For over 10 years I have worked with a lot of people sharing their life stories with me. A lot of times people say what they are sharing is things they’ve never shared before, to anyone, ever. A couple patterns I notice about forgiveness is people wanting to forgive and being unable to, or jumping to forgiveness without being ready, or punishing themselves for not being able to forgive. This is common, but it’s something we need to unpack.
As humans we feel a full spectrum of emotions from sadness and anger, and jealousy to joy, happiness and ecstasy. For our time here and now as humans, all of these emotions are valid, as I’ve written about before in Emotions are like Puppies. You are allowed to feel anyway you want. If someone did something to you that is beyond forgiveness (which I have heard many stories where this could be the case) - it is okay to be unable to forgive them.
I know that might sound weird at first - but hear me out for a second. Forgiveness is amazing, it’s releasing, it burns the ties that bind, it’s incredible!
But!
Sometimes it takes time to fully achieve forgiveness and sometimes it is impossible to get there. If you punish yourself your whole life for being unable to forgive, you are suffering twice - once with the trauma and again torturing yourself for not being able to forgive; this is, of course, even worse for your mental and emotional well-being.
To get to true forgiveness, you have to feel ALL THE THINGS: the hatred, resentment, disgust, shame etc. because! jumping too quickly to forgiveness could be spiritually bypassing (i.e. ‘I need to forgive because I’m spiritual, woke, etc…’) or gaslighting yourself (i.e. ‘It wasn’t that bad, other people have it worse, I’m overreacting, etc.’)
Your feelings are valid. You don’t need to do anything. You are the main character in your own life.
It’s also possible if you jump too quickly to false forgiveness, later in life these unprocessed emotions like the unfelt anger, hatred and/or resentment could bubble up again when their effects are more intense. In my opinion, the reasons these emotions can be more intense than the initial ones is because they’ve become infected and irritated from being shut down and compartmentalized. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘what we resist, persists!’ In this case, falsely-forgiving emotions that have not properly gone through their entire life cycle (from birth to resolution) can become exaggerated and more aggressive from not being witnessed. We see the ill effects of this process when we witness projection - when we ‘project’ or overlay past hurts from past events on to current people in our current life.
So!
Here’s my secret hack to forgiveness*:
Instead of trying to forgive the other person for what they did to you - what if you forgave yourself for not being able to forgive the other person?
Interesting right?
In my mind, forgiveness works both ways. You can try and forgive the other person, but if that doesn’t work, why not switch the direction of the forgiveness. Maybe try this on and practice some self compassion and self mercy?
What does it feel like to forgive yourself for not being able to forgive?
What if you chose yourself first?
*Disclaimer: you do not have to agree :) this blog is written with the same philosophy of trying on a T-shirt - if it fits, great; if it doesn’t, take it off and try a new one ;)
