I adopted a "that was then, this is now" mentality. I was turning over a new leaf, becoming a new and better person. What I did then happened during a "previous life" so to speak. I am able to put that behind me without guilt or shame, just as long as I don't repeat those mistakes.

The past is the past. It cannot be undone. I am not the same person that I was when I drank. I live in the present. I learned from my mistakes and went on with my life.

Become a better person, make an effort today to help someone out

To have self esteem, one must do esteemable acts

I personally found it was easy to forgive others, but forgiving myself was a process.

I will say that sharing my past with someone else was a watershed moment. He was like I did that or I did worse. I knew I was not alone and was able to move forward

1is2many

The fourth and fifth step is where we go on this topic

Hello tinydancer02,

For me, learning to forgive oneself for past deeds and getting to like the person you are have been the keys to liberation and the foundation for building a self-confident future. The problem was that I could not figure out on my own how this could be done so I had to look for help.

There are probably many paths that can be taken to arrive at the same destination and any method that works is as good as another. Falling victim to alcoholism and being unable to fix the problem on my own led me reluctantly to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Within a short space of time I noticed that there were two types of people at meetings. There were those who constantly struggled with alcoholism, who were often angry and feeling miserable and who were the sort of people that you would choose not to seek out if you wanted to have a good time. Then, there were those people who were not just sober but who were calm and serene, sometimes in spite of facing great hardship and tragedy. I was intrigued by this second group and decided to try and copy what they had done to improve their lives.

The process was simple but it required help and direction from people who had travelled the road before and who knew the pitfalls. A willingness to change was an essential ingredient and many thoughts and opinions that had been cast in stone had to be tossed aside. It has been a thoroughly fascinating journey of self-discovery but something that I could never have accomplished without help. That help came in the form of the Twelve Steps.

The process of learning to forgive yourself is covered in Steps 4 and 5 but a short description here could never do it justice. Reading about how it is done may be inspirational to some at least, but it is only by taking action that positive results may be obtained.

Steps 4-5, 8-9. Laying it all out and burying it and then making amends to everyone..

Making amends has given me such freedom, I cannot express.

Of all the things in life that triggered my drinking, I never thought my guilt was one of them. The guilt comes from paste judgments I made against myself and i held on to them for a long time, but with treatment, I learned to let go of the past and let go of all the past guilt made from those negative judgments and I do this by giving it to my Higher Power because He knows what to do with them and I do it with this Prayer:

“ Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction. Teach me how NOT to make of it an obstacle to peace, But let You use it FOR me, to facilitate its coming.”

God Bless