What is Forgiveness? How to forgive someone?

The word “Forgiveness” gives different meaning to different people. It is quite common for anyone to get hurt by people around us. Starting from our childhood, we used to get hurt even by our parents too. There are various types of traumatic experience in our life starting from physical to mental, emotional abuse either by our family members or our friends. So far, what are you doing?!! If someone who loves you, care about you or you care about them hurts you, what will you do? Are you holding your Anger, resentment and negativity with you or embrace forgiveness and move forward with lessons? Why it is difficult for forgive someone? How to forgive someone? Let’s see in this article.

What is Forgiveness?

Psychologists define Forgiveness as Conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of Anger or vengeance towards the person or group who harmed you regardless of whether they actually deserve for forgiveness.

Forgiveness is purely a self-care act which harnesses your personal power to take care of Mental & Emotional Health.
Forgiveness never means that you are allowing the person to do the same thing.
Forgiveness may lead to Reconciliation in a relationship. But it is not possible every time, depends upon the offender and situation, reconciliation may occur or not

Why it is difficult to forgive someone?

When someone hurts you, even though they are very close to you, you feel difficult to forgive that person by holding anger, resentment and irritation within you. Why it happens? Because

You feel that they don’t deserve to be forgiven:

When your best friend cheats you, you feel shocked, irritated and you cannot able to accept the fact. By holding anger and resentment, you just leave them. Since, they cheated you; you feel that they don’t deserve to be forgiven.

Righteous Indignation:

You become angry because you are disgusted at something which is morally incorrect. Sometimes it might be either Righteous indignation or Self-righteous indignation. Here, Anger is considered to be an acceptable.

Victim mode:

As a human, it is quite common to feel some mental energy by being a victim. It is purely because people listen to your stories, you will get lot of attention, always get what you want, and criticism on you will be markedly reduced. Because of getting energy by being victim, you don’t want to forgive people.

Not engaged in Perspective taking:

When you get hurt, you feel angry and irritation. Because of this, you always thinking about that the particular person behavior in that particular context without engage in perspective taking. Perspective taking means that you think from the opponent’s point of you which makes you to move away from your egocentric point and show Empathy and Compassion.

What happens if you don’t forgive others?

Anger builds Resentment and Hostility which has direct impact on your overall Health.
Stress, Anxiety and depression are more common.
You will start finding happiness and joy outside, so, more possibility of getting in to addictions. Addictions may be Alcohol, smoking, gadgets even food.
Spoils both personal and professional relationships because of bitterness and grudges in self elicited in behaviors.

How to forgive people who hurt us?

Again, forgiveness is a decision, it’s a choice which you take for taking care of yourselves.

The best thing which you can expect from forgiving others is “Happiness & Peace”. Additionally, Forgiveness won’t happen on a single day. It needs practice!!

Set an Intention: Without having intent to forgive someone, you can’t do anything. So first set an intention to forgive people, because the person who got benefitted by this is only you.

Give importance to your Anger:

Respect your Anger, write down what made you angry, how it is violated your boundaries. Detail it

Explore the incident:

Explore the incident in every aspect, broaden your perspective. Explore whether you are the reason behind that particular incident. If it so, note down what you have learnt from it.

Set a moment & Meditate:

Daily or weekly thrice, set a moment like immediately after bathing or before going to sleep. It is not about the time, it is about the moment.

Sit in a calm place, close your eyes, take a deep breath, inhale all positive energies, qualities like Compassion, love, peace from universe, Exhale with releasing all hurts. Feel it. Try this.

Forgiveness never happens on a single day, it needs practice to release all hurts, grudges from inside.

Practicing gratitude, cultivating Self-awareness and practicing mindfulness on regular basis acts as a energetic factor to forgive others and attain Peace and Happiness.