Can you help yourself forgive…if so, how?

Can you help yourself forgive…? Yes, of course you can. Being able to forgive is not as difficult as we may perceive it to be. However, before we can truly forgive ourselves, we must first endeavour to understand what actually happened, irrespective of whether the person or persons concerned is or are still alive or not. One way you could do this is by writing a letter to the person concerned, but not actually posting it, about all the behaviours you feel and found to be unforgivable.

What this exercise helps you do, and achieve, is find a way of voicing all your emotions, thus helping to remove your emotional pain out of your inner self. The real challenge comes after you have written out your grievances, because now, you need to reconsider how things came about and happened from the other person’s perspective.

When you have been hurt deeply, it is difficult to recognise the fact that there are two sides to the story. For instance, certain facts may have been withheld, thereby creating an imbalance. Step into the other person’s shoes for a moment and ask yourself: what were things like for the other person? What could have made the person angry or upset at the time? What was their situation? What could have triggered and led to the person being so harsh that would have led him or her to hurt you so deeply?

Try to see and understand what may have brought about their behaviour and or actions at the time of said event. The chances are you may come up with more than one explanation and or reason because you probably don’t know what exactly was going on in the person’s mind or his/her heart at said time. Sometimes, their action could actually stem from a memory of an event that occurred during their childhood and they have kept it inside them and held it against you for all those years.

For example, a mother was unable to buy a pair of trainers her child had wanted so much on his or her fourteenth birthday. This was because the company she worked for was closing down and she did not know when she would find another job, not to mention she was worrying about all the bills that had to be paid, including the rent and school fees that at the time… Just how was she going to support and take care of her child? As you start to look at things and peel away at events, you start to see that the reality was very different to what the child had thought and held against his or her mother for many years. This however, may not erode the fact that the child felt hurt at the time, but enabled the child to forgive his or her mother and be free at last of all that pain, having now understood what she had been going through at said time.

Forgiveness is not only to do with past events, but also present situations in your life, which could include, for instance, a son or daughter, who rarely visit their ailing parent because he or she is busy or a son or daughter, who hardly phone their ageing parent because they live in different countries with different time zone or maybe a partner whose friendship with another person of the opposite sex gets too close because they hardly get to spend quality time with their partner because he or she is always working or perhaps a friend who always arranges to meet up with you, but does not call to inform you they are unable to because they forgot… and so on.

Sometimes, we are so hard on ourselves, it’s almost like we feel we should bestow a self-inflicted punishment upon ourselves. Many things we can let go of, but we have a tendency to sometimes continue to carry them deep within us for ages, when all we have to do is forgive and set ourselves free from the issue or issues at hand, thus allowing for a more peaceful and happy life, rather than complicating it any more than necessary.

Forgiving is about allowing you to recognise and understand what’s going on around you, and within another person’s life, and being able to separate things from yourself. Don’t be hard on yourself and remember to also be forgiving towards yourself.