Forgiveness as Practice

I have been reading a lot about letting go of anger and forgiving those that do us harm.  It’s clear that walking around angry at someone for past misdeeds doesn’t do us any favors in the happiness department.  So, for my own good, I’ve started working on forgiveness.  Forgiveness for the big stuff and for the little stuff.  Most of the stuff that I’ve read speaks about forgiveness as if it were a switch, with which we could turn our hurt feelings from “on” to “off”.  

The insight I’ve gained from working on these issues is that forgiveness is a process, not a decision or a single act.  For me, it is getting up every day and saying “I choose not to hold that person in contempt or anger any longer, both for my personal well-being and the sake of any future possible relationship with them.”  The harder part comes with interaction, we must repeat our phrase about choice to ourselves, and be present with our feelings.  The person possibly feels no need for your forgiveness, and could possibly even be offended that they might need forgiving.  Here again, though, forgiveness is mine to give and is for my own happiness.  The person in question literally has no “need” of my forgiveness (unless they need something later, of course).   An important counterpoint to a person not needing our forgiveness is them not deserving it.  Some particularly heinous acts could inspire this type of response.  But again, forgiveness is not really an external thing.  It’s internal to each of us.  We give it (or not) because we are ready to heal (or not).  It is very hard to heal and become whole without letting go of the hurts that are caused by others.  Every time a memory of that person is triggered, we are once again wounded, and that is what we are trying to heal.  An interesting, though unoriginal, thing to note is that by reframing forgiveness this way, we take the power to heal for ourselves, and take that power away from the other person.  By choosing to forgive someone, you are acknowledging they have hurt you, and choosing, day by day and encounter by encounter, to let go of that hurt.  You reclaim your rights to happiness and wholeness by refusing to allow the past to dictate your future.  Since I have been thinking about these things, one “rule” has surfaced.  The deeper the hurt, the longer our forgiveness practice will take to achieve the results we want.  A couple going through a divorce, for instance, may need to practice forgiveness for a long time before actually realizing the acceptance that is sign of true healing.   That acceptance is an acknowledgement of the past without emotional investment.  It is understanding that those events happened, but they are the past, which has no power over us.