India, Jan. 13 -- A 62-year-old female client in her first session tells me, "I have chosen to start therapy because I find it hard to forgive myself. Although others see my life as a good one-and in many ways it was-internally I am constantly criticizing myself. I dwell on not being a good enough daughter, on not spending enough time with my children, and always striving for perfection. I have shame about who I am and also resentment towards myself. I want to change this." What this client is talking about is something that often comes up during therapy sessions. Self-criticism can show up as shame, regret, harsh judgment, hopelessness and the inability to trust oneself. Clients also talk about how they find it hard to trust their decision-making, or their own actions because they feel they are stuck in a pattern of internalized self-blame. Learning to work around this self-reproach requires making room for self-forgiveness. We are all flawed, and learning to remember this while also doing better every day, being compassionate towards others is a huge part of self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness includes empathy for self, the ability to be tender towards ourselves, accepting our fallibility, and learning to soften the way we talk to ourselves. This is a topic which is very much misunderstood and over-simplified. I often hear clients worry that forgiveness might make them complacent, as though it glosses over or diminishes the real problem. Some social media posts also dilute the concept, reducing self-forgiveness to simply stating, "I forgive myself," while overlooking how much deeper and more nuanced the process truly is. Self-forgiveness doesn't stop at accepting the role we played in creating our suffering or that of others. In fact, the process only begins at that point. It further requires taking responsibility and accountability for what we did, whether it was intentional or unintentional. It requires holding space for difficult feelings that may come up following this insight and to slowly work through them. I have found that this is the part which most people find difficult, because being in touch with our emotions can be overwhelming and scary. But this is where the real work starts. Learning to hold big feelings of guilt, regret and accepting that we can do better in the future is where our self-forgiveness lies. Our behaviours and actions don't happen in a vacuum, so recognizing factors we could control and then the way the circumstances played out is important. I mention this because I see people take complete accountability for their past completely forgetting factors that were causes and conditions that were beyond their control. The process of healing begins with catching ourselves when we talk using shoulds and musts. Instead think of moving to coulds.Only then you create space for compassion and change. 'What could have been done instead of what should have been done,' for instance. Refiguring how we want to feel, act and think requires evaluation, and a change in the emotional resources we usually deploy. Whether it's the ability to stay calm, to demonstrate kindness in words, actions or build an attitude of openness - all of these require work and patience. When the journey towards self-forgiveness is accompanied by changes in our belief system and in our actions is when meaningful progress takes place. The real goal of adulting is for each of us to ask how we come in our own way. It can be in moments when we abandon our own selves or when we get stuck in a spiral of shame, blaming ourselves and not trusting ourselves to do better. Adulting often requires us to start all over again, own up to our mistakes while still finding room to be compassionate to ourselves. It may sound easy, it can take years and put this in practice....