THERE’S a lot of lightweight twaddle out there about forgiveness, but if you really listen to people who’ve made sense of both small and big tragedies, you’ll hear stories of forgiveness that are as rich and dense as a proper chocolate cake.
Forgiveness isn’t a decision, a single act or a feeling. It doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or making excuses for it. It doesn’t wipe the slate clean, it’s not weak and it doesn’t let anybody off the hook.
Forgiveness never happens overnight.
Forgiveness is a practice; it’s the work of finding what there is to learn from a truly awful situation, so the road you walk along doesn’t keep leading you back to your pain over and over again.
Vanessa Bryant chose not to walk away from her husband Kobe Bryant, even after he admitted he had sex with a 19-year-old hotel employee. Photo: Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP Source: AP
If you’re interested in forgiveness, here are a small number of big steps that can help with the practice of making sense and letting go.
1. Take your own inventory
One of the truly miserable things about having been wronged, is how much time you can spend thinking about it. How could this happen? Why did she do that to me? How can he live with himself? Will she ever apologise? You can literally spend years of your life obsessing about the terribleness of other people.
If you can take some time to focus on your own shortcomings, they can help you find the real silver lining in your cloud of despair. We don’t always have a choice about what happens to us, but we always have a choice about how we respond. Maybe you’re guilty, ashamed or frightened by how you reacted to your tragedy. Maybe you were partly responsible. Maybe you let yourself down or foolishly left yourself open. Maybe you didn’t see it coming because you were refusing to look. Maybe your only failing was a belief that it couldn’t possibly happen to you.
2. Practice detachment
Letting go of your focus on what was done to you is not simple or quick, but it does have the potential to lead you back to the person you want to be. A daily practice of choosing to let go of thinking about your resentments can help you to focus on your own humanity, on how you want to be in the world, instead of keeping you permanently tied to the people who harmed you. Regularly refocusing on your own needs and how you want to behave in the world literally re-claims your life.
You may need to practice detachment hourly, or at times every five minutes. You may need to meditate, pray, keep a journal and tell your friends and family you want their support to begin to talk differently about what happened to you. If you can start to keep your focus on yourself, then you can begin to let go of allowing a terrible experience to stain the whole of the rest of your life.
3. Be a rebel
Being able to practice forgiveness can feel impossible when everyone around you wants to hang onto the hurt and keep the blame alive. Sometimes your people are so invested in hanging on that you need incredible strength and courage to go against the pack and begin to let go.
It might be really challenging for your friends and family to see you put down the black and white glasses and begin to see the world in full colour. They might be afraid you’ll be hurt again or they might be challenged to see their own wounds differently. And because they feel challenged, they might pressure you in no uncertain terms to get back in your victim box.
Practising forgiveness can require incredible courage when it means resisting ways of being that have been in your family for generations. You may need to develop the ability to see your people from a distance, with a loving but critical eye. And you may need to embrace the lonely role of the outsider for a time.
If you want something different, you have to be brave enough to do something different. If you can bear to be a rebel, you might just find what other rebels have always looked for; the freedom to change.
Maybe it’s time for Daenerys to heed some of this advice and forgive Ser Jorah Mormont once and for all. Source: AP
If you can be honest about your own part, however small, in your story of wrongdoing, it can help you begin to make peace with the future. Taking responsibility for how you’ve acted can give you a sense of agency and can help to renew a sense of hope that the future you’re building isn’t going to be determined by your past.
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