Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet

What is Self-Forgiveness?

Just like getting help, self-forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do – but also one of the bravest. Self-forgiveness is a liberating and self-compassionate act because it will help you come to terms with past events and mistakes. By coming to terms with past events and mistakes, you’re setting yourself up to move on and be released from lingering feelings of guilt, resentment, unhappiness, shame, and anger. Self-forgiveness opens up the opportunity for you to let go and heal.

To practice self-forgiveness, you need to adopt a certain mindset: that of a comforting friend that shows kindness and empathy towards yourself. It’s an act that requires you to acknowledge that holding onto your guilt and dwelling on your past mistakes will only make you feel worse and may hinder you from growing as a person. It requires you to learn from and take responsibility for your mistakes.

Self-forgiveness is a journey in its own right, and it might take a while to get there. Thinking about being worthy of forgiveness and kindness is hard for someone dwelling on their mistakes. If you have a patient whose mental health has taken a nosedive because they can’t forgive themselves, your job as a therapist is to help them work through their lingering feelings of self-resentment. One way to do so is through worksheets.

How to use the Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet

One of the worksheets you can issue to patients unable to move on from their mistakes is the Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet! This worksheet is adapted from the Self-Forgiveness Letter template made by the awesome folks at Positive Psychology.

The Self-Forgiveness is a simple epistolary exercise that asks the patient the following questions:

• What is or are the reasons why you have been unable to forgive yourself all this time? What mistakes have you made that made you feel guilty, ashamed, etc.? Identify all of these. Stating them is one way of acknowledging them. Refrain from making excuses and criticizing yourself.
• How did these mistakes impact your life, especially your mental health?
• How do you plan on rectifying your mistakes? Determine ways that will allow you to correct and seek forgiveness for your mistakes (it would be best if they are actionable and you’ll follow through with them). Besides seeking forgiveness from others (if others were wronged by your mistakes), accept the past and make amends with yourself and your actions.
• How do you plan on growing from your mistakes? Write about what you can do to not only avoid making the same mistakes but also what you can do to become a better person.

The patient simply needs to write a letter to themselves based on these questions.

The original by Positive Psychology has four sections, but we decided to have just one to allow the writing to be more free-form. The guide questions are there to help give them an idea of how they should go about writing a letter to themselves.

Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet Example

Now that you know what self-forgiveness is and what the Letter of Self-Forgiveness worksheet is, it’s time to check out our template. As we mentioned in the previous section, this was adapted from the version created by members of Positive Psychology. Our version isn’t divided into sections like theirs, but we took the prompts and wrote them as questions (with a few considerations here and there) included in the instructions. After that, there is a massive blank space where they can write the letter, and at the end is a “Love, yourself.”

If you like what you see and believe this free forgiveness PDF template will help your patients work through their feelings of guilt, self-resentment, and shame, feel free to download it! You can print it, or you can go paperless and send a PDF file to your patient to have them engage with the sole interactable portion of the sheet.

Download this Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet Example:

When is it best to use the Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet?

The best time to issue the Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet would be later in your patient’s therapy program. At the start, they are likely not to be emotionally strong and confident enough to forgive themselves for their mistakes. Since this worksheet requires them to identify these mistakes, it might make them feel more guilty and ashamed than they already are. To properly accomplish this worksheet, they need to create the emotional distance required to properly think about their mistakes without getting triggered.

The worksheet also asks the patient to state how they would rectify their mistakes (if it’s even possible to do so) and seek forgiveness, as well as how they can atone by making changes that will lead them to become a better person that is well-equipped to avoid making the same mistakes again. This is something that they might have a hard time doing early on in the therapy program.

Given this, it’s best to focus on helping them build confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. They will need those if they want to take on their past mistakes and free themselves from perpetual self-blame, guilt, and shame. It’s also necessary to teach them skills like conflict resolution, critical thinking, problem-solving, effective communication, and decatastrophization so they are equipped to handle how they rectify their mistakes, to be able to take the fact that it’s possible that the people they have wronged won’t forgive them, and what they can do to be a better person who won’t make the same mistakes.

What are the benefits of the Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet?

It can help the therapist get to know the patient more.

Talking about mental health issues is already hard enough for most people. It’s even hard to talk about our respective pasts, especially if it involves things we have done that we aren’t proud of. Through this worksheet, therapists can learn why their patient is having trouble forgiving themselves. Knowing what they’re dealing with and what’s causing their guilt can help the therapist determine how to support their patient.

It can help patients become less critical of themselves and regulate their emotions.

Assuming that you have helped your patient find confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth, this worksheet can help patients become less critical of themselves. One of the prompts tells them to identify their mistakes without making excuses and criticizing themselves. By learning to acknowledge what you’ve done without making excuses and self-criticism, the patient has the opportunity to look at themselves in a positive light, specifically that they are only human and mistakes happen, but they shouldn’t let those mistakes and the lingering guilt that came with them to define the rest of their life. By warding off feelings of guilt and shame, they open themselves to the possibility of atonement, redemption, and self-forgiveness.

The Letter of Self-Forgiveness can help them set goals.

This worksheet will ask patients what they plan to do to rectify their mistakes and how they plan on seeking forgiveness from others if they have wronged them. It also asks the patient what they can do after rectifying their mistakes, specifically how to improve themselves so they don’t repeat the same mistakes, and what they can do to be an overall better person. Goals will help them overcome any lingering guilt, shame, resentment, etc.

How can Carepatron help with mental health-related work?

If you’re reading this guide for the Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet, you will likely be a therapist or an adjacent healthcare professional looking for things to add to your roster of tools. If so, hello! We hope you found this guide helpful and that the template helps your patients.

We would also like to ask you for your time to explore more of the Carepatron platform, if you haven’t yet done so. We have several features that you’ll enjoy.

One of the features we’re most proud of, and one that we believe will positively and greatly impact your work, is our repository of resources. This repository houses a massive collection of clinical resources that spans many healthcare fields, including various types of therapy, from cognitive behavioral therapy to family therapy. We have a wide variety of worksheets (including this Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheet) that can be used to help your patient apply anything you’ve taught them, assessments to gauge patients for symptoms related to mental health problems, survey templates to help you find out how your patient feels about your therapy program, and a whole lot more! The resources are free, and you can download as much as you want and need!

We also have a nifty storage system that you can access by purchasing a subscription with us. This storage system will allow you to store clinical documents with us in a HIPAA-compliant manner, which means that even we can’t access them. Only you have the power to dictate who gets to access your files. You can even store filled-out Letter of Self-Forgiveness Worksheets with us if you want!

Storing your files with us is essentially the same thing as creating backups. In the event that you somehow lose your physical files, lose access to your personal cloud storage, or your work device gets busted, you can redownload your files from us, reprint, reupload to a new personal cloud storage, and create copies in a new work device. Awesome, right?

Not only will Carepatron help you streamline your workflow and provide you with clinical resources, but we can also help preserve your work by securing them!