How to forgive and find peace.
It’s very rare that a person hasn’t felt wronged at some point of their lives. Some of those wrongs may be personal and comparatively small, or they can be big and long-reaching. Perhaps you are someone who feels your own faults deeply, and find it hard to forgive yourself. Either way, when you can’t forgive yourself or others for any misdeeds committed, you can find yourself stuck in the past, held there by anger, sadness, and frustration.
Forgiveness as a gift to yourself
Aminata Conteh-Biger is the founder of The Aminata Maternal Foundation, an organisation that helps prevent maternal and infant deaths in Sierra Leone. She has more reasons than most to feel angry at the world. As a young woman she was kidnapped and endured several months of abuse in captivity during the Sierra Leonean Civil War. Throughout her ordeal, the bible story of the Prodigal Son – a parable that teaches forgiveness – kept her sane through some of her darkest moments.
“I didn’t understand what the purpose of forgiveness was, I just knew inside that it sets you free. That’s all I knew. [The parable] just said forgiveness will set you free.”
After she escaped and returned to her father, she realised that her kidnapping had emotionally destroyed him.
“I thought, if I had to hold a grudge, I would be keeping my dad in a prison … I wanted to live a life where he could see that they didn’t break me. That was almost like a gift for myself, and for him, because I knew that he was not the same person anymore. And that gave me [a sense of] peace. Also, the idea of forgiveness was that I was going to be free.
Freedom means moving forward
For Aminata, forgiveness meant moving forward with her life. It meant letting go of the anger and pain about what had been done to her and her family.
Everett L Worthington is professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University and a specialist in forgiveness. “Much of what keeps people from moving on after a hurt or transgression is rumination. Rumination is playing the event over repeatedly in the late show of the mind (sometimes like a very bad B-movie). Forgiveness can offer some closure, at least on the event we are forgiving.”
Which is not to say that forgiveness is easy. Aminata is the first to admit that it’s not a simple thing. It was a choice, and one that she has to continually practise. “Every day I make a conscious decision and do it. It is a practice because there are certain things that happen in this life that test you.”
Sitting with your feelings
But how do you actually go about forgiving? Maggie Dent is a parenting educator and author of Parental as Anything. Maggie says a practical way to practise forgiveness is by writing down all the things the transgression made you feel. Write in detail whether it made you feel angry, worthless, frightened, or sad. Once you’ve written it all down, burn it. It’s a path to forgiveness that Maggie has used herself.
“Once I got rid of all the feelings, I found it really easy to move on and let things go. I couldn’t move on, which is technically what forgiveness is, until I had processed and sat in the emotional pain that the event has caused me.”
The five-step path to forgiveness
In his work on forgiveness, Everett has come up with a program called REACH to help people through the steps to forgiveness. “R stands for Recall the hurt, which is needed if one is going to forgive and not deny the hurt. E stands for Empathize with the person who hurt you. A stands for give an Altruistic gift of forgiveness … C stands for Commit to the forgiveness you experience. The reason we make that commitment is so that H, we Hold on to the forgiveness when we doubt.”
Taking responsibility for your own actions
Self-forgiveness is just as important as forgiving others. If you’ve ever snapped for no reason at your kids or partner, you’ll understand the pain of self-recrimination.
But if you want to move on from your actions, you have to take responsibility for them first. Everett explains, “When people forgive themselves responsibly, they take responsibility for wrongdoing and when appropriate they apologise sincerely and seek to make amends if they can. Those responsible actions help the person who was hurt, whether romantic partner or child, to be more generous in their forgiving. That helps the person forgive herself or himself.”
Everett also says that self-forgiveness has a tangible, physical impact. “Self-forgiveness reduces stress that accompanies self-condemnation. That reduction in stress can reduce cortisol in the blood, which, when chronically elevated, can affect every physical system in the body. Responsible self-forgiveness [can also] close the relational loop. Even if a good apology and amends-making have been carried out and forgiveness has been granted by the person who was hurt, continued self-condemnation can damage the relationship.”
The truth is we are all imperfect and fallible. Once we accept that we are human we can embrace the humility to forgive ourselves and others. It’s not likely to be easy or comfortable, but it just might be the key that sets you free.
