Forgive or Forget?

How do you deal with emotional hurt? When someone betrays you, or disappoints you, or disrespects you or breaks your heart, or simply your trust. It may be not always be directly about you, it could be someone you love or an act of horror against a community, as we sadly continue to see in our global communities.

How do you feel? How do you respond? How do you process? What do you take from that experience with you? How do you heal from it?

Do you feel angry? Do you feel sad? Do you feel hurt? Do you feel you need to get back at that person or group or institution? Do you feel victimized? Do you feel compelled to react?

Beyond that initial whirlwind of emotional responses, do you eventually forgive or do you forget? Or neither? Or both?

Give it time, commonly held wisdom suggests. Time is the best healer. You’ll move on and go past it eventually and it’s not going to matter, unless of course you actively choose to hold on to it and make little to no effort to move past it.

Distract yourself, stop thinking about the person or sequence of events. Cut everything out of your life that reminds you of that situation or person. Out of sight is out of mind. All of these can be effective strategies for moving on. Except, sometimes it’s not always possible to cut off an individual or situation from for your life.

Regardless, unless you truly process and forgive the person and/or come to terms with the situation, you will never truly move on. You might certainly forget with time, only until a similar situation or person shows up in your life and the subconscious hurt you carry within you from the last time around, re-surfaces.

Ever wonder why you keep making the same mistakes over and over in life? Perhaps falling for the people who are not right for you, perhaps constantly being over-trodden by family members or even colleagues at work, perhaps constantly being passed over for a promotion, perhaps constantly ending up in toxic friendships. Just a few situations that come to mind. The cause is not outside us, it’s inside us.

Life experiences will keep repeating themselves unless you consciously bring awareness to and recognize what’s holding you back — your grudges? Your fears from past experiences? Your inability to trust because you still carry the hurt from the last time your trust was broken? Your inability to open up and love fully because you are afraid your heart will be broken again?

You will likely keep getting hurt and disappointed – because, sadly we do live in a world that lacks emotional awareness and assistance at large – as such, forgetting and moving on seems to be the quick-fix approach to take. Closing up emotionally and protecting yourself from future hurt seems to be a more practical approach instead of really uncovering the issue, facing it head-on and coming to terms with it.

Sometimes, depending on the situation and it’s severity, setting boundaries and forgetting may be the most effective immediate approach to take. However in the longer run, you will only truly move on with your life once you can reach a stage where you are at peace with the person/situation and yourself.

This is where forgiveness comes in. And it’s really really hard to do. How can one forgive a person who has caused you deep hurt? How could you trust again when your trust has been broken? How can you love again when your heart has been broken?

I’ve often read in self-help books that you should forgive the person who hurt you, not for them, but for yourself. Because when you can carry the hurt in your heart, you are causing yourself damage, not the other person. When you carry anger, you’re subjecting your body to physiological reactions to stress including hormonal imbalances and other long term impairments. Perhaps that’s why they say that the best revenge is no revenge.

When you’re deeply hurt, you want to somehow get the other person to feel or understand the pain you feel. Even if you don’t wish bad for them, you want them to somehow repent what they’ve done. You want them to acknowledge their hurtful actions to give you some relief from the pain. But none of what you feel or say or do can suddenly turn the other person around or undo the actions. In fact, sometimes it can make things worse, as people typically go into defense mode instead of acknowledging their hurtful actions, even if they are feeling remorse. In the end, all of this simply ends up impacting your well being and peace of mind.

This is why forgiveness is a critical part of healing and truly moving on from hurtful situations and actions. You can’t really fully heal unless you forgive. But what does forgiveness really mean? It’s a loaded word.

Forgiveness is not an excuse for someone’s actions. Forgiveness is not about accepting a toxic situation or person in your life. Forgiveness is not forgetting your boundaries with hurtful things or people. Forgiveness is also not about continuing to suffer in someone else’s inevitable suffering.

A quick Google search tells me “Forgiveness is a conscious and voluntary decision of letting go of feelings of resentment and vengeance against those who have hurt you, regardless of whether they deserve it”.

I think the above is just half the process of forgiving. Truly forgiving someone entails putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, to try to feel what they feel and to reflect on and understand what led them to cause the hurtful actions towards you. Why did they do what they did? Often, it’s really hard to understand this or even impossible to get the opportunity to go through this exercise. But the point of this is to approach the person or the action from a position of empathy and not apathy. That’s truly the difference between forgiving and forgetting.

Forgiveness is not just for those who have hurt you, but first and most importantly, for yourself. It’s about giving yourself permission to get hurt. It’s alright. You did your best. You got hurt. It’s not your fault. Just because of somebody else’s limitations, you do not need to be hard on yourself. You don’t need to stop loving and being yourself, just because of someone else’s actions.

The person who hurt you is coming from their own deep-rooted pain. Their actions are a result of where they are emotionally in their own life. Most people are not even aware of where they are at and why they end up behaving a certain way, or worse, what the impact of their actions on people around them is or could be.

Of course, in extreme cases, when people are aware of their actions and still causing others harm or hurt, that’s a much bigger concern because their inner hatred is clouding their voice of reason or judgement. This is where unchecked and deep-rooted hatred can lead to — actively afflicting harm on innocent people – out of sheer hatred. For the purpose of this blog piece, I’m not trying to tackle these extreme cases, frankly because I simply cannot fathom what level of pain leads people to commit such atrocities. For now, I am attempting to focus on day-to-day life experiences and relationship drama or even trauma we all go through.

The toughest part, in my perspective, is dealing with the ego when trying to forgive someone. That person hurt “me”! How could that person do this to “me”? How could I let this happen to “me”? Is something wrong with “me”? Did “I” do something wrong? “I” will never let this happen to “me” again.

The interesting part is, that none of this is about the “me” or the “I”. If someone hurt you, it was never about you. It was about them. It just happened to be you at the other end. It could have just as likely been someone else, and unless the person deals with their own issues, it’s likely going to continue to be someone else after you.

Remember, when people hurt you, it’s about them, not you. When you forgive them, it’s about you, not them.

I hope you can truly forgive all those who have hurt you and will likely hurt you down the road. I hope that you can fully heal and not let somebody else’s limitations hold you back from living your life feeling healthy and whole.

The world doesn’t need more hurt people. In addition, those who are already hurt need more love to heal from their issues. Only then the cycle of hurt and hate will stop. Only then the cycle of love will take over.