Grant contacted me recently because he was struggling with his guilt about no longer being able and willing to financially support his brother. Grant and his brother are in their 60’s. His brother has been an artist his whole life and very dependent on Grant as well as their mother for financial assistance.
Despite Grant’s repeated warnings to his brother about financial assistance coming to an end, his brother had shown no willingness to help himself and was becoming belligerent and mean.
Grant being a very spiritual and moral man shared with me how he was trying to follow some steps to try to forgive his brother, but he was struggling.
I suggested he stop trying to forgive his brother because it would not work. Given what I knew about Grant, I added that what he needed to help him forgive his brother was to forgive himself. And that’s because both of them were struggling with the same mistaken belief of not being worthy of having an abundant life.
Forgiveness is not a simple process, because often what is needed to forgive others, is to be able to forgive ourselves.
The way I see it, there are two aspects to forgiving.
First, when we look at the judgments we have of others we can’t forgive, chances are we believe they are bad, they have done something wrong and should suffer and be punished for what they did.
Whatever they did to us is over, but our judgments of how bad they are persists in our mind. It’s the stories we have and are rehearsing “today” about something that happened “back then” that is causing so much suffering. The event is over, but our thoughts about the event never end.
The first point is this: What we need to forgive in life is not just simply what other people have done to us but the ideas that we carry around for years or decades about what others did and what that has meant for us in our life, because this is what is harming us today.
We as the judge and jury are perpetuating much of our own suffering by rehearsing the judgments we have of others.
When we rehearse the events of the past, and the stories we have attached to those events such as: my father was never there for me –“he didn’t care about me”, my mother was too critical –“she didn’t think I was lovable”, my abuser “stole my childhood and made me believe I was damaged”, my ex-husband cheated on me,- “ruined my life”, then those thoughts hurt us more than they will ever hurt the other person. The event may be over but the stories live on.
We are attaching a meaning that is very personal about an event that likely had little to do with us. My father being absent, likely wasn’t because he didn’t care about me!
Someone once said that ‘resentment is like taking a poison and waiting for the other person to die from it’. The thoughts that we have today about the events of the past is what needs to be forgiven.
So often, what we need to forgive is not the actions that others did decades ago but the hurt that we create upon ourselves for the negative, angry thoughts that we entertain day after day that drain our energy. Our thoughts of resentment hurt us more than anyone else can ever hurt us. So who is hurting who and who really needs forgiveness?
The second point is this: how we judge others, serves as a mirror for how we judge ourselves. When we judge others as being bad for their actions, chances are somewhere in our own life we judge ourselves for being bad and we fear we will be punished. Deep in most people’s psyche, there is a belief that sooner or later our mistakes will catch up with us and meanwhile we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Our thoughts and resentments get projected onto others so that we don’t have to look at how we may be holding the same beliefs towards ourselves.
Our judgements reflect our own fears and rather than facing our fears directly we judge others. Making somebody else wrong is a projection of our own sense of badness.
Our unforgiveness towards others is a mirror for the mistakes that we have made that we can’t let go of and for the beliefs that we hold about ourselves that we may not be aware of.
It’s a lot easier to judge others than to look at how we ourselves have hurt others with our words or actions, the child we criticized because they didn’t live up to our expectations, the family member we have alienated for decades, or to face the regrets of the abortion we had, or the child we gave up for adoption that not even our husband knows about, or the pleasure we may have secretly felt from the sexual abuse as a child.
We hold ourselves hostage for the mistakes we have made and carry those secrets which breed toxic shame that we then project on others.
That shame we inflict on ourselves is far more painful and powerful than any harm anybody can do to us.
We are the judge, the jury and the executioner, but also the saviour! No one else can condemn us for our mistakes or release us from our guilt.
The forgiveness of others is nice to have but it means nothing if we can’t forgive ourselves.
Forgiveness is not as simple as saying “I forgive you”. It’s a decision we make to undo the thoughts that are stuck in our minds. We undo the judgements that we made about ourselves because we didn’t know any better.
It’s also not something that happens all at once. It may take weeks, months often years. We may want to forgive right now but we can’t force ourselves to do so. Forgiveness happens only when we’re ready and strong enough to meet our own fears and shame with acceptance and compassion.
