Healing Mental Exhaustion Through Self-Forgiveness
Episode #15: Healing Mental Exhaustion Through Self-Forgiveness
Is self-care the antidote to generally every difficulty, stress, and struggle? For Dr. Prianca—it’s not. To be at peace with our efforts and to cultivate a healthy approach to anything we do in life, Dr. Prianca explains why self-forgiveness must be learned. She explains why self-forgiveness is a practice and how you can do it in practical applications.
What you will learn:
Why Dr. Prianca is annoyed by the term self-care
You need to stop name-calling yourself
Prianca Naik on the importance of self-forgiveness
Self-compassion is a practice
Why self-approval must always come first
To end burnout and exhaustion and get your peace of mind back, check out her free masterclass on 4 steps to overcome burnout, get rid of overwhelm, and get your peace of mind back.
https://program.stresscleansemd.com/4-secrets-to-living-a-life-you-ll-love-podcast
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[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:]
Self-care is a major term thrown around as the antidote for so many difficulties. Al anon talks about self-care as a way to nourish one’s self when near an addict recovered or active.
What I want to talk about is the self: self focus is a part of my program
Now I know what you’re thinking self focus?! That’s selfish!!
But truly to be at peace and happy, cultivating a relationship with ourselves is critical. A part of this process is self-forgiveness.
Mnay of us grow up in homes where an A- wasn’t good enough. Whatever mistakes I made were drilled into me, discussed for years after. One of my family members still brings up something I did 22 years ago! With that kind of a childhood, and maybe you can take a minute to reflect upon yours…of course I am hard on myself. So self-forgiveness is a critical part of our healing process.
Were you told what you did was good enough growing up? Or was nothing ever good enough? Did your parents forgive you for your mistakes or did they hammer you with criticism? How about you? Are you hard on yourself? Do you expect a lot from yourself and maybe even others? Are you beating yourself up? Take some time to reflect on these questions…because once we figure out where we came from, how we grew up, we can give our current selves compassion…even our past selves. Why we did what we did…even if our current self doesn’t agree with past decisions.
We do things we have regrets of course…we are human. Especially our perfectionist tendencies make us even more hard on ourselves. Beating ourselves up by self-scolding and negative self-talk. One thing I will say which I practice and say to my clients as well…is to eliminate any name calling of yourself in your head. When you drop something for example don’t automatically call yourself stupid…if you do, stop yourself in your tracks and practice this.
Day to day errors we must accept as a part of the human experience. As I;ve said before, remember that resistance is the cause of so much human suffering. So resisting a mistake or going over and over again in your head what went wrong only adds an extra layer of suffering. You can actually decide to accept a mistake, notice what you’re feeling the vibration in your body. And take action in deciding how to move forward.
The past is useful for learning, but not dwelling. The past is useful for learning, not dwelling. We can decide to learn from the past but not ruminate.
When we make intentional decisions, we take back our power and live our lives as opposed to feeling like life is living us. This is how we empower ourselves.
In worrying about what other people would think about certain aspects of our lives, we shift our focus away from ourselves and onto others. This is the easier thing to do…the easy way out. Because what we are really afraid of is our own judgement of ourselves. So can we show ourselves compassion and forgive ourselves for what we think may not have been the best behavior or decisions? We can create more inner ease and peace. We can carry on a bit lighter. We can probably sleep better.
If we wrong someone, we can ask for their forgiveness and forgive ourselves at the same time to truly create closure.
Also understanding why you are the way you are. What was your childhood like? Did your parents meet your core needs? Unconditional love, safety, etc….any traumas you may have experienced. This is something that is more in the realm of therapy but worth exploring in therapy in order to move forward with having more self-compassion and forgiveness.
I highly recommend the mindful self compassion workbook by Kristin Neff. Init she talks about
embracing our imperfections in order to build the necessary resilience to thrive.
Being able to be present for others means showing self-love, compassion and forgiveness for ourselves.
We all have made mistakes. So working through the process of forgiving ourselves and past behaviors, seeing if we can meet ourselves part way. Understanding that person from 20 years ago or even 2 years ago. Where was she? What was she thinking? Why did she do what she did?
Odds are, you did the best you could given whatever you knew at the time and whomever you were.
I want you to think of one major thing that haunts you from your past. Some “failure” or shame you have. Who and go through who you were back then. Who influenced you. Why did you behave in a certain way.
For me, this is not going to an ivy league school. I was shamed and berated and called a failure throughout my 20’s until I got into medical school.
This haunted me more than I realized because the teacher in a writing course I took, Molly, form the Brooklyn writers collective pointed out the recurring theme of discussing getting into wash u in st louis which isn’t an ivy league school. And how I should write about it to make my peace with it.
Anything that comes up for you regularly please consider doing the aforementioned exercise
Now think of a shameful behavior or decision that you wouldn’t want people to know. Something you never talk about but is in the shadows…what comes up for you when you think about this instance? what would you say to a friend who had this identical situation? Would you find a way to have compassion for them? I will guess the answer is yes. So can you allocate some of that forgiveness and compassion for yourself?
Life coaching and finding your way out of exhaustion doesn’t mean saying bye to all of your imperfections. It means constantly working on yourself, being aware, and doing the hard work. The other evening I was working on a very important document and I read it 4 times. I stayed up late, messing with my sleep…the first story I told myself was: I’m being a perfectionist I’m obsessing. I then acknowledged this…I was beating myself up…and changed my narrative to this is very important for x reason and that is why I am working so hard.
When it comes to mistakes, errors, missteps, remember to go easy on yourself. Practice self- compassion and forgiveness. And after we forgive ourselves, we can also reflect on lessons learned so we don’t repeat the regrettable behavior.
We are always learning and growing right? We have nothing to prove…We have to love ourselves and approve of ourselves first.
Remembering that life is a process, we aren’t perfect inherently. We do our best. We manage a lot. We are always learning and growing. There are often new opportunities presenting themselves, we just need our eyes wide open for them. This can shift our perspective to a more open, happy peaceful one.
In her book, Self-Compassion, Kristen Neff says that “self-compassion honors the fact that all human beings are fallible, that wrong choices and feelings of regret are inevitable.”
The more we can accept this, the better off we will be.
We won’t go through life w out making mistakes or even hurting people inadvertently. We will always make mistakes…we can learn to accept and make peace with this.