Contrary to popular opinion, it is 100 percent unnecessary to forgive other people in order to deeply heal and transform your own life.
The idea that in order to be able to move on, we must first forgive is nonsense. Feeling pressured to do anything usually indicates that you might be better off not doing the very thing you think you ought to do. Instead, step back, take a deep breath, and explore your true motivation for forgiveness.
When people excuse or condone an act, they are, in a sense, minimizing, absolving, or even nullifying another person's role in causing an offense. This practice actually has a greater negative effect on a person’s mental health than not forgiving.
Anything done from a place of pressure is not felt from a place of the heart. Doing things like exercising, eating a clean diet, giving up sugar, quitting drinking, etc., when coerced, is more about emotional self-preservation than true desire. Pressure is always an indication that something might be amiss.
Feeling like you need to forgive someone even though you’re not at that point yet is never about the other person or truly trying to reconcile the situation. Rather, it’s about the need to emotionally protect yourself from what you might have to feel if you didn’t forgive. Forgiving another person before you feel ready can harm your mental health, hindering your ability to move forward.
Pressuring someone to forgive before they feel ready is a profound way to ensure these depressive symptoms emerge. Sadly, many religious and cultural communities are guilty of imposing this type of hidden pressure on people. Instead, one of the most powerful experiences that help someone move on is actually when the offender takes responsibility for the harm they have inflicted.
The idea of forgiveness imparts the notion that it's possible to just stop dwelling on something and make a conscious decision to let go, as if our emotional well-being and energetic existence were all determined by choice. This approach sees forgiveness as a cognitive, rational process that could not be further from the truth about how feelings and emotions work.
Forgiveness includes the energy of feelings and emotions, not thoughts, and if done authentically, energy from the heart. It naturally occurs when someone unravels and reflects upon their feelings about what has happened. This takes tremendous emotional stamina, courage, and support and requires people to experience and endure difficult feelings in order to figure out what’s next.
Many people find that they are not able to withstand this process and shy away from the thought of confronting their difficult feelings. A person’s inability to forgive is a signal that they still need emotional support with emotionally navigating and processing their feelings. It’s not a fault of their character.
Some people get hung up here, in some cases for hours, days, months, years, decades, or even lifetimes. However, the inability to feel your feelings will be the thing that truly holds you back, not the inability to forgive.
Yet, there is an implication in the process of forgiving someone that you are striving to wipe the slate clean, and therein lies the biggest problem of all. By not holding people accountable for their actions, the world continues to be filled with the energy of emotional irresponsibility and the idea that there is no lasting impact on another person because all that needs to happen is to “just forgive them” or “ask for forgiveness.”
By working hard to be as conscious as you can about your impact on others, you are developing emotional responsibility for how you affect those around you. This is what leads to organic, heart-filled, spontaneous empathy on the part of someone who has been harmed. And not only is this better than forgiveness, but with time, it becomes a “no-brainer.”
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