Forgiving others is challenging enough. But what if you're the one who's done something wrong?

"It can feel a little odd to say, 'I'm going to pardon myself,'" says Tyler VanderWeele, co-director of the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

But it's a worthwhile effort: as with forgiving others, self-forgiveness is linked with less psychological distress, including fewer symptoms of depression, according to a 2020 study VanderWeele co-authored in Frontiers in Psychology.

Getting started requires recognizing that no matter how badly you've behaved, you're in a relationship with yourself — one that deserves respect and compassion. Calling self-forgiveness a "second dimension" of the concept of forgiveness, a 2022 study published in the journal Spiritual Care pointed out that any genuine effort to self‑forgive must include three components: remorse, apology, and the making of amends. Only then can you restore your self-esteem.

"Genuine self-forgiveness needs to acknowledge the wrong, but in spite of the bad, you should want what's good for you," VanderWeele says. "And that may involve changing."

Guilt and self-recrimination will only take you so far, says Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School. But ultimately, forgiving ourselves liberates us to ask the same from others.

"You can't take action in a relationship if you're in that spin cycle of beating yourself up," Malkin says. "If we're riddled with guilt or shame, those feelings shut us down. From a self-forgiving stance, we can take action, even corrective action — but we can't do that if we're stuck in that loop."