So last time, we spoke about the first step in healing: confronting your trauma and its symptoms. Today, we will talk about the second step, which is absolutely vital to effective healing: Forgiveness. Now this part often takes longer than the first due to the complexity of thought involved. But in order to live a life of freedom from pain and to ensure you don’t pass the symptoms of that pain down to those under your influence, you must forgive. Forget what twitter, tumblr, or your favourite artist says – you must forgive. Note: Oftentime before you listen to a person’s advice, I urge you to look at their fruits. Look if their advice has first worked for them. If someone is encouraging you to withhold forgiveness yet you can tell that such a person is still somewhat bitter about their own circumstance, be wise. You wouldn’t take financial advice from someone who is broke. Judge people’s word by their results.
Unforgiveness manifests in a plethora of ways. It can look ugly, and it can look pretty. It’s one of the hardest things to identify and that’s probably why it took me over 20 years to notice it in myself. The thing about unforgiveness is that it has this sinister power to slowly but subtly change the nature of its victim, without the victim realising. I thought it was merely a coincidence that I didn’t like hugging people or didn’t like when my friends tried to physically touch me. I had accepted it as simply a part of who I am. Until I realised (from observing my behaviour and doing a self-examination) that this was a trait that I had developed, rather than just naturally had. I realised that I had developed this from a place of unforgiveness towards those who didn’t show me physical affection growing up. So my heart’s reaction towards any sort of physical affection years later was to be cold and unwelcoming and quite blatantly repellent to it. This was one way that unforgiveness chose to manifest itself in my life.
Sometimes it’s necessary to ask ourselves why we act in certain ways, and if the answer is “I don’t know” or “just because” then that may be something worthwhile looking into. For some people, unforgiveness looks like trying to prove a point. Some of us have unforgiveness towards our fathers for not showing us the love and attention we ought to have received growing up, and as a result of this unforgiveness we live forever trying to prove a point to them – whether they are present or absent. You didn’t receive praise from your father and so you think the solution is in proving to other men/women that you are worthy of praise, in an attempt to try to prove it to the one who really hurt you. You then become a stubborn person who is constantly trying to prove to everybody that you don’t care what their opinions about you are – the irony. This is a fruit of unforgiveness.
The reason why I called this thing sinister is due to its ability to shapeshift forms in your life. It can appear as something negative one minute and something positive the next. For example, there are some women who dedicate their lives to uplifting other women (whilst degrading men). To such a woman, she may think she she is doing this simply because she loves other women, but often the root of that is unforgiveness towards some man that has caused a hurt in her life. The same thing applies to men who act in this manner. That is why it is so important to never just blindly do anything or behave in any sort of way without first interrogating yourself. And the funny thing is that most people do eventually end up interrogating themselves for their behaviours, but then they stop there. They stop after realising that there is a trauma to which they are responding to, but they never seek to heal from it because they don’t believe it can be healed. Let me wipe that lie away – it can. Every single kind of trauma can be healed. And the key to this healing is forgiveness.
Now for a lot of people, when you hear the word ‘forgiveness’ you immediately think this is the behaviour of one who is weak-minded or gullible or dumb. We tend to think forgiveness equates to letting somebody walk all over you. We think it means we are letting a person walk free from the wrong they have done, and make them feel like what they did was okay. But in truth, these are all terrible interpretations of what forgiveness actually does and how it even affects us. The most fascinating thing is that most of the people who advocate for unforgiveness are deeply hurt inside, and them choosing not to forgive does not make their pain any better. So why so passionately fight for something that is really fighting against you?
Forgiveness is a great act of strength. Why? Because it detaches you from your pain. That requires a lot of strength. Many of us have such strong relationships with our pain, and it’s only because we chose not to forgive either ourselves or a person who has committed a wrong. Ask yourself this: when someone hurts you, what is it that makes it so hard to forgive them? Often, it is the fact that they violated what you were once somewhat secure in. In some way, they violated your sense of identity. They made you question who you are. They made you question what you were deserving of (good vs. evil). They made you question whether you were good enough, or loyal enough, or smart enough, or strong enough. They made you see yourself in an uncomfortable light that was mixed with pain and grief. And that’s a hard thing to get over. It is hard to be able to remember the internal pain and insecurity somebody brought you and then choose to forgive them. But the truth is the longer we choose not to forgive them, the longer we choose to hold onto the original feelings of pain within us. Because often, it is not just about the act/offence itself, but about how the result of such a thing made you feel. But the sooner you realise that you are reacting moreso to how it made you feel, than the act itself, the better. Why? Because you can then start working on unlearning whatever negative feelings or thoughts that the act/offence brought you. And you can then be in a place to forgive.
The craziest thing about forgiveness is that it benefits you a lot more than it benefits the offender. But many of us don’t realise this. When we choose to let go of a hurt that has been brought upon us, we are choosing freedom. When we choose to recognise that our real identity is not equal to the distorted identity that we were made feel like we had, we can finally walk in freedom. For example, if somebody made you feel like you are unworthy of love or respect, once you realise that that is indeed a lie and that you are worthy of those things, it’s easier to forgive them. Because forgiving them is like saying to them that their act doesn’t define you. It is saying to them that what they did to you does not have permission to change your identity. It doesn’t have permission to change your personality, or your future relationship with others, or anything else about you that unforgiveness may try to malform. It’s saying to them that “I and my trauma are not one and the same but are separate entities. Therefore I will not be controlled by the hurt it wants to use to govern me”. It is saying to them that “I will let go of this because I am worth more than to allow pain distort the truth of who I am”.
Because the truth is that unforgiveness exerts a LOT of power over us. It changes who we are. So, that means that on top of the hurt that a person brought you, you give them even more power over you by choosing to live in unforgiveness. You not only let that offence shake you in the moment of it happening, but you let it shake you for the rest of your life – which is quite miserable. Unforgiveness is literally like choosing to give somebody permission to forever control your decisions and emotions and everything else you do. It is like saying “you hurt me in this relationship, so I now give you permission to dictate my next relationship and cause trust issues to exist between me and my new partner”. It is like saying “you treated me so badly, so I now choose to never let go of that and therefore pass on the anger issues I formed from it onto my children”. It is like choosing to lose every single time. Why would anyone want to do that?
Often, the reason we are reluctant to forgive has a lot to do with us not wanting the offender to live life peacefully as they wish. So for some crazy reason we think that the unforgiveness WE harbour in our hearts has an effect on THEM. Time and time again, I’m sure we have all seen this to not be the case. You can be living in unforgiveness while the person who hurt you is living their best life. You can choose to hold onto the hurt while the person who hurt you forgot they ever did it in the first place. You can choose to be bitter while the person who hurt you never thinks about you for a moment longer in their life. And the reason why people who hurt us are often able to do that is because their freedom is not actually linked to our forgiveness, but it is rather linked to them choosing to forgive themselves. People cannot live in freedom until they first choose to forgive themselves for the hurt they caused others. Once they do that, there is nothing that you can do to make them live in guilt – not even you using unforgiveness. Somebody needs to hear that.
I learned this the ugly way. I watched the person who sexually assaulted me live their best life while I lived in misery. And the misery I lived in wasn’t so much explicitly because of the act, but because of the unforgiveness I chose to let dwell within me. It took me a long time to forgive him, but when I did, it was the most free feeling I had ever felt in years. I no longer had to get angry when I saw his posts. I no longer had to roll my eyes when I heard his voice. I no longer had to shiver when I heard his name. Yes, the pain of the act itself is still valid, but you by no means have to let that pain define you. And when I realised that, my life changed.
So, how do I then forgive a person? That’s the question that many of you are wondering right now. And it’s a valid question. I will share what I myself know.
1. What makes it easier for me to forgive is by looking at someone in their entirety. I think of the fact that no human being fully chooses to be the way that they are. We are all products of our circumstances and environments. I think of the fact that somebody who has hurt me is probably acting from a place of being first hurt themselves. Now, that does not excuse them from the pain they have caused me. They are still responsible and should act accordingly. However, it helps me to absolve some of the blame that I would ordinarily have allocated completely to them. It is easier to forgive someone when you realise that it is not totally “their fault” that they are who they are, and that they too are in need of some healing. Now there is a line between doing this in forgiveness, and constantly letting a person treat you like a mug because of this knowledge. The line is self-respect. You must respect yourself enough to know that even when you understand somebody’s story and why they are who they are, you should not let that person be absolved of responsibility. Their story is not an excuse. You cannot have so little respect for yourself that you make that person think that treating you, or anybody else for that matter, in such a way is okay. Often when people do this, it comes from a place of low self-esteem. But when you understand your true identity and value and who you are, you cannot so easily just let anybody have access to your life anyhow again. So, I summarise, one way that helps me forgive someone is giving them the benefit of doubt and basically ‘feeling sorry for them’. But respecting myself at the same time.
2. Another thing that helps me forgive people is realising that people do make mistakes, and those mistakes do not define them. I think of the fact that I am not a perfect human being myself, and I too slip and hurt people and fall. And it does not define me, so similarly other peoples mistakes do not define them. The truth is, many of us struggle to give room for other’s mistakes because we don’t give room for our own. Many of us are reluctant to acknowledge that people make mistakes because when we make mistakes, we are very very hard on ourselves and ultimately don’t forgive ourselves. Very often, people who choose not to forgive others are simply just reflecting their inner inability to forgive themselves. If you can acknowledge that you too are imperfect and fallible, it is easier to forgive somebody else for sharing these same (human) qualities.
3. Something else that I do is I tend to pray for those that have hurt me. This was a technique of forgiveness that God Himself taught me, and it’s one that frankly changed my life. I used this technique to forgive friends that betrayed me, to forgive parents that hurt me, and to forgive the man who sexually assaulted me. The Lord taught me through praying for people that people’s lives are a lot more complex than we can ever understand. And sometimes we just have to pray that they will receive the love and healing they are in need of, so that they stop hurting others as a result of their lack. The film production The Joker (2019) is a great depiction of this. It is a great depiction that often the behaviours of the worst of people can be traced down to them being subject to terrible behaviour themselves. Sometimes, all you can do to help such a person is pray for them and believe that God will fill any and every void they have left, even as He also fills yours.
I really do not think you can heal without realising these things. Forgiving yourself is also a whole ‘nother thing altogether, but what I will say on that (from personal experience) is that you must learn to give room to error. You must learn that as long as you are human and you are not God, you will make mistakes. You must understand that you cannot live up to this ‘perfect’ standard that even you has created for yourself. You must let go of supernaturally high expectations and understand that your worth as a human being is not defined by how ‘good’ you perform but rather by the one who created you and gave you the worth in the first place. Is the worth of gold defined by how malleable that gold is, or rather by the fact that no matter how it behaves, it is gold nonetheless? Now you are worth more than gold. So cut yourself some slack.
Healing is not healing if it does not bring freedom. If we want to experience true freedom and fruitfulness, my dear friends, we must learn to forgive. And it’s okay if this is a long process for you. It’s okay if it takes you longer than you would so like. It’s okay if it makes you uncomfortable. What is important is that you start and you persist to finish; remembering that at the finish line is a long-awaited freedom and peace and comfort. So persist, my friends. Persist. You can do this. Let that hurt go and no longer give it permission to dictate who and what you are. We can do this together. So let’s get it.
