What is self-forgiveness? How does it happen? Is self-forgiveness just accepting yourself? Is self-forgiveness arrogant or dangerous? These are just some of the questions this book attempts to solve. The process of forgiving yourself is not easy. Self-forgiveness results from an honest, sometimes very painful, confrontation with ourselves that being forgiven by another person does not require. Other people may forgive us, but they may not know us as well as we know ourselves. Only we can know how mean or arrogant or blind to our limitations we have been. It is this knowledge that makes self-forgiveness so hard, maybe harder than forgiving yourself. Guilt and self-blame can be incapacitating feelings that only deliberate self-forgiveness will dispel. Forgiving Yourself identifies various types of actions that call for forgiveness, and offers a step-by-step program for eliminating self-defeating behavior so that you may learn to forgive your mistakes, heal your relationships, and get on with becoming your best self. The author hopes that this book will provide damaged people the tools to put self-hatred away and return to the human community and restore peace within a person, and when peace is restored and hatred eliminated – even self-hatred – good things can result.

Authors: Beverly Flanigan
Publishers: Macmillan
Date of Publication: 1996
No. of pages: 200