Forgiveness is the action/process of letting go and forgiving someone for doing you wrong and affecting your feelings. This usually occurs when you move on from a bad time in your life or have a change of attitude towards a situation and/or the person.
Why is forgiveness important?
Forgiveness is important and essential for many reasons. Not only will it make the person receiving the forgiveness feel better, but it will also make you a lot happier. Forgiveness is mainly for your own benefit as it allows you to move on and it will stop you from having feelings of sadness and carrying a burden from the cause at hand. Learning to forgive someone is a sign of maturity. It doesn’t make you weak to forgive someone, you can forgive someone and not forget what they have done.
How does holding a grudge affect your mental health?
Holding a grudge is when you hold onto a situation that has occurred towards you and holding onto it will only affect you. This can badly damage your mental health and cause issues like depression, insecurities, trust issues, anxiety, etc. Holding onto bad things that has happened to you in the past will make it hard for you to move on with your life and you may struggle to maintain relationships because of the issues and/or feelings you may feel due to being betrayed before.
How does forgiveness affect your mental health?
Forgiveness helps us to change anxiety into inner peace and reduces fear. It leads to an overall improvement within yourself and reduces chances of developing depression as you won’t constantly feel negative emotions towards a situation which will eventually wear you down.
Without forgiveness you will find yourself stuck/trapped in your past and it will prevent you from better times and being the happiest you can be. Forgiveness helps us to heal from our past traumas and helps us to grow as an individual. It will help us to reduce unhealthy anger and allow us to move on and may repair relationships.
Do you have to forgive to move on?
Forgiveness is an essential part towards moving on. People may be able to move on without forgiveness, but there may be times where the situation is brought up and all of those feelings towards it will drag up and then you will be dealing with unhealthy and unnecessary emotions that you wouldn’t feel if you truly moved on. Many people see forgiveness as a sign of weakness and allowing someone the change to hurt you again. However, forgiveness does not mean you have to continue any relationship with said person, forgiveness is for you and allows you to be happy and move on.
Forgiveness will benefit you more than the person receiving it, letting go of that burden will bring a sense of relief and it will elevate your mood. Although there are things that are unforgivable and may make people feel like giving forgiveness is not the best thing to do such as victims of sexual abuse may feel more power and happiness from not forgiving which is of course completely ok and validated. In addition, everyone is different and people deal and move on with things differently and that is ok.
Why is it hard to forgive?
Forgiveness is often misunderstood for accepting/condoning an action
Bitterness
Hurtful memory
Anger
Fear
Often confused with trust
What is the difference between forgiveness and trust?
Forgiving someone and a situation doesn’t mean they have regained your trust. It is important to note that forgiveness is mainly for your own benefit, trust needs to be earned and just because you forgive someone that has done you wrong, does not mean that you will be foolish enough to give them another chance in hurting you. Trust is something that needs to be earned, and losing that trust makes it really hard to regain it.
Forgiveness is releasing someone and/or a situation and not allowing it to take over our life and continuously hurt us. Forgiveness does not mean that you trust the person, but it may help us to learn to build our trust with others and remove the weight from our shoulders that may be bringing us down.
How do you forgive someone?
Forgiving someone is a process. Depending on the reason for forgiveness, it may take a while. To forgive someone you need to understand forgiveness. There are many ways to help us move on such as;
Talking the situation out – Whether this be to the person or someone you can trust. Talking about your feelings will help you to identify the reason for the hurt and focusing on that will help you towards healing.
Writing it down – If you are not comfortable or want to speak to anyone, writing it down is a good thing to do. Doing so will help you to understand your feelings and be able to work through them helping you to forgive.
Have patience – Forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Especially when it’s something that has really affected you. Remember to be kind to yourself, it is hard for many people to forgive.
Try and understand reasons for the person receiving the forgiveness – This does not mean to make excuses for them. Everyone makes mistakes and it doesn’t make them a bad person. It may be unintentional, or it may be intentional. It can be hard to understand the other persons point of view, but there are many reasons that has no excuse such as domestic violence, sexual assault, etc.
Feel your feelings – It is ok to feel certain ways over situations. No one is ever wrong on how they feel, everyone feels things differently and things may affect you more than it would affect anyone else. It does not make your feelings invalid.
Put yourself first – As much as people may feel like forgiveness is condoning someone’s actions, it is the opposite. Forgiveness will make you feel lighter and a lot happier. It will allow you to move on and reduce negative thoughts of resentment and bitterness.
Remember that forgiveness is for your benefit more than anyone else’s. Put yourself and your mental health first above all else.
