Should We Forgive?
🪷Heal Your Self Series: Forgiveness is for you, not them.
Welcome to the Heal Your Self series, full of tools from my therapy room to help you move on from your past, heal, and embrace your true self. Let’s dive in to today’s topic, forgiveness.
You can also listen to this very useful guided meditation on forgiveness. J says: “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.”
Not a member yet? The inner work we do here can be transformative and hugely rewarding. This is super-cheap therapy!
Hi friends,
In today’s post, I discuss ten considerations for forgiveness, and how to take responsibility and move on. Do also listen to the meditation linked above, and there are therapeutic journaling questions that will also help you explore this topic.
Forgiveness is for you, not them.
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, even decades, before they could talk about it. I take the role of ‘enlightened witness’ while my broken client can unravel, heal, and come back to themselves and move on with their life.
Much of the journey of therapy is acknowledging and processing what’s happened, and integrating it. Clients find ways to rebuild and move on, with a trained professional to hold you in those difficult stories of your life. I share much of what I teach and learned about forgiveness here, so take some time as it is well worth it.
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. I wrote a post about trauma here:
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.
The good news is we can, over time, rewire the trauma loops, with support, therapy, self care, processing what happened, like with inner work opportunities like this, and understanding how it impacts us now (with more help from these Heal Your Self posts and the Bloom Sessions which will continue soon). Finding supportive others, and being present are also very important.
And there is forgiveness.
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
Do you need to take responsibility for your part? Are you caught in blame or othering?
Read on for my tips and the self guided therapeutic journaling session.
Paid subscribers can also listen to the popular forgiveness guided meditation here, for a more experiential move into forgiveness and letting it go.
