Forgiveness

Unfulfilling relationships cause us negative feelings that are affecting our mental, physical and spiritual health. Waves of anger, resentment, stress and hostility take control over our minds, consuming our energy while remembering the arguments we have had, the betrayal and all the efforts we have made to make our relationships work. Our emotions become even more intense as we remember the good times we had with the people we loved but chose to hurt us. Our mind wants to make sense of our experiences and distinguish between illusion and reality. We may spend weeks, months or years thinking repeatedly about them, aiming to understand our past and even exploring revenge… All these thoughts and intense feelings damage us, as we sit with the pain, and we cannot move forward in a journey toward healing.

Healing implies forgiveness. Forgiveness is not about approving or justifying the actions of those who chose to hurt us but about letting go of those past unpleasant experiences. It is not a one time “event” or moment when decide to let things go, but more an ongoing effort to accept that all these experiences have already happened and that we cannot do anything to change their course. It comes from a deep understanding that if we cannot accept the past, we allow the past to keep us trapped in resentment and bitterness.

Forgiveness should not be a mandate, an expectation that others impose on us. Use your own judgement if you hear statements like “to forgive is divine” or “turn the other cheek”, as religious beliefs are often deeply held and might create a sense of obligation and a failure feeling if being unable to embrace this moral imperative. The pressure of forgiving can be retraumatizing, reminding the victim about not having the possibility to choose, about not being in control, about having to put aside their needs to satisfy the needs of others.

Forgiveness is a choice that comes from our own desire to see our past experiences as learning opportunities, something that happened for us and not to us. We know that we are healing when we hold onto our sense of agency, we acknowledge our past and then we commit to making better decisions in the future, as we have the desire to release the pain. Our mind may try to go back and forth many times, moving from past to present, until finally settling in the present, stable and determined to stay there.

Forgiveness may also involve an attempt to reconcile with the perpetrator, when the perpetrator wants to apologize and there is trust that no further harm will be caused. This is a process that involves an attempt to understand the perpetrator's circumstances and the perpetrator's desire to share power with the victim. However, this may not be your case! If your sense of safety has been jeopardized, your safety cannot be compromised in the future!

Sometimes healing involves forgiving ourselves. Deep reflections help us understand our own contribution to the outcome of these experiences. They stem from core beliefs that we developed during our childhood, when our parents put us down or when we were bullied in school. We may have witnessed abuse in our home. These adverse childhood experiences distorted our perception of what a healthy relationship is with ourselves and those around us. If we enter relationships without completing our healing, we don’t love ourselves unconditionally and we continue to put ourselves at risk of attracting people who break our heart. When we are healed, we don’t bite into the illusion that we are loved even when we recognize that someone is not treating us well.

As we accepted that we entered relationships without healing, we need to acknowledge that those who hurt us also made the decision to start relationships before healing their childhood wounds. These could be wounds that had been passed on from generation to generation, as massive traumas have been caused by extreme poverty, rigid religious and societal norms have affected people in multidimensional ways. Often people fail to see that they expect a different outcome despite doing the same thing over and over again.

Forgiveness allows us to heal. Instead of holding on to our pain, forgiveness is liberating. If we continue to work on showing love to ourselves, we allow our heart to open again. It brings the understanding that we have grown a little bit more, even if the growing process has been painful. We learn to look at ourselves and others with compassion, empathy and love.