A Stoic Approach to Forgiving Yourself | Stoic Saturdays

You said something you regret. Maybe you let someone down. Perhaps you lost your temper, missed a chance to say goodbye, or stayed silent when you should have spoken. And now, months—or even years—later, you carry the moment like a stone in your chest. Every quiet pause brings it back. Every accomplishment feels stained. You keep replaying it, trying to change it with thought alone. But the past won’t budge.

Most people live like this more than they admit: dwelling, ruminating, dragging their past mistakes behind them like a shadow. They confuse guilt with growth, as if refusing to forgive themselves is some form of moral duty. But self-punishment isn’t redemption. It’s stagnation. The ancient Stoics understood this better than most, and their wisdom offers a way out.

Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, once wrote, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” The mistake happened. It lives in the past. But what keeps the pain alive is not the event itself—it’s your refusal to let it be what it was. It’s the belief that if you replay it often enough, maybe the ending will change. But it won’t. What can change is your relationship with it. That’s where power lives.

Epictetus taught that “it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about them.” You may say, I should have known better. But that’s the illusion. You didn’t know better. Not then. Not with the tools, the understanding, the emotional vocabulary you had at that moment. To assume otherwise is to assume you were someone else. But you weren’t. And the only thing more dangerous than making a mistake is refusing to learn from it because you’re too busy trying to undo it.

The Stoics never demanded perfection. Quite the opposite—they insisted that we would all fall short, often, and that our job was not to become faultless but to become virtuous. That means striving toward wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—not living in shame, but learning from it. “No one becomes good all at once,” Seneca wrote. And no one becomes unforgivable from a single misstep. The fact that you feel guilt at all is proof of your moral compass. But guilt is a tool, not a place to live.

There’s a difference between guilt that sharpens you and guilt that eats you. Healthy guilt signals that something you did went against your values. Chronic guilt convinces you that you are the mistake. It whispers, You don’t deserve happiness. You’ll never be good again. But that’s not Stoic. That’s self-judgment in disguise. Seneca, always direct, asked, “What is the point of dragging up sufferings that are over, of being miserable now because you were miserable then?”

Some people relive one moment for decades. A mother who snapped at her child and still carries the shame, even though the child forgot it hours later. A man who ignored a call from his father—his last call—and punishes himself every time he sees that missed notification in his mind. A student who failed a test, dropped out, and believes they forfeited their potential forever. In all these stories, the memory doesn’t hurt because of the event. It hurts because of the story they tell themselves: This proves I’m not enough.

But those stories are not truths. They are interpretations. And the Stoics believed that the one thing always within your control is how you interpret events. You may not be able to change the past, but you can decide whether to be its prisoner. And that begins with forgiveness, not just as a moral idea, but as a daily act.

To forgive yourself is to say: I did something I regret, but I am not that moment. I was unwise then, but I have the capacity to live wisely now. And wisdom, as the Stoics saw it, was not abstract. It was embodied. It was shown through how you live, how you show up, how you treat others, and how you respond to pain—especially the pain you cause yourself.

You don’t need to explain your philosophy, Epictetus said. You need to embody it. That means moving your energy from rumination to action. If you broke someone’s trust, can you now become someone known for dependability? If you caused harm with your words, can you now become someone who speaks with care and truth? If you wasted years, can you now live this hour fully?

The best apology is transformation. The best way to honor your regret is to let it guide you—not bury you.

But still, forgiveness can feel like letting yourself off the hook. That’s the lie guilt tells: that you must pay forever. But the Stoics saw life differently. Each day was a clean wax tablet. Each breath was a new opportunity to align with virtue. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself that “what stands in the way becomes the way.” Your mistake, if you let it, can become the thing that teaches you how to live rightly.

To live rightly, you must learn to live with yourself—not just the version of you that did everything well, but the one who faltered. The one who missed the mark. The one who hurt people and let themselves down. That version of you is not a failure. It’s part of your evolution. If you despise that person, you cut off the roots of who you are now. Self-forgiveness is not indulgence. It’s integration.

It’s remembering differently.

Not with shame, but with understanding. Not with regret, but with resolve. The wound becomes the wisdom. The guilt becomes the fuel. You do not forget, but you stop letting it define your worth. You stop mistaking your past for your identity. You begin again, not because the past is erased, but because it has been understood.

Forgiveness is not something you wait for. It’s something you choose. Not once, but every time the memory returns. You meet it with clarity, with kindness, and with courage.

You are allowed to begin again.

And you begin by letting go.