Why forgiveness is so important

When you are ready to let go of emotional pain it is usually time to consider forgiveness, I believe that learning how to forgive is a major element of stepping out from negative internal dialogue and an uncomfortable victim mentality. It also frees you to look forward towards the future rather than looking over your shoulder and dwelling on the past, running unhelpful “what if” stories over and over again in your mind, because these just tend to reinforce those negative feelings.

For many people their gut reaction to forgiveness is “no way, they shouldn’t have done that…” However, it may be useful to explore forgiveness from a different point of view, the reason we might consider forgiving a person is NOT because what they did was OK, hardly at all, the reason to forgive is so that YOU don’t suffer anymore with all the stories in your mind and the resulting emotions that they cause and can move on with your life.

Often when very bad things happen to us they can stay in out mind for years and we spin stories around about how unfair it was, how they were never punished, how it affected our lives etc. In most cases that other person has no idea that you are still angry and still thinking about those actions all these years later. Each day you send out these angry thoughts of injustice, anger and frustration towards this other person and they don’t even know you are doing it, in some instances they may have passed away or they may even live in another country or town, you send out all this pain – and the only person who feels that pain coming back is you.

I am not suggesting that we need to condone what that person did or even accept it in any way, however, they did that one thing all those years ago, yes it was bad, however, you are punishing yourself everyday with these bad thoughts that affect your health and well-being. Sometimes the bigger and more prolonged abuse is what we are doing to ourselves by holding on to those old stories and replaying them each day in our minds, rather than forgiving so that we can get on with our own lives.

Forgiving ourselves can help too, it’s not uncommon for us humans to make mistakes, we do things that we regret later in life, it can be beneficial to just acknowledge that you made a mistake, learn from it and allow yourself to move on, allow yourself to grow, cut yourself some slack because punishing yourself is not going to help anybody.

Often it can be useful to explore your beliefs when you are ready to forgive another person or indeed yourself, as we tend to latch onto certain beliefs that are not necessarily true like, “I’m not good enough…” “I attract bad people…” “I’m not clever enough… pretty enough…. funny enough…”

When I help people who are anxious, depressed or just lost, we do lots of work around acceptance (of others and of themselves) and we break down those old self limiting beliefs, from this new perspective anything is possible.

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