You can't heal while punishing yourself: four ways out of self-punishment

The Short Version

Punishing yourself for the past does not make you better. It keeps you where you are. Pastor Sarah Jakes Roberts spent ten years at it and puts the lesson in one line: "You can't want to heal and punish yourself at the same time" [1][2]. Chrissy Teigen tells Mel Robbins she has always been a punisher and that it is exhausting [3]. Coach Jim Curtis says the first person to forgive is the one in the mirror [4]. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer goes a step further and says that behavior makes sense from the point of view of the person doing it, so the need for blame, and with it forgiveness, falls away [5]. They do not agree on the word forgiveness. They do agree on the order: the harshness has to stop first, and change comes after.

Table of contents

What They Said

Sarah Jakes Roberts: ten years of sitting with herself the wrong way

Roberts became pregnant at 13 and had her son at 14, as the daughter of a prominent megachurch pastor [1][2]. She already felt she was not one of the good church girls, and the pregnancy seemed to confirm that she did not fit [1]. For about ten years she tried to become someone else. She compares herself to Cinderella trying on shoe after shoe, through achievement, relationships and school. She waitressed at a strip club, stayed in toxic relationships and went through a divorce [1].

She was reflecting during those years, but in a particular way. "I was sitting with myself punishing myself," she says, replaying lines like "How could you be so stupid? You made the biggest mistake. No one's ever going to want you" [1]. Her conclusion is that how you sit with yourself decides whether you heal. Repeating the negative words other people have spoken over you will never bring you to a place of healing [1]. What worked was a different intention: "I had to sit with myself until I no longer cringed," until she no longer felt shame and could feel compassion where she once felt guilt [1][2]. When Mel asks how a person learns to forgive themselves, her first answer is "It starts with intention" [1].

She does not pretend this is comfortable. Sitting with yourself and trying to be compassionate brings discomfort, because it requires you to love yourself in a way you do not think is possible [1][2]. Until you can do it, she says, it does not matter who you love or what you achieve. None of those things will make you feel better [1][2].

Mel stops the conversation at this point and repeats it for listeners: "You cannot heal while you are still punishing yourself" [2].

Roberts also explains why people keep doing it. The reasoning, as she voices it, is "I'm going to keep this from happening again by constantly living with it right in front of me" [2]. We believe keeping a mistake in front of our face will prevent a repeat and prepare us for rejection [1]. The cost is that we will never be more than that one moment if we keep replaying it [1].

She adds three ideas that give the compassion some structure.

The discount. She grew up at the height of purity culture. Once she had broken its main rule, she felt her price had been marked down, and since it was already low, she accepted things she would not otherwise have accepted [1]. She calls the belief behind that a lie. "Your value is an inside job," she says, and what you have survived adds to your value [1]. Working with many women, she has found that nearly everyone has some experience that made them feel less valuable than the person next to them [1].

The cupboard. After the pregnancy she tried to build a brand new life on top of her past, and she believes she failed repeatedly because she was not using what she actually had: a child, a sharp mind, a gift for writing, insecurities and later a divorce [1]. "You can't reinvent who you are using ingredients that don't exist," she says [1]. When she started a blog and readers found it inspiring, she tried to scare them off by revealing the teen pregnancy, the divorce and dropping out of college. They only connected more [1]. The things she thought disqualified her were what people wanted.

The whole movie. Regret, she suggests, comes from turning on the movie of your life in the middle and judging yourself by one scene [1]. When she watches the whole thing, she sees a 13-year-old who was lost, lonely and angry while her parents' church grew explosively, with nobody helping her process it [1]. Anyone with what you had in your cabinet, she says, would likely have made similar choices [1]. She defines compassion as looking at your life through a lens of love and not judgment, and says that if you cannot do that for yourself, you cannot receive love or extend it well [1].

None of this erases responsibility. She still wishes some choices had been different, mainly for her son, who grew up while she was still growing up [1]. Her definition of power includes humility, which she describes as owning what you do wrong [1].

One story shows how long a verdict can last. When she first got pregnant, someone close to her said, "I always knew to expect something like this from you," and she believed it for ten years [1][2]. Years later she felt God say the same words to her with the opposite meaning [1][2]. Her daily version of that reversal is rest. For her, rest includes letting the 13-year-old who was called names take in where life is now: a son who is 21 and loves her, and a husband and children who speak well of her [1][2].

Chrissy Teigen and Mel Robbins: the prison

Teigen gives the clearest description of what self-punishment is like from inside. On her own podcast, in clips Robbins replays, she says the relationship with herself is the hardest part: "I've always been a punisher," whether through diets, food or drinking [3]. She inflicts some kind of pain on herself for letting people down or for feeling she was not good enough in a group [3].

It governs her days. She rarely leaves the house, because after any interaction, even at the grocery store, she works hard to make sure people had a good experience and then dwells on it [3]. "It's getting so exhausting being this mean to myself," she says, and "I don't know what it's like to not be that way" [3]. She knows what ending it would give her. So much of her day would be free to think of things that really matter. But for now, "I'm in the prison of it" [3].

She traces it to childhood. She wanted love and affection, had a parent who was not very affectionate, and felt she was someone to be shown off. Performing and being good earned praise, and she has wanted to be good for everybody since [3]. What she wishes she could change is this: "I wish that I weren't so misunderstood and I wish people knew how good I was" [3]. She also says interactions with adults in her childhood, including sexual ones, shaped her people-pleasing, and that this is one reason she is in therapy [3].

Robbins's answer is not phrased as forgiveness. She tells Teigen she is in a prison because she has handed control of her worth and happiness to other people's reactions [3]. When Teigen insists she can control what people think, "I can by being really good," Robbins says no, and asks whether Teigen could control what Robbins would say about her to her own daughters afterward. Teigen admits she could not [3]. Robbins's thesis is "Your power is never in what someone else thinks. Your power is in what you think about yourself" [3].

Her tool has two parts. Say let them about what other people think, feel or do. Then say let me, and return to the three things you control: what you think, what you do or do not do, and how you process your emotions [3]. She stresses that this pattern is not the person's fault. It was conditioned in childhood, when we were taught that we were responsible for other people's moods [3].

To explain that conditioning she plays a clip of psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti. A child, he says, tries to make sense of the world without abstract thought or life experience. If a stressed parent snaps at a child who asks for a drink, the child does not conclude that the parent is in a bad place. The child concludes it must be them. "So we attribute the negative things around us to ourselves," he says [3]. He cites Winnicott's idea of raising children to feel good enough, and says that if we did not get that in childhood we can go back and change it later in life [3]. Robbins calls her let them a practice of attribution: assigning someone's bad mood or negative opinion to them and not to your worth [3].

She adds a second idea that takes the sting out of being judged: "Two things can be true at once" [3]. Someone can be disappointed in you and still love you. She proves it by asking Teigen for her own negative thoughts about her husband, and sharing her own about hers [3]. And she names what is at stake beyond Teigen herself. Teigen's biggest fear is passing this on to her children, and Robbins points out that her kids are watching how much strangers affect her [3]. "You don't have to live like this," she tells her [3].

Jim Curtis: the first person to forgive is in the mirror

Curtis, a coach and hypnotherapist, makes the strongest claim about order. "You can't manifest a new life with an old identity," he says [4]. People change their behavior, waking earlier and working harder, while still holding a subconscious belief that they are not enough, and they eventually burn out or sabotage what they build [4]. His short version: "You can't create a life that your subconscious mind doesn't believe you deserve" [4].

Asked what someone should do when nothing has worked, he answers with a play on Robbins's phrase: "I want to change Let Them to Forgive Them" [4]. And he starts with the self. Forgive yourself for not achieving, for letting yourself down and for shaming yourself, and you move into more of a flow state [4]. When Lewis Howes asks who a person needs to forgive first, Curtis guesses that listeners pictured a parent or a spouse, then tells them to look in the mirror: "You are the first person that you need to forgive" [4]. He lists what that person has been through at your hands. You have been terribly hard on yourself, telling yourself you are not good enough and shaming yourself for the decisions you made [4].

His mirror exercise is concrete. Stand naked in front of a full-length mirror, close enough to see every wrinkle. Listen to the judgments your mind produces about age, weight, a hip that sits higher than the other. Then apologize to yourself and forgive each one [4]. What follows, he says, is compassion for yourself [4].

He speaks from experience. He has lived with chronic pain, avoided audiences and public appearances out of shame about the way he walked, and believed no woman would want him [4]. Asked to rate how mean he had been to himself, he says he was "the meanest" [4]. Only when he forgave himself and began loving himself did his life open up, with more love, wealth and ability to contribute, even though his physical condition did not change [4]. He admits the practice is still tested most by his health. New pain frustrates him, and forgiving his body and himself brings him back faster [4].

Forgiving others comes second, including parents who did the best they could [4]. He is careful about its limits. It does not mean letting go of boundaries or bringing harmful people back into your life [4]. Holding on, he says, keeps you in the identity of the abused child or the divorced person, stuck in survival mode [4]. Howes reads a line from Curtis's book that unforgiveness places a burden on your heart, and sums it up as "forgiveness equals freedom" [4].

For a daily practice he recommends the Hawaiian Ho'oponopono prayer: center yourself, breathe and repeat "I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you" 10 or 20 times [4]. He frames the whole approach in one line: "This is not about fixing you. It's about freeing you" [4].

Ellen Langer: if behavior made sense, what is there to forgive?

Langer, the Harvard psychologist, is here for one idea, which she calls the most important thing she has come to in all her years of study: "behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or the actor wouldn't do it" [5].

She describes a study behind it. People circled traits they kept trying and failing to change about themselves, such as impulsive or gullible. Later they circled the traits they valued, such as spontaneous or trusting. These were the same behaviors described positively [5]. As long as she values being trusting, she says, she will sometimes look gullible [5]. Seeing this makes people like themselves more and fight less in relationships [5]. It is also why she dislikes New Year's resolutions, which imply that what you did before made no sense [5].

Then she takes the idea somewhere the others do not. Asked to give a sermon, she chose forgiveness as her subject and reached what she admits some would call a sacrilegious conclusion: "you can't forgive unless you first blame" [5]. Forgivers are blamers. If you understand why someone did what they did, there is no need to blame, and so no need to forgive [5]. Andrew Huberman responds that he would love to bypass blame altogether [5].

Langer does not apply this only to other people. In her account, recognizing that behavior makes sense leaves less need for blame, forgiveness, fear or self-judgment, and she says there are then no good and bad people [5].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that self-punishment does not work. Roberts punished herself for a decade and stayed stuck [1]. Teigen calls it exhausting and a prison [3]. Curtis says effort stacked on a belief that you are not enough ends in burnout or sabotage [4]. Langer's study suggests the traits people keep attacking in themselves are the other side of traits they value [5].

They agree on the order. For all of them, easing up comes before improvement. Roberts could not heal until the punishing stopped [1][2]. Curtis says you cannot manifest without forgiveness [4]. Robbins tells Teigen she will never feel safe while her goodness depends on other people's opinions [3]. Langer says the realization itself changes everything and that life becomes easier and nicer [5]. Nobody here says you earn kindness toward yourself by first becoming better.

They agree the punishing voice was learned early. Roberts carried a sentence someone said to her as a pregnant teenager [1][2]. Teigen learned to perform for praise [3]. Conti explains why children blame themselves for the moods around them [3]. Curtis traces subconscious beliefs mostly to ages zero to seven and to emotionally charged events [4].

They disagree about forgiveness itself. This is the real split. Curtis makes self-forgiveness step one and gives a prayer for it [4]. Mel asks Roberts how to forgive yourself, and Roberts answers with compassion [1]. Langer rejects the frame. In her view forgiveness requires blame first, and blame is what understanding removes [5]. The disagreement is partly about words. Roberts's whole movie, in which anyone with your ingredients would likely have done the same, is very close to Langer's point that behavior makes sense to the person doing it [1][5]. Both replace a verdict with an explanation. But there is a practical difference too. Curtis's method keeps the idea that something needs pardoning and then pardons it, again and again. Langer's removes the charge. Each has reasons. Curtis works with people whose bodies and nervous systems are caught in shame, and offers them a ritual they can repeat [4]. Langer is describing a change in how you see behavior, which she believes makes the ritual unnecessary [5].

They disagree on where the problem sits. Roberts and Curtis look at the past: the mistake, the old story, the old identity [1][4]. Robbins looks at the present: Teigen's punishment is triggered daily by what she imagines other people think, so the fix is to stop handing them the measure of her worth [3]. Curtis explicitly sets his phrase against hers [4]. They fit together better than that suggests. Robbins's method stops new punishment from being triggered. Curtis's and Roberts's deal with what is already stored.

They differ on faith. Roberts found healing through an intimate relationship with God, though she offers listeners without faith a version based on the intentionality of their existence [1]. Curtis mixes hypnotherapy and therapy techniques with prayer and talk of frequencies [4]. Robbins and Langer make their case without religion [3][5].

Why It Works

Replaying a mistake defines you by it. Roberts's explanation is that the mistake held in front of your face becomes the only thing you are [1]. Watching the whole movie adds the context that the single scene leaves out [1].

Low self-worth lowers what you accept. Her account of the discount describes a spiral: feeling marked down, she accepted worse treatment, which seemed to confirm the lower price [1]. Deciding that value is an inside job interrupts it [1].

Identity overrides effort. Curtis describes the conscious mind, which supplies willpower, fighting the subconscious, which holds who we believe we are. If the belief says you do not deserve the result, new behavior eventually fizzles [4].

Misattribution can be corrected. Conti's point is that children assign other people's bad moods to themselves because they cannot yet think abstractly, and that this can be changed later in life [3]. Robbins's let them is a way of practicing the correction [3].

Reframing ends the fight with yourself. In Langer's study the same behavior appeared on the list of traits people wanted to change and, in positive words, on the list they valued [5]. Seeing that makes people like themselves more [5].

What Curtis cites, and what is only his claim. He refers to a study reporting that forgiveness lowered inflammation and cortisol and raised immunity, including in people with HIV [4]. He also tells a story of a man praying over photos of prison inmates, after which violent crime reportedly dropped, and speaks of the prayer as a frequency [4]. The summary gives no evidence for those last claims, and they are best read as his beliefs.

Punishment uses up the day. Teigen says healing this would free much of her day to think of things that matter [3]. Roberts says that without self-compassion you end up in what she calls the struggle Olympics, unable to receive love or extend it well [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies to regret over your own past choices [1][2], to daily self-criticism after ordinary interactions [3], to shame about your body or health [4], and to traits you keep trying and failing to change [5].

It does not cancel accountability. Roberts counts humility, owning what you do wrong, as part of power, and still wishes she had chosen differently for her son's sake [1]. Compassion here means an accurate account of what happened, not a claim that it did not matter.

It does not require letting anyone back in. Curtis says forgiveness leaves boundaries in place [4]. Robbins calls let them the world's best boundary [3].

It is not quick. Roberts took about ten years [1]. Teigen says letting people think what they think is incredibly hard, and she has known no other way of being [3]. Curtis still gets pulled back by new pain [4].

Parents are a special case. Robbins says it is not your job to manage other adults' emotions, but parents do need to help children process theirs [3]. Teigen's fear of passing the pattern on is a reason to work on it, since her children are watching [3].

Some of this needs professional help. Teigen links her pattern to childhood experiences, including sexual ones, and is in therapy for it [3]. Curtis mentions depression among the things people shame themselves for [4]. If self-punishment involves trauma, an eating or drinking problem, depression or thoughts of harming yourself, see a licensed therapist or doctor. A mirror exercise or a mantra is not a substitute.

What To Do With It

1. Change how you sit with yourself. Set the intention before you reflect. Roberts's test is whether you are sitting with yourself to punish or in pursuit of compassion, and her target is to stay until you no longer cringe [1][2].

2. Write down the sentence you replay. Hers were about being stupid and unwanted [1]. Notice whether you are keeping the mistake in view because you believe that will stop it happening again [2].

3. Watch the whole movie. Describe who you were at the time, what you had and what nobody was helping you with. Ask whether anyone with the same ingredients would likely have chosen the same [1].

4. Open the cupboard. List every real ingredient, including the ones you hide, and plan from those. Start privately, then tell one friend who needs to hear that their story is not over [1].

5. Do the mirror exercise. Stand in front of a full-length mirror, listen to each judgment, then apologize to yourself and forgive each one [4].

6. Use a short repeated phrase. Curtis suggests the Ho'oponopono lines 10 or 20 times after centering yourself and breathing [4].

7. Say let them, then let me. When someone's mood or opinion starts a spiral, assign it to them and return to what you think, what you do and how you handle your emotions [3].

8. Test the belief that being good controls opinions. Ask Robbins's question: could you control what this person says about you after you leave [3]? Then remember that two things can be true at once, and that people who love you also have negative thoughts about you [3].

9. Try Langer's reframe. Take a trait you keep trying to change and name the valued trait it belongs to, as with gullible and trusting. Ask what made the behavior make sense at the time [5].

10. Rest, and update your younger self. Roberts lets the girl she was see how life turned out. Do the same for the version of you that heard the worst things [1][2].

Sources

1. Sarah Jakes Roberts on Letting Go of Regret and Creating a New Version of Yourself · The Mel Robbins Podcast
2. Sarah Jakes Roberts on Self-Forgiveness, Opening Your Cupboard and Letting Power Flow Through You · The Mel Robbins Podcast
3. How to Stop Caring What People Think of You · The Mel Robbins Podcast
4. Jim Curtis on Release, Align, Become: Why You Can't Manifest With an Old Identity · The School of Greatness
5. Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity · Huberman Lab