ARCHIVE - forgiveness

ForgivenessBecause I am 50 years old there have been many times I have needed to forgive others and myself. Some have been very big issues and very hard to do…some even took years of working through. At this point, though, I feel I have gone through the process of forgiveness for things that have hurt me in my past and present life. Therefore, it was hard to come up with anything for this activity. But, surprisingly, I had a situation this week that came up that really bothered me. As the week went on, I realized that I either needed to confront this person or hold in my frustration or extend forgiveness and understanding.

First, I had to examine what was happening and why I felt the way I did. When I figured it all out and went through the forgiveness steps I was able to let it go. I think it may come up again and I may need to confront the situation but at this point I didn’t want to do that. Mainly because it involved a good friend that I don’t believe has any idea of what she is doing. I am afraid I will hurt her feelings if I confront at this point and I am hoping that it will not happen again. I know this friend cares about me deeply and would not do anything consciously to hurt me but she is sometimes thoughtless in her words. I feel as if I can forgive her this since I am sure I also have areas that need forgiveness from her.

Empathize: Write a brief letter as if you were the other person. I wrote this letter and also thought a lot more about where she was coming from. This helped me to empathize with her but not necessarily excuse it. I also remembered all the kind things she has done and what a great friend she is to me. This helped me to remember how I value her friendship. This helped me put it in perspective and actually just writing it down helped me to see it more clearly. That was probably the most helpful step. The other steps were easy after that. I even decided to create a “Certificate of Forgiveness”.

I felt the steps laid out in our handout were helpful and I also realized that I do them somewhat already. I guess I learned them throughout my life whenever I needed to forgive someone since these are things that helped me.

Thinking it through by seeing it from her point of view and also trying to understand her reasons helped me to move on and not make “such a big deal” about the hurt she extended to me. I realized that I value the friendship too much to let such a small issue possibly spoil it. It wasn’t worth all the time spent worrying, feeling angry and thinking about it. I can imagine if the “forgiveness” that I extended this week had been a bigger issue that those steps would really help. Forgiveness can really be the hardest thing to do especially if you feel you have been wronged and wounded and did absolutely nothing to deserve it. Those seem to be the time in my life where it is most helpful to really dig deep and then to forgive for my own sake, no matter how hard.