Abstract
When patients enter individual psychotherapy with guilt or shame over past actions or inactions that hurt themselves or others, self-forgiveness can be a powerful tool to help patients move forward. To be effective, however, therapists must be able to determine when self-forgiveness is an appropriate goal for individual counseling, and they must have working knowledge of the process of forgiving oneself. Toward that end, we outline signs that individual therapy patients could benefit from self-forgiveness. We then review theoretical models on the therapeutic promotion of self-forgiveness, as well as intervention programs designed for individual therapy. We end with a review of the empirical literature on self-forgiveness in individual counseling.
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Cornish, M.A., Wade, N.G., Cikara, A. (2017). Self-Forgiveness in Individual Psychotherapy: Therapeutic Models and Counseling Outcomes. In: Woodyatt, L., Worthington, Jr., E., Wenzel, M., Griffin, B. (eds) Handbook of the Psychology of Self-Forgiveness. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60573-9_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60573-9_12
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