For many of us, the harshest litany in our lives is the stream of self-evaluations running through our heads.  This can seem harmless and even necessary to control our behavior; it is easily confused with appropriately holding ourselves accountable.  But the way we deal with ourselves reveals a lot about our views of reality, and it tends to leak out into our relationships with others, though we may not be aware of that.  Today Cinthia looks at two big (and related) reasons we are so hard on ourselves: unforgiveness and perfectionism. Cinthia states that the following is an important rule of life: We accept forgiveness, and we offer forgiveness.  These two actions often seem separate to us, and most of us find one easier than the other.  The two are bound together, however, as Jesus showed in Matthew 6:9-13, often called “The Lord’s Prayer,” and in Matthew 7:12, often called “the Golden Rule.”  (This last has reflections and corollaries that are found in every major religion, indicating that God has written it into our hearts at a deep level.)  Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  He told us to do to others what we would want them to do to us.  And He told us that the second-greatest commandment is to love others as we love ourselves (Mark 12:30-31).  Our relationships with others and our approach to ourselves cannot be separated; this is why unforgiveness on either side of the equation produces sickness and disease in our bodies and souls.  Giving and receiving forgiveness both require an understanding of what forgiveness is not, as well as what forgiveness is.  Forgiveness is not minimizing the offense, dismissing it, condoning it, or saying the offense was understandable or okay.  Forgiving a bad thing does not mean calling it a good thing.  It does not mean we will allow the harm to keep happening or will pretend the harm never happened; remember, trust and accountability are often separate issues from forgiveness.  Forgiveness does not necessarily mean we will forget what happened; in some cases, that would not be safe to do.  Forgiveness means that we turn the debt over to God and let Him handle the accounts.  We stop trying to exact payment on our own, whether from ourselves or others.  We give up the roles of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.  We see ourselves and others as valuable in spite of the choices made; we see people (including ourselves) as more than just the sum of actions committed. For those who struggle with self-forgiveness, self-forgiveness can seem wrong, as if it dismisses the seriousness of the choice or the harm done by it.  It seems too easy to let ourselves walk away from what we did.  The problem is that God is the Judge, not us.  He has made a way to forgive us because of what Jesus did on the cross.  Receiving and embracing His forgiveness is not a dismissal of the seriousness of our actions or the harm done; after all, any choice that requires the blood of God’s Son to pay for it is serious.  But adding our own mental self-punishment to Jesus’s sacrifice is not the same as taking our sin seriously; our self-flagellation cannot add ever equal the horror of the punishment He took for us.  If we take our own sin seriously, we must also take seriously what He did about it. Self-forgiveness means that we choose to live at peace with ourselves because God has chosen to live at peace with us.  We may still attempt to repair damage done when that is possible (e.g., acknowledging, apologizing, making attempts to restore what we took from someone else when that is possible, etc.), but we recognize that refusing to forgive ourselves does not repair anything or help anyone.  We choose to walk away from the mental torture of holding onto our sins and mistakes.  We choose to see ourselves as more than our offenses.  Cinthia models a statement like this one: “I am not proud of what I did, and I do not condone or minimize it.  But I am choosing to mov