Humans aren’t perfect. We lie to each other, we cheat, we betray each other, and we make mistakes. If you want to navigate your relationships, your career, and your personal life with fewer negative feelings and stronger connections, it’s important to find a way past these negative events.
For most people and in many situations, the way is through forgiveness.
But how can you find forgiveness, for yourself or other people, after an event that feels impossible to forgive?
Why Forgiveness Is So Important
Forgiveness is important for several reasons, regardless of your personal values or background.
Reconciliation and relationship repair
If you or someone else has committed some negative action, forgiveness is the only viable route to reconciliation and relationship repair. Not all relationships are worth preserving, but many are – and forgiveness is the path to preservation.
Letting go of negative feelings
Forgiveness also allows you to let go of your negative feelings, even when you can’t repair the relationship. Letting go of negative feelings helps you feel better and stay healthier, and may reduce symptoms of anxiety, stress, and bitterness.
Empowering yourself with empathy, compassion, and better communication
Practicing forgiveness is a way of empowering yourself with empathy, compassion, and even better communication skills. After forgiving yourself or others, you’ll be able to enter your next relationship with a cleaner conscience and a clearer mind.
The Power of Counseling
Forgiveness isn’t always easy. That’s one reason why relationship counseling is so valuable. Through counseling, by yourself or with a partner, you’ll be able to work with a professional to fully explore your thoughts and feelings, discuss possible avenues to forgiveness, and cultivate the tools required to practice and fully accept forgiveness.
Regardless of the severity or the nature of your relationship, and regardless of how much effort you spend on your own, counseling has the power to help you.
It’s arguably your greatest resource as you pursue forgiveness for yourself or others.
Tools for Forgiving Others
If you’re considering forgiving someone in your life, these are some of the best tools to help you move forward:
Identify what you’re forgiving (and what you’re healing). Take a moment to identify, specifically, what you’re forgiving and what you’re healing. For example, let’s say your partner cheated on you. Obviously, the cheating is the root of the problem. But are you forgiving your partner for a careless moment of indiscretion or a conscious betrayal? And are you attempting to heal anger, resentment, feelings of abandonment, or some combination of these and other emotions?
Exercise empathy and compassion. Try to practice empathy and compassion, even if it is hard. Try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and think and feel the way they do. What led them to do this? Can you sympathize with anything they thought or felt? Can you relate to how they think or feel now?
· Acknowledge and explore your emotions. You should also spend time introspecting. What exactly do you feel and why do you feel it? You may feel very distant from this person, but what’s driving you away? You may feel very angry, but what’s at the heart of your anger? The further you explore, the better.
Join a support group. In some cases, support groups can help. It’s an opportunity to anonymously share the situation, get feedback and outside perspectives, and get emotional support from people who have the capacity to understand. It’s an excellent sanity check and an opportunity to find peace through external support.
Choose to forgive. Forgiveness begins with a choice. You may not feel forgiveness in your heart immediately, but you can make a conscious choice to move forward with it. Once you start practicing forgiveness, you’ll eventually feel it.
Talk it out. If you want to repair the relationship, have conversations with the person you’re forgiving. Explain everything you’ve thought and everything you’ve learned, and explain why you want to practice forgiveness.
Start rebuilding trust. After the initial round of forgiveness, you can start rebuilding trust. Take things slowly and steadily, spending time with each other in small increments until you start feeling more comfortable with each other.
Distract yourself. If you’re forgiving someone with whom you do not want to repair the relationship, find ways to distract yourself so you can focus on something other than them.
Additional Tools for Forgiving Yourself
Many of the aforementioned tools are valuable in forgiving yourself as well. However, you may also need to lean on these additional tools for forgiving yourself:
· Examine your motivations and past feelings. What motivated you to take this action? What were you feeling? Can you have compassion for yourself? Where did you go wrong?
· Split yourself into past, present, and future. If you struggle to forgive yourself, it might be because you feel heavy shame or embarrassment for what you did. To resolve this, try to see yourself as different versions in the past, present, and future. What you did in the past doesn’t necessarily define who you are now, and it certainly doesn’t define what you’re going to do in the future. You can’t change the past, but you can change the present and future.
· Treat yourself like you would a friend. Treating yourself with kindness is a prerequisite for self-forgiveness. This may be difficult for you, so take a cognitive shortcut by treating yourself like you would treat a friend. How would you talk to a friend who did this?
· Avoid excuse-making. When thinking about your actions, avoid making excuses. Take responsibility and feel guilt – as long as you don’t overwhelm yourself with these feelings.
However you get there, forgiveness is powerful. It can help you cleanse your negative feelings, improve your own emotional intelligence, and potentially repair your damaged relationships.
With the help of a qualified counselor and perseverance on your own end, you can get to a much better emotional and social state.
Feature Image by Liza Summer on Pexels
