The Power of Forgiveness

It’s common in life to experience having your feelings hurt, deep betrayal or even desperately needing to forgive yourself… or others.

Any resistance to forgiveness ultimately slows your healing process and prevents you from taking your power back. Your ego may believe that if you continue punishing yourself or others, it will protect you from making the same mistake or getting hurt again.

Unfortunately, that only keeps you held in pain. 😔 The key is to keep the lesson and let go of the pain and struggle through forgiveness. ⭐️ 

While forgiveness is a super-power and a healing balm to your soul, it is essential to first acknowledge your hurt feelings, whether they are feelings of abandonment, rejection, anger, betrayal, guilt or shame.

Forgiveness is a conscious decision to release feelings of hurt or resentment towards another, a group or even yourself, whether or not you feel it is deserved. 

Forgiveness is also a process. If you try to “hurry up” to get to the other side of forgiveness so you can stop the pain, you can create a mask and slow down the healing process. Avoiding, pretending and denying that you’re hurt is not the same as not being hurt.

✨ There is no shortcut in the process of forgiveness and it is essential to fully acknowledge and feel your hurt feelings. 

When you feel obligated to forgive so as to not disappoint someone or have them feel badly toward you, it’s not true forgiveness. It’s more helpful to be honest in saying, “I want to forgive you and I am working on it,” than pretending you have done it and continuing to be plagued by the pain of it all.

Sometimes people will withhold forgiveness as they believe by offering it, they are letting go of perceived power over the person who hurt them. Or, that by offering forgiveness they’d be denying the hurt they experienced. Is that true?

Listen…hurt people will hurt people. Expecting them not to or wishing that they hadn’t is not helpful. People will be, do and act out of their current level of consciousness. Knowing you can trust that liars will lie and thieves will steal is an important part of knowing you can trust life.

Forgiveness, and ultimately offering genuine compassion for those who have wronged you, allows you to move on from the past. It frees you from the burden of bitterness and anger which can crush your emotional well-being. But, forgiveness does not mean you continue to accept the hurtful actions of others or that you automatically return to the same relationship.

One of the most important aspects of forgiveness is learning to forgive yourself by acknowledging poor choices or conclusions you made along your path. Self-forgiveness is key toward a healthy and loving relationship with yourself and, therefore, with others. All relationships are a reflection of your relationship with yourself.

I was not always treated with loving kindness or respect by my ex-husband. Ultimately, through doing my work, I learned that I teach people how to treat me.The way my ex-husband treated me was how I unknowingly thought I deserved to be treated. Beyond my relationship with him, I created other ways in my life to experience feeling disappointed and hurt, too. That was a lens of pain that I didn’t even know I had… OOPS.  🤷‍♀️

The pain I experienced was completely about my relationship with myself. It had nothing to do with him. He was just modeling actions I thought I deserved and came to expect. I had learned from my family of origin, society and culture that I wasn’t important and that I didn’t matter.

I needed to forgive myself for recreating those relationships that my family of origin and society demonstrated to me… for example, my mom innocently not knowing she deserved any better either.

Forgiveness requires seeing truth at a level you didn’t even know existed. You nurture gentleness when you refuse to beat yourself up or lash out at others. When you are gentle, you accept that you are human and recognize that we all make mistakes. When you or someone else messes up, the goal is to learn from your missteps and make new choices. 

I held onto misunderstandings for decades while sustaining the belief that I didn’t matter. Being gentle with myself and discovering how I inadvertently came to these misunderstandings was an important part in forgiving myself. Gentleness makes it easier to acknowledge and correct mistakes.

As author and psychologist Jennifer Chrisman points out in her blog post, “Overcoming Shame: Forgive Yourself and Let Go”:

“Stop beating yourself up. You are a work in progress; which means you get there a little at a time, not all at once … If we practice this way, continuing to acknowledge, forgive and let go, we will learn to make peace with the feelings of remorse and regret for having hurt ourselves and others.” 

I love this topic of forgiveness. It invites you to be free of the heavy loads that life offers. There’s no need to carry the baggage of your past once you see that you never deserved to be treated that way, that you deserve to be forgiven for your own personal misunderstandings and that forgiving others and yourself brings you the freedom that you want and deserve.