Three Steps Toward Forgiveness

The statement "Nobody's perfect" may sound cliché and overused, but it's true. We have made mistakes in our past, and we will continue to make mistakes as we move forward in life. We must learn to forgive ourselves and extend grace to others as well. Recovery involves learning along the way. When we remain teachable there’s room for mistakes as well as forgiveness.

In their book What Went Right: Reframe Your Thinking for a Happier Now, Dr. Michael Wetter and Eileen Bailey offer advice about how to change the self-critical stories in our minds. We can reframe our thinking to gain self-confidence and a more fulfilling life in recovery. We do not have to carry any burdens from the way we lived before sobriety.

In this excerpt, we explore ways to forgive and accept our mistakes. We can use our past to forge a better path to long-term recovery. Wetter and Baily share real-life examples of how overthinking our mistakes can negatively affect our daily lives. This excerpt helps us realize that a wrong decision or misjudgment does not make us a bad person with a bad life. It only makes us human.

This excerpt is from the book What Went Right: Reframe Your Thinking for a Happier Now, by Dr. Michael Wetter and Eileen Bailey. It has been edited for brevity.