- forgiving people to create peace

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In brief:
Forgiveness centers on the benefits of feeling peaceful. Finding peace doesn't need to be complicated. Remember, all grievances begin when something in a person's life happens in a way that he or she doesn't want it to happen. The feeling of peace comes as you allow your hurts to heal - blaming less, taking responsibility for how you feel, and changing the story you tell. This is called peace forgiveness.

Sorry Is Hard To Say, Forgiveness Is Even Harder To Give

What Is Forgiveness?

Forgiveness centers on the benefits of feeling peaceful. Finding peace doesn't need to be complicated. Remember, all grievances begin when something in a person's life happens in a way that he or she doesn't want it to happen. From that initial unpleasantness he or she takes things too personally, blames the offender for how he feels and the outcome of things, and tells a grievance story. That grievance means that too much space is "rented out" in his or her mind to hurt and anger.

Your Goal Is To Feel Peaceful!

The feeling of peace comes as you allow your hurts to heal - blaming less, taking responsibility for how you feel, and changing the story you tell. This is called peace forgiveness. As you feel more and more peace you are progressing in your goal to be healed from your grievances. You are learning to forgive.

There is one critical when it comes to forgiveness, it is the story we tell.

When we tell a story of victimization we have already taken something too personally and are blaming the offender for how we feel. When you tell the story of your heroic overcoming of an injustice, you will naturally blame less and take things less personally. However, it is very difficult to move directly to changing a well-rehearsed grievance story.

Take Responsibility!

To avoid that problem, you should begin by taking responsibility for how you feel. We have to remember that we are responsible for our emotional experience. Our past is not responsible for our present feelings. Just because something unpleasant occurred in our past or may occur in our future doesn't mean that our every day should be ruined.

Difficulties, mistreatments, and unkindness do not have an extended warranty. We become helpless when we give the person who hurt us excessive power over how we feel. Our painful feelings will diminish only when we take that power back and show we are responsible for how we feel.

Let us not lose sight of the good things in our life. This sounds simple but takes some effort. What this means is that we choose to spend time and energy finding the beauty and love in our life to balance out the time we spend on grudges, grievances, and wounds.

Forgiving Yourself If You Are Angry At Someone Else!

When we feel hurt or angry, it is easy to fault someone else. "You're to blame," we insist. "You made me feel this way." But the fact that we feel upset at someone doesn't necessarily mean he or she is guilty.

Sometimes our rage is our own, forged in our own hearts and minds, fed by our personalities, our provocations, our exaggerated responses to conflict. Yes, this other person might have done something to offend us, but perhaps not to the degree that our intense response would suggest. Our reaction may be entirely inappropriate or even dangerously misguided.

Owning Up To Your Issues!

Tearing down your defenses and looking honestly at yourself can be painful work. The process may teach you that you were more than just a victim and that perhaps there is no one to forgive but yourself.

The same factors that influenced the way the offender treated you may have influenced the way you treated him. Again, some of these factors may be external. You might ask yourself, "What was going on in my world at the time of the injury that may have affected me emotionally, making me feel more vulnerable, less in control and less resilient, so that I reacted inappropriately? Did these life events throw me off-balance and lead me to act in ways that were callous or otherwise offensive?"

Internal Factors May Also Shape Your Responses!

It helps to ask such questions as, "How did my personality affect my reaction? How did it influence the way I was treated?" If you are innately shy and the offender took this personally and assumed you didn't like him, that was his mistake and not yours. You didn't hurt him; his mistaken assumptions about you hurt him.

But if you are shy and didn't speak up and then felt offended that someone didn't show interest in you or respect your position, you need to confront how you contributed to your own pain. It may be that your own silence - not his behavior - set a trap for you.

What about your dysfunctional ideas about yourself and the world, ideas that may have been based on damaging early life experiences? Did they play a role in your mistreatment? These fixed ideas often pre-date the offense and even your relationship with the offender, and create what I called "channels" of Psychological Vulnerability. What happens is that your heightened sensitivity to being abandoned or ridiculed, leads you to misperceive or mis-react to events today.

Sharing Your Hurtful Experience Is An Important Step To Forgiveness

Sometimes we have a hard time admitting that bad things really happened and that they hurt. We may even deny the intensity of our feelings to remain in problematic relationships. Acknowledging how you feel is one step in the fight against the tendency to stay in abusive and painful relationships. In any case, you are not ready to forgive until you are clear about how you feel.

It is just as important to know exactly what was done that was unacceptable. This means trying to remember details as best as we can. It doesn't mean we have to exhaustively examine every minute of what happened. The urpose is to free us of the tendency to deny and minimize what occurred. We want to know that what we experienced was unacceptable behavior and to be able to state in clear language what was not okay. How can we know what to avoid in the future if we are unclear about the lines crossed? Coming to clarity about what causes us pain makes us less likely to repeat a hurtful situation.

Sharing Your Pain With Someone You Trust!

A very important element to forgiveness is to tell a handful of trusted people what happened. This means talking about how you feel and what about the hurtful situation was not okay. Sharing your pain with a few trusted people helps you cope; it helps you put feelings into words and makes them clearer. Sharing pain allows other people to care for us and provide us with guidance and support. Sharing our pain helps us to connect with the universality of hurt and allows us to feel less alone.

To talk openly with one to five people doesn't mean it is better to tell twenty people. When we share our story with a couple of people, we do so for support and guidance. When we share our story with a larger number of people, we often do so to denounce the offender, offer a cry of pain, or let people know how we have been victimized. These reasons are different from looking for support and guidance and are too often simply the retelling of our grievance story.

What Happens If There Is No One You Can Trust?

If you cannot find trusted friends or family, then try a therapist or support group. If no one is available, you can write down your experience on paper and then review it. You can share what you have written anonymously in chats on the Internet.

I must mention one caution: please do not share your pain with people who can hurt you or take advantage of your confidence. You also do not have to share your pain with the person who has hurt you, for that person is not necessarily an appropriate one.

When you have shared your pain with a few trusted people, you can take the next step and learn to forgive. You know how you feel, you know what is wrong, and you have shared your pain.

Is There Such A Thing As Total Forgiveness?

It is commonly assumed that when you forgive, your negative feelings are completely replaced by positive ones. The problem with this expectation is that it is so categorical, that it puts forgiveness out of reach and leaves you with no alternative but to not forgive at all. When you grant "genuine forgiveness", you make room for anger and recognize it as normal and adaptive. You don't replace it with compassion or love and simply wipe the slate clean. This sort of magical reversal is not what happens to real people who have suffered real emotional injuries.

Even years from now, when you think about how you had been hurt or when something calls up the memory of your suffering, your old pain may resurface, grab hold of you, and drag you down. To expect otherwise is to deny the power of the human brain to conjure up traumatic moments and force you to re-experience them with the same clarity of detail, the same visceral intensity, as when they first occurred.

Can We Simply Forget About The Whole Incident?

Even if you forgive an offender and even if you're committed to a life of equanimity, there may be times when you experience spasms of hate and cannot separate what he did to you from who he is. You are still human, and to think your response can be divided into neat boxes is unrealistic. Accepting this will broaden your understanding of what it means to forgive and make room for negative spikes in emotions that are bound to arise.

What happens when you genuinely forgive is not that you necessarily empty yourself of all hostile feelings, but that you allow other emotions to co-exist with them, such as sadness and grief. Along with your anger comes a richer, more balanced, more complex reaction - encompassing both what the offender did wrong and what he did right, both the damage he inflicted on you and his efforts to make good.

A Real Life Example

However, be prepared because forgiving won't wash away the injury; you may be left with a residue of bad feelings and an overwhelming sense of loss. This is what my good friend Sherri experienced. Although she forgave her husband, Bob, for having an affair, she continued to struggle with bitterness and sorrow. "I know he's trying hard to make me feel valued and safe," she assured me, "but I've lost the idealized image I had of him - forever. My feelings continue to oscillate between empathy and an unbearable sense of betrayal."

Two years after Bob revealed his affair, Sherri sent me this note: "The affair still hurts very much, although the therapy helps. So does reading and the passing of time. We live with it and do the best we can, and we both love each other." It could be said that Sherri hasn't forgiven Bob yet because her positive feelings toward him are at times tainted with negative ones. It could also be said that she has partially forgiven him and may forgive him more over time. When you forgive, you don't flip a switch.

Conclusion

When you are hurt, take control of your response to the happening, take an honest look at the cause of the happening, and don't blame anyone including yourself.

If it is really your fault, make an apology, correct the mistake if you can, and remember not to make the same mistake again. If it is not your fault, analyze what you can do to improve the situation and move on.

On the other hand, don't keep all these hurts within you, pour them out to a trustworthy friend, he or she might not be able to help, but you will definitely feel much relief after being heard. A heavy rock is lifted from you.

Don't try to forget what has happened. It doesn't work as memory can not be erased. It can only fade off with time. So focus on what you can do now. Look at the big picture and all the beautiful rainbows in life, and treasure them. Time will heal your wounds.

Life Is Just Too Short For Guilt, Shame, and Blaming.

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