Primarily, I remind myself that I have an illness whose symptoms occasionally lead to emotional harm on the people close to me and that, in a sense, to feel guilt or shame about this is similar to someone with diabetes feeling guilty about their irritability from low blood sugar, or someone with a migraine feeling guilty about needing silence and shutting people out for it.
"I am not the problem. The illness is the problem."
It can also help to put perspective on perceived wrongdoings. For instance, looking at the world around us... When is the last time you caused someone to lose their home? Or denied someone access to healthcare? Or rejected someone's core identity? Or abandoned a pet at the side of the road? Or scammed a senior out of their savings? Or street raced down the highway? This isn't to dismiss the impact of your problematic behaviour but to just acknowledge its place in the bigger picture.
For as much as you are responsible for your own actions, the other person is responsible for how they
react to your actions and for reconciling themselves with the outward symptoms of your illness. It is also up to them to establish their own boundaries and to communicate those boundaries in a way that's ideally free of judgement against you. In other words,
it takes two to argue.
I would say this is more akin to putting perspective on guilt and shame rather than totally absolving yourself of it.
Still, you're dealing with presumably severe-to-extreme mental health conditions that are to a point where you're active on a suicide forum. This fact alone means that it's worth trying to take it easy on yourself, as far as these feelings of shame.
Highly unlikely any of this would free your mind of these feelings, but
any reduction in intensity is still
something.
This shame is killing me and the hard part is I WAS wrong and an asshole or embarrassing in those instances.
If there are specific instances that you just can't reconcile with, you could consider apologizing for them.
By "apologizing", I mean a
full apology where you
acknowledge the wrongful action (state what you did),
admit responsibility (own the wrongdoing, sans excuses),
actually state the words ("I'm sorry" or "I apologize"),
offer to make amends (eg. "I'd like to make it up to you by doing this or doing that"; "how can I make it up to you?"), and
tell them what you'll do differently going forward ("this is what I'm doing differently, going forward"; commit to doing better in the future).
Ideally, only apologize once. And do so without expectations of the other person. Remember that a dry response or outright silence isn't necessarily indicative of rejection -- it could just be that they need time to process it.
With any apology, if you're not satisfied with their response and feel compelled to repeat it, you could say something like,
"Will you forgive me," or,
"Do you accept my apology?" But I wouldn't push it further than that. You've owned your wrongdoing -- what the other person does with that, is totally on them.
