Learning to forgive is all about self love! I never thought about it that way till I was taught what it really meant to forgive and experienced it first hand in my life.
To forgive means taking the time to look at the situation that happened to you with honesty and truly feeling it and truly acknowledging the impact it has had in your life. The emotional and physical responses you have experienced because of this event. But also acknowledging what impact it is having on you now. You have to do this before you will ever heal and move forward in your life and forgive.
When you finally decide to forgive you can say it out loud or write it in your journal, and then forgive. But you also have to understand what it means to forgive because people don’t understand, I didn’t understand till I learned. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean you go to them and say I forgive you, it doesn’t mean that you are now back to being friends with this person it means that you forgive them in your mind, and body and soul. To forgive is an act of love and kindness you give your self and no one else.
It allows you to stop wasting your energy and your emotions on that person and allows you to use that energy to feel good about your self. Let that event pass, let the emotions fade away and you are free to move on, Become the person you are met be. You take the power back. It is always easer said or written then done right.
I Like to reason it out almost like a thought record. I like to write down what happened, my reactions physically and emotionally how I truly feel about it, how I am still letting it affect me now even though the event is long passed.
I then look at the situation for what it truly is, because in almost every case the person who hurt me is always the person who actually needs help, or is uneducated, ill informed and doesn’t know any better. Or they are hurt them self’s and are lashing out because they don’t have the tools to cope.
That old saying “You always hurt the ones you love” WHY? because they can, a stranger would just walk away and have nothing to do with the person or even engage with them, but because you know them, are friends with them or are a family member, you are the one who gets hurt…and it stinks
I then really acknowledge the emotions I am feeling after I do this and write about how their actions have changed me. Then I am ready to forgive, because it has no power over me at all anymore. Once I forgive them I write about how I feel now after I have finally let it go, I celebrate my new feelings and give them the time they deserve. I then set a boundary because now I am looking after myself and my well being and I learn from that experience.
So I will write “ I will not allow this to happen to me again with this person because I have learned from it from my past and I have forgiven, so now I will set this boundary as an act of love for myself because I am smart and I learn from my past and I move forward” I will stick to what ever boundary I set and always think of it as and act of love towards myself, never an act against the other person because sometimes we do that. We say to our self’s it is selfish to do this, or I am being a bad person ect…But we are not, we are looking after our self’s and setting a boundary because we know what happens when we don’t and we don’t want to get hurt again.
After I have forgiven, I feel proud, strong, happy and filled with calm and I feel really good about who I am. I looked at the situation, I reasoned it out, I forgave the person, I set a boundary and put a positive end to the whole thing.
Forgiving is a very personal experience that we give our self’s as a gift, so we can move forward in life and truly, truly grow as people. What is in the past is in the past and we have to move forward because living in the past puts us on a path of never growing and even worse living in a depressed state or anxious state. It is not healthy to Carry old emotions like hate, guilt, regret with us through our lives. It is health to forgive, move forward, love who you are, become who you are met to be! always think of it as a gift to your self because you have to live life to it’s fullest, we are only here for a short time, we only have this life to live so forgive and do it for your self. To forgive is divine!
Darcy Patrick
“Only with open conversation can we break the stigma behind depression, let’s start talking and do it together"
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