The luxury of {self} forgiveness.

There are so many times in therapy when I hear a client say "I should have known better... I should have seen it coming... I should have made a different choice." The fact is, it's easy on the back end of things to have regret. To wish for a different way. To think how things could have gone differently. But we also know that in most cases, we do the best we can with what information we have.

If you don't know healthy coping skills for depression, you're going to choose unhealthy strategies to escape from your pain. If you don't know how to communicate effectively, you're going to come off shy or passive-aggressive. If you don't know the importance of unpeeling the layers of your core issues, you're going to try hard to cover them up.

When you know better, you do better. What we need to focus on is learning lessons. Given certain situations in our lives, we need to reflect back on them and evaluate how successful we were with getting things done. It's easy to forgive someone else when they don't know an answer... to give them the benefit of the doubt. I sometimes wonder why we don't afford ourselves the same luxury.