Guilt is a very coarse emotion. If we have done something that we know has hurt or angered someone, made them upset, we doubtlessly feel guilty; more so, if we truly regret our actions and see the error of our ways. This guilt continues to grate on our consciousness no matter what we do. After all, being the reason behind someone’s hurt never feels good, especially if they are someone we care about and someone who is close to us. The only way to alleviate this guilt is by being forgiven.
Just as we appreciate being forgiven and given a chance to leave our mistakes behind once we have learned from them, others too deserve to experience that relief. When we forgive someone, as long as we have communicated clearly enough what made us mad or why we were upset and they reciprocate by understanding and genuinely feeling sorry for their mistakes, we are giving them a chance to grow. You will be surprised at how much forgiveness can improve relationships and dynamics between two people. A majority of this comes from the fact that forgiveness takes a lot of honesty and empathy, along with rational and clear communication that is not provoking towards anyone and does not cause anyone to be defensive either. All of those components, outside of forgiveness, make the pillars of a healthy and good relationship or friendship.
Being generous with your forgiveness also has a host of benefits for you. Forgiveness, principally, becomes something you grant to alleviate someone else’s guilt as much as it becomes something that helps you move on and finally let go of things that may bog you down. The question of forgiveness stems from negative feelings in the first place. If nothing that can cause hurt or anger conspires, there is no requirement for forgiveness either. Forgiveness becomes a tool to move past that then.
Though forgiveness is a step in the right direction, it is not as easy. When we have been hurt by someone, or someone’s actions and words, it can be very hard to work past that. Sometimes forgiving someone can feel like invalidating our own feelings, or making it seem like what they did was not bad enough to feel bad about it. Sometimes it can also feel that forgiving someone too easily will somehow be forfeiting our stand in the matter, that it will reduce the “weight” of our opinion or what we are standing up for.
Other times, the hurt is just way too big to be able to move past. How are we supposed to forgive someone then? Would it not be inauthentic to forgive someone for the sake of forgiving them even if we do not truly feel that way? It would be considered lying, or misleading someone to let them believe things are okay when they are not. And if they are not informed of your feelings, they will continue to act as if everything is normal and that will eventually get on our nerves as well, it can even lead to outbursts that may well up before we even realise it. And now we are the one who has hurt them.
All in all, communicating, figuring out what is wrong and forgiving someone is the best way to deal with the situation. As we have established, forgiving is not very easy. So here are some tips that will help you be better at forgiving.
1. Assessing and coming to terms.
The biggest step to forgiveness, the one that is the most essential is, is to process what happened in the first place. What was the event that made you upset, what about it particularly made you feel the way it did, why do you feel so strongly about it? It is important to take a step back and view the situation from a greater viewing angle and truly understand where the root of the negative feelings lie. It is equally important to assess how exactly these negative feelings affect you. Are they even intense enough to warrant continuing to hold on to these emotions? If not, it is best to let go. And if they are big enough that they are affecting your daily life, maybe thoughts about what hurt you are distracting you or you find yourself being emotionally drained or even mentally exhausted because you simply do not have the energy to deal with it anymore, but you are still hurt and nothing has changed in the situation for you to feel better about it either. This would be a good time to try and come to terms with the situation. That does not mean you passively accept what happened, but rather you familiarise yourself with the situation, how it has affected both you and the person who hurt you. Understand what exactly occurred that made you upset and what are your options now. You can either talk it out with the person, make them understand what soured your mood, understand that they regret their action and will try not to do it again, and forgive them. Or you could let that anger and hurt fester in your head because you don’t want to have to confront them. Or you could let it go without a discussion or any attempt at resolution, you move on from both the event that hurt you as well as the person who hurt you.
2. Understand forgiveness is for you.
The biggest takeaway you can take from this article- forgiveness is for you and you alone. Sure, you may forgive someone because you want to alleviate their guilt. But that is also for you, you want to alleviate their guilt. Them not feeling guilty matters to you. But on a more internal level, forgiveness is more about liberating yourself from the cycle of getting hurt, acting out on that hurt and hurting yourself even more as an ill-guided attempt at showing your disapproval of whatever made you upset. Forgiveness, at the end of the day, is uprooting the cause of unwanted feelings and leaving room for the growth of things that are wanted. Constantly thinking about something that has upset you, poring over the situation and going over and over again to justify how you are right and how the other person was wrong is not helping anyone. If anything, constant reminders of how you were wronged only serve to experience those feelings again and again. What good does wallowing in those emotions do? Forgives for yourself is to realise that forgiving something is so that you can be done with that situation so that you don’t have to tie yourself or your self-worth to it. Someone hurt you and you have no control over that. You feel hurt and you have no control over that either because we all feel emotions. But what you choose to do with that hurt, how you approach the situation, how you choose to process those emotions and how you decide to deal with them is very much dependent on you. You can take control of those factors and lessen the pain you are experiencing, you can choose to find that closure for yourself by resolving your tangled feelings if the other person shows no intentions of ever apologising. Realise that it is so that you can move one, and if someone seems to learn their mistake and grow from it, or find in it a reason to move on from the situation too, is just a by-product.
3. Thinking
Up till this point we have only talked about the feelings and emotions related to forgiveness, how forgiveness is granted to rid ourselves of the negative emotions that we no longer welcome within ourselves. But there is a significant cognitive component to forgiveness as well. Emotions are much harder to deal with and tack as they are fickle things. We may feel a certain way about something, and feel in a completely different way about it in a short amount of time. But thinking, thinking is a lot more tangible in terms of making changes as well as malleable. We may not always be successful in guiding our emotions, but we can guide and redirect our thoughts.
If we decide to, mentally and not emotionally, forgive the person if only to relieve ourselves from having to deal with it repeatedly by repressing it, it becomes a lot easier to get our feelings on board as well.
Another technique, that may often help to mentally urge ourselves towards forgiveness instead of bitterness, is reframing. Reframing is to patiently and logically revisit the situation that made you upset in the first place but instead visiting it from multiple perspectives rather than just yours. It is to incorporate the outlooks of others and try and understand what it is like to be in their shoes. Empathy goes a long way, not only in understanding other people better but also in avoiding hurting ourselves by making assumptions about others. Take one example of a situation that hurt you, maybe you were upset because a co-worker made an off-handed comment about you the other day, possibly in front of your other colleagues. You are not wrong to be upset in this situation. But if you were to step out from being yourself for a moment and into being the other person, you might realise that you are well aware that they have been very stressed the entire week for a very important presentation, or that maybe your common manager has been treating them very poorly in the recent past. Of course, none of that makes it okay for them to be rude to you but it may be helpful in realising that their snark was not aimed or directed at you. It will help you forgive them easier.
4. Do something good for the person you are upset with.
Okay yes, I know it sounds weird. Someone might even say it sounds ridiculous. Fair enough. But this is one opportunity where you can make cognitive dissonance work in your favour. Cognitive dissonance is when we change our opinion about something because it does not align with another opinion we may have about another thing. Example: You like chips a lot but you know they are not healthy for you and cause a variety of health issues. Now, either you will somehow convince yourself that they aren’t that unhealthy, so you can continue to eat the chips you like. Or you will convince yourself that you don’t like them that much, how can you like something that is unhealthy?
Apply the same rule to someone who has hurt you. Do something good for someone who has hurt you. Force your brain to think that forgiving them is not that hard. When you do something good for them, a favour perhaps, you are also telling your brain that they are someone who deserves your help, favour or goodness from you. In doing that, it will no longer make sense to not just forgive them either. If they are someone who is good and worthy, then they must be worthy of our forgiveness as well. This will make it easier for you to forgive them.
5. Understand it is a process.
Forgiveness is a process, one that is not always linear and can take time. Be patient with yourself, and take baby steps. Forgiveness is not something very easily granted even if we wish for it to be. Give yourself time, as much time as you need, to be able to truly forgive someone. You have been feeling down, and probably not very happy in the time it takes for you to process the situation. So it is okay to go slow, to be careful of how you feel. Forgiveness can be interpreted in many ways, but we need to be sure to communicate it in a way that makes sure what we say is what the other is understanding, otherwise there will still be a gap in communication. This would not be true forgiveness then.
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
