I’m Kate, a psychotherapist writing about mental health, for you to explore and flourish in a life you love. Upgrade here for tools, resources, meditations and if you’d like to support my work. Thanks for being here!
If you missed the guided meditation on forgiveness, listen here. Not a member yet? You are welcome! In this post, I discuss ten considerations for forgiveness, and how to take responsibility and move on. Forgiveness is for you, not them.
Hi friends,
We all want to be loved, accepted and valued in our lives. Sometimes others don’t see us as the lovely humans we are, even hurting us intentionally or unintentionally. We all make mistakes and no one is perfect. Some transgressions go way beyond, and forgiveness can seem impossible.
When I first started counselling 18 years ago I worked with many people with shocking stores to tell, that they often carried with them for years before they could talk about it. I take the role of ‘enlightened witness’ while my broken client can unravel and come back to themselves.
Much of the process of therapy is acknowledging and processing what’s happened, and integrating it. Clients find ways to rebuild and move on, with a professional with many years of training to hold you in the difficult stories of your life. I share much of what I teach and learned about forgiveness below.
Trauma makes forgiveness more challenging, as it alters the function of the brain, keeping us stuck in destructive loops. When our minds are under pressure to process something it has no preparation for, it sends our nervous system spinning, and we end up with jumbled thoughts and extreme feelings that can last for years. In trauma, our mind can no longer make sense of the world we thought we knew. It is impossible to make sense of the senseless. If it happened in childhood, we may never have known what’s possible. We can now though.
We can rewire the trauma loops, with support, therapy, self care, processing what happened with supportive others, and being present. The Heal Your Past series and 92 page workbook is full of useful exercises to help you process and move on.
And there is forgiveness. The forgiveness guided meditation is a gentle, experiential way to open and consider it from your deepest, wisest self. It will help you move on. Additional journaling prompts here will help you too.
‘I am starting to realise that it’s an important stage in the healing process. Little by little I am learning to let go. I enjoyed the meditation. I found it assertive and empowering.’ J
Should We Forgive? Forgiveness Is For You, Not Them
It can take time to build the capacity for forgiveness, and you may already be there. It can even take time to become aware that something or someone has been wrong, inhibiting you and your life in ways that seem un-related. It is your decision to forgive or not.
Forgiveness is not brushing it under the carpet and pretending it didn’t happen. Nor is it dismissing your feelings about what happened. It is accepting and freeing yourself from the residue of the event, events, behaviour, or transgression.
Forgiveness is choosing to move on, empowered in our strong, survivor, warrior-self that is able to reform a beautiful life and sense of self, despite what has happened.
Forgiveness means letting go of the protective armour or blame and or hatred that encases your heart. Tara Brach
Resources for Forgiveness
Ten Considerations for Forgiveness - see below.
Do you need to take responsibility for your part? Are you caught in blame or othering? Read on.
Listen to the popular forgiveness guided meditation here, for an experiential move into forgiveness and letting it go.
See posts with relevant exercises here and here to explore othering, labelling or other rigid thinking.
Go through the Heal Your Past Series here, particularly the Unfinished Businessposts, and download the workbook, free if you are an annual subscriber. (Do message me if you don’t have it yet).
Use the Simple Tools to come into the present moment, where your life is now. The present moment is all we ever really have?
Paid subscribers can find therapeutic journaling prompts in the Members Therapy Tools Page, to experiment further with moving into forgiveness. Is it time to let go? Is it possible? Come and find out!
How do you feel about forgiveness?
With love and gratitude,
Kate
P.S. Thank you for reading, liking, commenting, and sharing, it makes such a difference and it means a lot. Some of this post is free, so feel free to restack and share if you think someone else might like it. It also helps me grow here.
Upgrade to read on, for all the guided meditations, my therapeutic journaling prompts, exercises and workbooks. You are welcome!
