Forgiveness, a simple world with many different meanings for different people. Forgiveness can mean freeing someone from the guilt they may feel from having done or said something that hurt you, forgiveness could also be you processing your anger or hurt in order to move on from the situation and free yourself from the negative emotions attached to it in your head.
We are taught about forgiveness from a very young age. Right from the beginning, as a child, we are taught to not hold on to grudges. If another child took your toy, you were taught to not get upset over it and fight with them but to forgive them and play with all the other toys you have. In school too, if your classmate took your favourite pencil without asking, and they said sorry after that, I’m sure your parents/guardians or teachers must have encouraged you to forgive them. There are two benefits to the adults encouraging you to grant forgiveness to the other child in this scenario, one is that it will teach you what forgiveness is early on and since children at a younger age already have a short attention span you will realise quickly that whatever you were upset about was not that big of a deal. The other benefit is that it teaches the other child if you realise and reflect on your mistakes, and then ask for forgiveness genuinely you will almost always be forgiven. This situation would then be an excellent opportunity to teach you both about forgiveness, a lesson that will stay with you for a long time.
While lessons of childhood do leave a lasting impression, forgiveness is something we all grow very familiar with as time passes on. At almost every stage in life, every milestone in our journey of growing old and experiencing the world, we will have to either be on the giving or receiving end of forgiveness. We all make mistakes, and these mistakes - if we take the initiative to learn from them and use them to become a better person - require forgiveness to move on from.
If you think about it, from one perspective, forgiveness and hurt are two sides of the same coin. Both co-exist, but one is absent in the presence of the other. A good way to explain that would be through an example. Imagine a situation where one of your friends and you got into an argument. Maybe it was an argument regarding something political, and we all know those debates tend to get very heated very quickly because everyone has strong opinions regarding politics and usually refuse to budge from such staunchly held opinions. Maybe in the heat of the moment, your friend said something that was extremely hurtful to you. For you to be upset and express your hurt would be a very natural reaction, you would be mad at them. But if they were to come up to you and take initiative to apologize to you, you would be willing to understand their side of the argument and might even accept their apology and forgive them because they have proven that they are truly sorry. No in this situation, when they hadn’t apologised, you were hurt. And that hurt did not go away until they apologised. It is only when they apologised that your hurt faded away to be replaced by forgiveness. When you are hurt, forgiveness is hard to give, and when you have decided to forgive, hurt is very hard to cling to.
Forgiveness, then, is in many ways an antidote to hurt. It may not be a very accurate statement, but it works well as a general umbrella statement. The entire point of forgiveness is to be able to process your emotions and be able to let go of them and move of from them. Hurt, anger, sadness and regret - these are all negative emotions that serve no purpose to us and are often simply holding us back from our true potential.
Forgiveness helps us take all of these negative emotions we may feel in situations that we perceive as hurtful to us, and makes us think about it. The first step to forgiveness is to process what forgiveness is for in the first place. Nobody asks forgiveness for something that is right. People ask for forgiveness only when they have realised they were in the wrong and regret the hurt it may have caused others. So to forgive them we will have to ask ourselves do we want to forgive them? Is what they did forgivable and do they deserve the forgiveness they are asking for? In answering these questions, we will also start evaluating our own reactions, trying to figure out what exactly upset us and why so. It will also force us to gauge the intensity of how hurt or angered we are. The more hurt we are, the more anger we feel, the less likely we are to be forgiving towards them. But sometimes in this reflective process, depending on the situation, we may realise our hurt or anger was not entirely due to them and some of it is also on us.
How can it be on us? Why would we hurt ourselves? Well, ideally we shouldn’t. But humans also have a tendency to overthink and jump to conclusions. Many times our negative emotions are invoked from our assumptions more than the reality of the situation. In this way, the mere concept or just approaching the possibility of forgiveness has the power to make you reflect, see your flaws and work on them to improve as a person.
The actual process of forgiveness, by the time your reach the end of it, would have helped you understand that letting go of your emotions is only better for you in the long run. Processing your emotions, getting to the root of those emotions and going through the works to eventually be able to forgive someone will have improved you as a person, and enhanced your general outlook towards life without you even having realised it.
Forgiveness also makes you healthier. Of course, running a lap in your nearest park will be a quicker way to get fitter, but forgiveness can uplift you in many ways that you may not have thought possible. Going back to the point we made, where we stated that forgiveness helps you transform negative feelings into positive ones, or at the very least process them and let go of them. If forgiveness is something you have not thought of giving yet, if you don’t think forgiving someone who has hurt you is an option because you cannot find it in yourself to say that whatever they did is something you can get over, you will hold on to those emotions. There is no closure in that situation and you will continue to let the thoughts about that situation roam around in your head and keep experiencing the same negative emotions over and over again. Just like we need to disinfect wounds before we can expect them to heal, we also need to process our thoughts and emotions from an emotionally scarring situation in order to get to the part where we can heal. Otherwise, our mindset gets infected, as we try to repress our emotions. And then eventually, at some point, these emotions and the expression of these emotions are bound to surface in one way or the other, and it can hurt you as well as those around you and those that care for you.
Lingering on whatever has hurt us for a prolonged period of time can severely affect our mental health and our general demeanour. When you find yourself sad and unable to move on, it will start affecting your daily life too. It will start affecting the other relationships in your life as well. When we are hurting, we also become blind to the hurt of others. If you are hurting, you will probably be too drained from dealing with your own emotions to notice that your best friend is upset with something in her life, or that your father is sad to see you sad. Sometimes some experiences leave us with a lot of emotional baggage, and the longer you drag that baggage, lugging it around wherever you go, you are exhausting yourself and not the other person.
Your mental health also affects your physical health. We may not realise it instantly, but being sad, hurt or angry will start to chip not only on our mental health and our personality but also our physical health. When our mental health takes a toss, maybe even severe enough to cause us depression and anxiety, it is bound to manifest in ways that might blindside us. You may lose your appetite, you may even have trouble sleeping. Being sad also presents a problem for your brain to produce the necessary neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate your mood and maintain a lot of other systems of your body as well. You may grow lethargic and start keeping to yourself.
All of this, from not eating enough, not sleeping enough, not enough activity and not enough taking-care-of-yourself will take a toll on your body. The solution to all of this? Learning to forgive. Forgiveness will help you release all of that pent-up frustration, anger and hurt until it no longer weighs you down. All the side-effects that you are facing as a result of these negative emotions, will take time but be reversed. It would not make sense to have them magically reversed, but forgiveness is such an important part of your journey towards a happier you, an integral part of your recovery from the hurt you have been clinging to tightly for too long.
Other than protecting you from the dangers of a sad mood and helping you reverse the effects of the neglect you may have caused yourself in being tangled in feeling, forgiveness, in general, has health benefits too. Forgiveness leads to lower heart rate and lower Blood Pressure. It checks out, if you think about it once you forgive someone you are done with that situation. You are not going to continue to be stressed about it because in your brain you have resolved the situation, it is done and dusted. This means you don’t experience stress due to it either, hence the lower heart rate and BP. Studies also show that people who were more generous with forgiveness also showed less overall stress experienced. Similarly, not having hurtful memories and negative emotions nag at you as you try to sleep also improves your quality of sleep. The more well-rested you are, the more likely you are to be a pleasant person to be around. This means being forgiving improves your social life as well, both in terms of being more approachable and in terms of better quality of friendships and relationships as well.
To conclude, forgiveness holds immense power to improve multiple aspects of your life. On the physical front, it has numerous health benefits. Forgiving helps you sleep better, reduces fatigue, makes your heart healthier and also protects you from the many dangers that stress threatens your health with. It also encourages you to have a healthier lifestyle in the long run.
On the personal front, being forgiving requires a lot of introspection and urges you to look at what made you upset so that you can avoid it in the future. Forgiving someone also helps you understand what your limits and boundaries are. You form a better connection with yourself when you let go of all thoughts and emotions that clutter the path to self-awareness. It also helps you realise when you may have been wrong, or at least not entirely faultless in situations, giving you an opportunity to fix it and improve as a person.
On the social front, being able to forgive makes you a better friend, as a big part of forgiveness is also being able to communicate what made you upset. This will inevitably lead to healthier friendships. You will also come across as a more approachable individual.
You may also be interested in:
Sorry. Due to our site's regulations and policies, your message has not been posted. Our moderating team has been notified about your message. If the message is found to be genuine and still did not get posted, you may not post the message again as it will automatically get posted for you within 24hrs time (excluding weekends).
- The Indiaparenting Team
