Self-Love And Forgiveness

Forgiveness gets sold as a shortcut: let it go, move on, be the bigger person. But when you’ve been hurt, rushing to forgive can become another way of abandoning yourself. We slow it down and redefine forgiveness as something steadier and more honest: acknowledging what happened, refusing to excuse harmful behavior, and putting responsibility back where it belongs so you can stop carrying what was never yours.

We also dig into attachment theory and how early relationships shape the way we experience love, safety, and connection. When love is inconsistent or painful, the nervous system adapts by reading the room, changing ourselves, and doing whatever it takes to stay connected. Those patterns aren’t character flaws, they’re survival strategies. The hard part of healing is recognizing how often that survival required self-abandonment, and then learning to come back to yourself with compassion.

Along the way, we share two poems, “Sorry” and “Unbraiding,” to name the grief, tenderness, and hope that can surface when you finally stop judging your younger self and start thanking them for surviving. If you’re working on nervous system healing, inner child healing, boundaries, or self-compassion, this conversation offers language and reflection prompts you can return to again and again. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review with one thing you’re ready to set down.

Transcript

Welcome And The Healing Arc

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Welcome back to Held and Becoming Into Your Power. This is episode six, Self-Love and Forgiveness, and I'm Michelle Gorman. Held and becoming into your power is a space where you can hold yourself in love, accountability, grace, and compassion. A space of becoming and a space of fully stepping into your power. Over the past five episodes, we've been building a foundation of understanding. We've explored how the nervous system develops in response to our environments, how attachment, that bond between a child and a parent or caregiver, becomes the spine, the blueprint, if you will, for how we experience love, safety, connections, and how the behaviors we developed based on survival are not character flaws, but adaptations, survival strategies created by a very intelligent nervous system doing its best. And in our last episode, we talked about trust and how rebuilding it begins within ourselves. So today we take that next

Redefining Forgiveness With Accountability

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step. Today we're going to talk about self-love, attachment, and forgiveness. Because once we begin to understand our patterns, a new question naturally arises. How do I begin to let go? Forgiveness is something that is often talked about in healing spaces, but many times it's often misunderstood. For a long time, I believed forgiveness meant letting people off of the hook for the harm that they caused. I put a lot of pressure on myself to forgive people very quickly without holding them accountable for their actions. But over time, my understanding of forgiveness began to really shift. My healing really changed when I started holding people accountable for their own behaviors. So what does that mean? It doesn't mean staying angry. It doesn't mean forgetting what happened. And it doesn't mean making excuses for someone else's behaviors. It simply means acknowledging the truth. Someone hurt me and they are responsible for their own actions. When I began to separate that truth, my life and my healing really shifted. I stopped carrying things that were never mine to hold.

Attachment Theory And Self-Abandonment

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Much of this understanding came through therapy, especially learning about attachment theory. Attachment theory explains how our early relationships shape the way we experience love and safety and connection. When love is secure and consistent in childhood, we learn that it is safe to be ourselves. We learn that we are worthy of care simply by existing. But when love is unpredictable, painful or inconsistent, the nervous system adapts in different ways. We try to become what others need us to be. We read the room, we adjust our behavior, we change ourselves in order to maintain connection. And over time, this can lead to something much, much deeper. We begin to lose ourselves. We begin to abandon ourselves in order to stay connected to the world around us. One of the most difficult parts of healing attachment wounds is realizing how often we abandon ourselves in order to be accepted. And I wrote a poem about this realization.

Poem: Sorry And The Cost

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It's called sorry, and it is in my book Finding My Power. Sorry. Be myself, be me, ambiguity, gravitation pull formed when young, not understanding what everyone wants, adapting and changing to see if they like me all the while suffocating my identity. I am sorry to me for leading astray, trying so hard for others okay. I am so sorry to me for enduring others' pain, losing myself over and over again. I am so sorry to me for dismissing my emotions, carrying others' unhealed burdens, causing much commotion. I am so sorry to me, a day of reckoning, a day of loving me. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. When we begin healing attachment wounds, we often look back at our younger selves and see all the ways we try to survive. The ways we adapted, the ways we tried to earn love, and the ways we silenced ourselves in order to stay connected, to stay safe, to stay accepted.

Self-Forgiveness For Survival Strategies

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Those adaptations were not weaknesses, they were survival. The nervous system was doing exactly what it learned to do. And one of the most important steps in healing is learning to forgive ourselves for adapting. Forgive ourselves for the ways we coped. Because at that time, those were the only tools we had. Forgive ourselves for the times we abandoned our own needs. Forgive ourselves for the moments we didn't know yet how to choose ourselves because we really were doing the best we could with the awareness that we had at that time. Self-love begins when we stop judging those earlier versions of ourselves. Self-love isn't something that we achieve. It's something that we practice and begin to meet with compassion instead.

Guided Reflection And Unbraiding Poem

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Take a deep breath in and gently let it out. And now ask yourself, where in my life did I learn to adapt in order to be loved? Were there moments when I changed myself to keep the peace or to feel accepted? And if that younger version were standing in front of you today, what might you say? Would you meet your younger self with the same expectations you carry today or with compassion? Would you judge them or would you thank them for surviving? Take one more deep breath in and remind yourself you were never meant to carry everything you've been holding, and that process is not instant. I'm going to read another poem titled Unbraiding, and this is from my book Finding My Voice, unbraiding, mixed messages, crossed wires, entanglement fires, unbraiding slowly to make my soul holy, letting go, grow, grow, grow.

Closing And Next Episode Teaser

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Healing is rarely a single moment. More often it's a process of slowly unbraiding the patterns we learned, letting go of what was never ours to carry, and allowing ourselves to grow into something new. One moment at a time, one layer at a time. In the next episode, we'll explore something that naturally follows forgiveness and self-love. Once we begin releasing the burdens we've carried, a new question emerges. Who am I becoming now? We'll talk about reclaiming our voice, redefining our identity beyond old patterns and old wounds, and learning how to live in alignment with the person, the human that we're becoming. Thank you for listening to Heldon Becoming, a space for reflection, healing, and the courage to become who you truly are. Until next time, so much love.