“When you’ve done something unforgivable, forgive yourself.”

In this week’s “Lights, Camera, Wisdom,” I explore how to forgive yourself if you’ve done something unforgivable. The quote comes from David Mamet’s House of Games.

The movie stunned me when I saw it. It’s about a psychologist who gets involved with a conman. She dives into a world where people mislead, con, and steel through the confidence game. On the surface, she wants to learn from him. She needs to understand how it works and feels to pull the wool over other people’s eyes. Instead, they fall into a twisted version of love. Then, the movie careens into plot twist after plot twist. Only Mamet could think of this bizarre psychological thriller.

One of the themes is “Take what you want without regard to how you wound others.” Terrifying, really. It explores sociopathy and narcissism in society. In my opinion, it was ahead of its time. It presaged the Internet and the freedom people feel to con and steel from others using this powerful tool. In the movie, they characters con each other and others up close and personal, but the overall game remains the same. People end up hurt or worse in name of “get what you want and to hell with caring about anyone else.”

At one point, the psychologist falls down the narcissistic rabbit hole so far she feels she’ll never feel like a good person again, She’s done unforgivable things. So, she visits her mentor, another psychologist to get guidance.

“When you’ve done something unforgivable, forgive yourself,” her friend advises.

That moment in the movie stopped me in my tracks. Was it true? When we’ve done something unforgivable, should we forgive yourselves? Could we do that?

In the world of the movie, that’s a tough call. She does some terrible things. And if you see the ending, you’ll see what I mean when I say she might not have learned what the rest of us would consider an appropriate lesson. Having said that, what about the real world? Can we apply those words to our own lives and purify our souls? Should we use self-forgiveness to remove the stain of having hurt others?

First, we’d have to come up with a common language on what is and isn’t forgivable. What might seem unforgivable to you, might be a walk in the park to someone else. So, self-forgiveness becomes an individualized act. Someone else can forgive you, but if you still feel guilty, their forgiveness doesn’t mean much on the grand scale. You’ll still feel awful and guilty, at least on some level.

Conversely, you have to ask the question. Can you forgive yourself if the people you’ve hurt haven’t forgiven you? Ultimately, only you can decide for yourself if what you’ve done is unforgivable. And then you have to choose to face it, square on. That is much easier said than done.

To try and clean the darkness out of your psyche, you have to admit you were capable of the terrible act. You have to accept all parts of yourself and live with them. However, blaming yourself wastes energy. Let’s say you feel bad and castigate yourself for it. What have you accomplished other than feeling guilty? It’s only when you take action, when you do something about what you did or said that you make substantive change.

So, instead of blaming yourself, make amends. Focus on making peace with yourself and with those you hurt. Even if you don’t get their forgiveness, try to fix it. And if you try to the best of your ability and they still don’t forgive you, you’ll eventually have to forgive yourself and move on. In order to keep functioning, if you aren’t a sociopath, you have to let go of the guilt in order to make things better. Or the guilt over what you did will eat you alive. It will smear everything with a layer of stress and sorrow. And it will inhibit your ability to get better and be better to others in the future.

That’s the lesson I took from that moment in the movie even if it wasn’t the lesson the movie ultimately taught. When you do something unforgivable, you have to forgive yourself so you don’t waste your energy on guilt feelings. Rather, you’ll have to use that energy to heal and to be better from this day forward.