Why Self-Forgiveness is the Hidden Test of Heroism?
Courage to Forgive - A conversation with Allison Armstrong 3/3
In a candid conversation on shame, grief and faith, Alison Armstrong says the courage to forgive oneself can restore men from the spiral of penance and self-condemnation.
Dominic De Souza began with a confession.
He told Alison Armstrong he had carried a story for almost a decade, a story he had barely admitted aloud. Early in his marriage, after the birth of his first child, his wife contracted a chronic illness. Family support weakened. Stress mounted. Then came a miscarriage.
“I remember at the time thinking that I didn’t react very much to it,” De Souza said. “And I just had always been a very hard worker. And so I just went back to working very, very hard.”
Years later, while walking through his neighborhood, the meaning struck him.
“This whole time, I have been so ashamed as a man that on my watch someone died because I wasn’t good enough,” he said.
It was, he said, a shame rooted less in logic than in the burden he had been carrying. He wondered whether he should have been “more creative,” “attentive,” or “proactive” enough to create safety. The grief had driven him to build skills, earn more, grow stronger, provide better.
Then, unexpectedly, he found that the old wound had changed.
“I had thawed out that grief, I think, by leveling up,” De Souza said. “It felt good to be able to put that shame down.”
Shame Without an Audience
Armstrong began by separating shame from embarrassment.
Embarrassment, she said, comes from being seen as imperfect. It requires an audience, or fear of one.
Shame is different.
“Shame requires no audience,” Armstrong said. “It requires no witness.”
The person harmed, she added, does not even have to agree harm occurred. Shame can remain entirely “between you and you.”
For Armstrong, shame is especially destructive because it reaches into the person’s sense of self. Her late husband, she said, taught her that “the worst part about shame is that it disconnects us from our spirit.”
She described shame as arising when someone believes a betrayal has occurred: betrayal of values, identity, spiritual purpose, or the good one believed he was meant to embody.
That betrayal, real or perceived, can make a person avoid an entire area of life.
“If he failed in a marriage, doesn’t ever want to get married again,” Armstrong said. “If he failed in a business, he doesn’t ever want to own a business again.”
Then she named a sentence many men carry: “I should have been there…”
Others may argue against it. They may present facts. They may explain that presence was impossible. But shame, Armstrong said, resists logic.
“They still should have been there,” she said.
The Deserving Equation
Armstrong described one of the more dangerous patterns she sees in men: a running inner account of good and bad.
She called it a “lifetime deserving equation.”
Men, she said, may keep track of the good they have done and the harm they believe they have caused. The sum becomes what they think they deserve. When the account turns negative, they may feel they deserve nothing.
But human beings still need things.
“A man thinks he doesn’t deserve something, but he needs it, so he takes it,” Armstrong said. “And then he’s ashamed of himself for having taken it.”
That creates the spiral: need, taking, shame, lower deserving, more need.
De Souza recognized the pattern in prayer. He said the line that helps him most is simple: “Jesus, you loved me first.”
Rather than praying from self-worth, he said, the prayer gives him a new starting place. Before achievement. Before proof. Before self-accusation.
“I have a fresh baseline I need to be operating out of,” De Souza said.
The conversation turned toward Catholic men, heroism and the inner pressure that can drive a man toward difficult, costly action.
De Souza wondered aloud whether some heroic acts come from a desire to balance the scales. A man might volunteer, sacrifice, serve, suffer, or endure because doing good seems to answer the weight of what he believes counts against him.
“I have no idea if most men would agree with me,” he said. “But that’s what goes through my mind.”
The Courage to Forgive Yourself
Armstrong pushed the conversation toward free will.
She said shame can override the will by trapping a person in the endless attempt to deserve what he needs. In response, she described a process she calls “noble forgiveness.”
The process is direct. A person says, “I harmed or hurt,” names the person, names the action, and refuses to add excuses.
“Without any because,” Armstrong said.
The listener responds with honor: “Thank you for owning that.”
Then comes the hard question: Do you forgive yourself?
Armstrong said many people answer no. They believe forgiveness must be earned. They believe penance must precede release.
But she argued that shame carries benefits, which makes it hard to surrender. It protects from future failure by keeping people away from the place where they failed.
The cost is absence.
“We’re MIA,” she said. “We’re missing from that part of life.”
That absence can touch children, spouses, parents, employees and friends. The person remains protected, but unavailable.
“Really, I consider forgiving oneself to be a courageous act,” Armstrong said. “It’s heroic to forgive yourself.”
She added that from a Christian view, the refusal to receive forgiveness can become its own arrogance.
“Jesus already forgave me,” she said. “Who am I to say I know better?”
Heroism as Becoming
De Souza connected the conversation to the stories people tell.
He said many people spend life trying to preserve who they think they are, even when life demands growth. Stories, he said, expose that struggle.
“Who you thought you were cannot endure what the world has thrown at you,” De Souza said.
For him, the hero’s journey reflects the pressure to become someone freer, more mature and more responsive to love. In many stories, he said, the hero resists until suffering burns away the false self.
“You have to go through hell to burn off the bits that aren’t actually you,” he said.
He pointed to action stories in which a soldier, brother or father carries guilt and then endures extreme trial to save others. The drama becomes an outer version of an inner reckoning.
At the end, the hero may finally rest.
Armstrong accepted some of the insight, then pressed deeper.
“We could call it identity, we could call it ego,” she said. “That self that we try to preserve and be true to.”
But, she said, that preserved self may fail as a compass. “I’m not sure that it’s a true north,” Armstrong said.
A Prayer for the Moment
Armstrong then told a story of her own.
Years earlier, she was asked to interview people for a League of Women Voters project on homelessness and hunger in Orange County. She had never interviewed anyone and felt overwhelmed as she walked down a grassy hill toward the filming site.
She stopped and prayed.
“Thank you God for having me be whatever I need to be to get your work done,” she said.
She said the prayer has followed her into interviews, stages, writing and difficult public moments. It is a prayer, in her telling, that loosens the grip of self-preservation. Instead of defending an identity, she receives what the moment requires.
The result, she said, can be astonishing.
“It literally will prevent miracles,” Armstrong said of clinging to the self. “It’ll prevent such beauty, such surprises.”
De Souza offered one final metaphor for ego. Ego, he said, can serve a purpose. It can be fuel.
“You put fuel in the gas tank,” he said. “You don’t pour it in the driver’s seat.”
For a conversation that began with miscarriage, hidden grief and a decade-old burden, the final image carried the theme home: shame may drive, but it should never steer. Forgiveness, received and practiced, may be the harder road.
But it is also the one that returns a person to life.