – for being me, offer a sense of grace in my own accountability for being an imperfect, fallible human being. And ultimately, I believe it’s a practice of kindness, that can potentially lean us closer towards forgiving ourselves – of which Anne-Marie Cockburn shares so poignantly in her reflections in our creative writing workshop:
‘I discovered that in all my actions and behaviours over the past 10 years, I have in fact been apologising to myself over and over for not being able to save my daughter and for only managing to make it as a mother for 15 years and 9 months. Self–apology, rather than self–forgiveness is more manageable for me, perhaps one day I will be able to achieve self–forgiveness.’
Forgiving ourselves is a deeply personal, complex and intricate process that this series, as Marina shares, asks us to ‘grapple with self-judgement and what it means to reconcile with our imperfect pasts’. And for many of us forgiving ourselves may not be possible yet simply raising our awareness to its possibility maybe the very thing that allows us to one day find ourselves there.
As one woman’s extract from her poem ‘The Sands of Time Waits for No Woman!’ written in our prison programme RESTORE echoes:
The Sands of Time Waits for No Woman!
…I don’t want to awake one day
At 60 or 70 years old and think
‘What have I done to myself’
Why didn’t I forgive and made
The choice to go forward with
My Life,
As
The Sands of Time waits
For No Man
This not so perfect show of
My Life,
Has to go on, with or without
My Awareness!
Rahema, RESTORE Participant
The Sands of Time Waits for No Woman!
…I don’t want to awake one day
At 60 or 70 years old and think
‘What have I done to myself’
Why didn’t I forgive and made
The choice to go forward with
My Life,
As
The Sands of Time waits
For No Man
This not so perfect show of
My Life,
Has to go on, with or without
My Awareness!
Rahema, RESTORE Participant
Creative writing workshop
Self-forgiveness: Making meaning as a foundation for change
This online workshop invites participants to deeply listen, reflect and explore through creative writing prompts how making meaning can support us to reconcile ourselves with what has gone before and journey toward self-forgiveness.
