When We Don't Want to Forgive

I work with a lot of clients who have been divorced. 

And sometimes, they really struggle to forgive their ex-spouse. 

They feel that the grievances against them have been so grave that there is no way they could forgive. 

They can even feel that they don’t want to forgive them. 

Somewhere in our brains we think that by forgiving them we are giving them a free pass. 

That we are condoning what we consider to be bad behavior. 

That they won’t have to pay for said bad behavior. 

Or maybe even that we're being disloyal to ourselves.

Here’s something I'm sure you know, but that I want to remind you: 

Forgiveness has absolutely nothing to do with the other person. 

Us choosing not to forgive them doesn’t put them in any kind of a prison. 

It doesn’t hurt them even a little bit. 

Very often, they won’t even know that we are hurt and not forgiving. 

When we choose not to forgive, we are the ones who pay. 

We pay in anger and frustration and resentment. 

We pay in a loss of peace and contentment. 

We pay in drama and anxiety. 

We pay in sleepless nights and wasted days. 

When we choose not to forgive, we are, in essence, giving the other person control of us. 

And it can be very easy to believe that all of these difficult emotions and situations are the fault of the other person. 

But the truth of the matter is, we are creating them. 

They are our fault. 

And until we begin to take responsibility for them, we will never find the peace and contentment that we seek in this situation. 

The honest truth is that the other person is not being hurt at all by us not forgiving. 

We are the ones who are hurt by it. 

When we choose to forgive we don't do it because the other person deserves it or has earned it. 

We forgive because we deserve peace in our lives. 

We have every right to move on and to let go of all of the difficult emotions created by not forgiving. 

Forgiving another doesn’t mean they were in the right. 

It also doesn’t mean that we feel that what they did was okay. 

Forgiving means we choose, for ourselves, to feel peace, to move on, to let go of what is not serving us. 

And what serves us, in every situation I can think of, is to forgive. 

Forgiveness will not change the original circumstance, but the thoughts that create forgiveness in our hearts can completely change our experience with the circumstance. 

Because when we change our thoughts, we change our feelings, which then change our actions. 

 And when our actions change, then we create a different experience for ourselves within the circumstance. 

Interested in digging a little deeper?

Check out this podcast:

 

#241 Forgiving Others

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