The power of forgiveness
Let go of the past and release resentment to find healing“Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself, not a gift you give someone else.”
– Tony Robbins
Have you ever been stuck? You feel worried, angry, stressed – and you can’t seem to get out of it. Most of the challenges we have in our life are because we have unmet expectations. We think life needs to be a certain way, that people need to act a certain way. When it doesn’t happen, we get upset. We don’t want to “forgive” life and others for not meeting our expectations.
We will always carry anger and hurt in our hearts as long as we have expectations of other people and life conditions we can’t control. But that built-up resentment only ends up hurting you. As Nelson Mandela said, “Resentment is like drinking a poison and then waiting for the other person to die.” The power of forgiveness is one of the greatest gifts of life. Through it, you’ll understand that the only person you hurt when you’re upset – no matter how justified it may be – is yourself.
The quest for forgiveness
We often don’t realize the impact forgiveness has on our lives. Many of us are carrying around grudges against people who don’t even realize they’ve hurt us. We may not realize we need some form of acknowledgment, but we have internalized the hurt that was caused. We become preoccupied with needing an apology. It begins to eat away at us. We believe our loved one has done us irreparable harm. The ensuing anger and frustration that we feel actually work against us, stopping up our emotional bandwidth and forcing our attention away from the things we really care about.
The easy way to repair this damage is to forgive someone, but we’ve developed a strange idea of forgiveness. We have grown to believe that it must be a huge production: the person who has wronged us needs to apologize and ask for forgiveness before we can provide it.
It’s not about us
Feeling like we are wronged creates the expectation that the other person must ask forgiveness. But in so many cases of hurt feelings, it’s really not just about us. We can control how we react to being snapped at. Next time your spouse snaps at you, consider their present circumstances: Are they stressed out? Are they upset about something? Think about the last time you snapped at someone. You weren’t doing it for fun – you were doing it because you were upset, worried or not feeling well. Context is everything.
In reality, people are doing the best they can with the resources they have. When we better understand what drives people to react in ways we don’t like, it becomes easier to offer the gift of forgiveness.
