You are right, it doesn't happen overnight. You have to go slow, take each situation and disect it in therapy, which means discuss it, and think about who you were, what you knew at the time, not now but when something bad occured. You have to get to a point where you recognize that if something you did wrong was because of something that happened to you, something you really didn't understand at the time, you need to come to a point where you can forgive yourself because you honestly didn't know better.

You are only human, and you were a child, were given messages you had to go by to make decisions. If you were neglected, or abused or even abandoned, you went without something important, and that does happen with alot of people. So what can happen is people who struggled as a child with something that was never their fault, can have problems when they get older, problems with trusting others.

You are 38 and at this point you need to step back and do a review of "you" and take time to become "self aware" and when we do that we are bound to see things we did that we may not like. It is always important to realize that whenever we review we do so with the knowledge of an outcome/consequence. At the time we go through something, we don't have that.

Forgiveness comes into the picture when a person realizes what they didn't know, that they have learned something, and are ready to let go and move forward. Often there is a grieving that also has to take place too.