Finding self-compassion and forgiveness

Hey there, I need some guidance on how to go forward with this. I got coached by amazing Mars on some things that are not going so well in my life at the moment. I have given birth to my baby daughter a few months ago, unfortunately, the birth was a traumatic one and since then I saw a therapist who helped me debrief it. That helped but there is still the PTSD after that. After the birth, things didn’t go very well and among other things, I had to stop breastfeeding after 2 months. While I know (rationally) the things that happened at birth weren’t my fault and I couldn’t have avoided them, with breastfeeding I still carry a lot of blame. My thoughts are around ‘ I should have known better’ and although I survived the birth somehow I should have ignored the pain, the PTSD, things that were going wrong with breastfeeding and I should have known better to not listen to many medical professionals, who unfortunately were one of the causes of this disaster. Long story short, Mars coached me on these things and it turned out there is a lot of anger I still feel around what happened, anger and blame towards myself mainly. Her advice was to forgive myself and practice self compassion about how things went. And this is the part I am stucked with. Maybe it sounds stupid or made up but I don’t know how to forgive myself. I self coached a lot about this and it came up that 2 other moments in my life were as traumatic as this and for those, I also blame myself and cannot forgive myself that I didn’t know better. I genuinely don’t know where to start, how to practice self forgiveness. I don’t know what it means to forgive myself, let alone how to do it. I am a bit shocked by this thought… I ask myself how do i show forgiveness to other people? And still I cannot come up with some concrete ideas on how to do this for myself. If I try thoughts like “I know I was not to blame, I couldn’t have known better ‘ etc. I just cannot believe these thoughts and I spiral back to coming up with more evidence of how I am to blame.

Thank you!

 

 

Answer:

It doesn’t sound stupid at all. It sounds very understandable given what you are going through. We’re so sorry you’ve had a traumatic birth and you didn’t get the breastfeeding experience that you wanted for you and your baby. Sometimes where we get stuck is thinking that we have to be ok with what has happened. Someday you might get there. For now, you can feel all the feelings about the birth and breastfeeding that you want. This is part of the process. Trauma takes time to heal. Postpartum takes time to heal. Having a new baby is taking a lot of your energy right now. There’s no rush.

A small step you could try for now is to make a few ladder thoughts to hold on to. For example:
I don’t know how to forgive myself , YET.

I notice my brain thinking I cannot forgive myself.

I am becoming a person who knows how to forgive myself.

Being a human is really, really hard sometimes.

We’re here to support you through this. Try on some of these thoughts, come up with even ONE of your own. Bring back anything you want more coaching on.