Forgiving is hard work. It takes a lot of
energy. At times it seems impossible.
Yet, if we look at how much energy we use holding onto anger or hate against someone who has offended us, who comes out ahead in the long run?
If someone did us wrong, perhaps in a
relationship or a farm business deal in the past, what good is it to hold onto it today? It only reminds us of our pain, loss and anger. It does nothing to heal ourselves.
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Sometimes we have been hurt and can do nothing about it. But the more we hold onto our emotional anger or pain, the more it continues to hurt us. I once worked with an adult man whose older brother had sexually abused him when he was a young child. He held the hurt within himself for years. Then we finally shared it, and after he had worked on a letter of forgiveness to his brother, which he never sent, he stopped feeling upset about the past.
Forgiving someone is the opposite of revenge. Revenge makes you think you feel better. But in rural areas, we still have to live around people who have hurt us.
Not being accepted as we are often hurts. We can’t control how other people act. We can tell them how we feel. We can decide to move beyond our feelings of hurt.
We, alone, can determine what and who we are. We don’t have to believe other peoples’ opinions of us.
To forgive others in life, we have to admit they treated us badly. It may have been unintentional or intentional on their part. Regardless, we need to mourn the good treatment we didn’t get from them, not focus just on the bad.
Mourning means moving beyond a loss. Forgiving doesn’t change the way people treat us. It does change how we treat ourselves.
In Becoming A Forgiving Person, (Haworth Pastoral Press 2004), Henry Close offers one way to approach pains of the past. He suggests we think of having two sets of parents.
One set of parents lives in a certain place. They did things that influenced us. Like everyone else, these parents were a mixed bag. They had strengths and assets, but also weaknesses and liabilities.
Our other set of parents lives within our mind. They are our reflections of the real parents we had. But our memories and ideas are often distorted. They are images we internalized of our parents, both good and bad. These are the hardest parents for us to deal with. We can easily get stuck in the past, not realizing that both they and we have changed over time. If we remain glued to our hurts and bad feelings, we don’t grow and change.
Peter Griffiths is a mental health counsellor based in Prince Albert, Sask. His columns are intended as general advice only. His website is www.sasktelwebsite.net/
petecope.
