Contents
How to know if I can forgive someone who has hurt me
Psychology
The forgiveness process first requires a time in which the person experiences and connects with the negative consequences of what has happened to them.
Forgiving or not forgiving is closely related to resentment. When we forgive we stop experiencing anger, fear, sadness, guilt, resentment or shame towards ourselves or towards other people to experience compassion, and this compassionate attitude allows us to silver a more complex reality. We stop thinking about ourselves and we no longer see the world as a hostile, dangerous, unfair place or against which we plan revenge.
Dr. Montse Marsà, psychologist at Mundopsicologos.com, talks about the importance of learning to forgive: «learning to forgive implies connect with suffering and let it go By our own decision: because we have decided to be at peace and be happy ». All this implies that we stop carrying
carry out actions that seek revenge to punish: We stop protesting claiming what we did not have or was not and we redirect ourselves towards all those possibilities that have been opened by connecting with positive psychological states.
But you will say that how difficult it is to forgive when you have been hurt a lot, right? Montse Marsà has an answer to this: «Sometimes acceptance is difficult and we find it difficult … However, truly forgiving can be difficult because we think that forgiving is forgetting and not thinking about what happened … but quite the opposite; forgiveness is memory and learning. If we forgot, we would not learn and we would not protect ourselves against suffering, “he explains.
In general lines, and according to Dr. Montse Marsià, this is how forgiveness would be achieved:
— The desire. It is wanting forgiveness to be free. It is wanting to be free, it is to be free from suffering. Desire mobilizes us, and that will lead us to seek the tools we have to do so.
— Recognize the emotions we feel. It is connecting with anger, with rage, with injustice. It is recognizing and accepting what we feel, which does not mean leaving it within ourselves and doing nothing, on the contrary, it is listening to what we feel and taking responsibility for it. We are responsible for what we do with our emotions.
– After taking responsibility for what we feel, to take action. Taking responsibility for what I feel will lead me to accept that only I myself have the power to be free. If I take responsibility, I decide what to do with my emotions. We cannot control emotions, but we can change what we do as a result of them. But if I don’t take responsibility, anger leads to more anger, anger to more anger … and so on with all emotions. When I take responsibility, I am the one who decides what to do with them, even though they are present. Do I decide to continue suffering or do I decide to be free and be happy?
— Acceptance and forgiveness. It is coming to accept the circumstances in their totality, recognize them as such and forgive them. At this point, we experience the freedom and worthiness of feeling free from suffering.
And it is that getting rid of all kinds of hatred or resentment has its benefits … As the expert points out, forgiveness is freedom, and this is the greatest benefit of forgiveness: «We become free to suffer from that circumstance and learn from it. To forgive is also to recognize ourselves as people capable of managing what we feel and freeing ourselves from what makes us suffer. Forgiveness is two-way: if I forgive, I forgive myself; if I accept, I will also be accepting myself in my totality. In addition, concludes Dr. Montse Marsà, forgiving will make us fully accept what we feel without reacting. «Because to feel hatred, to feel anger, rage… is to react and not protect ourselves as valuable people that we are. And negative emotions, after all, do not allow us to be at peace and develop to our full potential, “he concludes.
Ana de la Mata, a psychologist at the Cepsim psychological center, emphasizes that forgiving does not mean reconciliation, as we often think. Reconciliation is an interpersonal process that involves reestablishing or repairing a relationship, in which the victim rebuilds the lost trust and the perpetrator recognizes the mistakes made and takes steps to correct or amend the damage caused.
However, forgiveness is an individual process, which has to do with «diminishing the resentment» that one feels without the need for the participation of the perpetrator: «Forgiveness requires an effort to see the one who wronged us with benevolence and love and to accept the parts of ourselves that we reject at some point, “says the psychologist.
Therefore, the forgiveness process first requires a time in which the person experiences and connects with the negative consequences of what has happened to them. It is necessary to experience a series of emotional reactions such as anger, sadness, guilt, shame or fear.