When you think about the worst thing someone has done to you, you may or may not have forgiven them yet. If you have, then the memory helps you reflect on what you have learned from them. if you haven’t, then it’s most likely that you are still carrying your anger and resentment and it reflects through your actions in life. This can happen without you even realizing it and although you may claim you have forgiven them, in reality, you still hold a grudge. Forgiveness plays a big role in everyone’s life, as at some point in time we all have to at least try to forgive someone. Having the capacity to truly forgive can change your life for reasons you might not even think about.
Typically when a person is angry it’s usually combined with stress as the anger stems from a stressful situation or event. Taking the time to forgive someone can reduce the effects of being stressed such as breakouts, lack of sleep, anxiety, and further mental and physical issues that can be caused by stress. Taking the time to step back and check if you have forgiven someone or not could change the way you approach other situations in life such as an event occurring where the same outcome as something that hurt you in the past is possible. In this situation, you may hesitate to open up as your true self, whether this be in a relationship, in school, or anywhere that people can have an effect on you. Lacking forgiveness affects not only your life but others’ lives around you that you probably don’t notice.
A common act that occurs when having unresolved anger and hurt is allowing those emotions to affect all relationships in life. This can cause relationships to fall apart because, in reality, those people aren’t the ones who hurt you, and yet you are treating them like they are. For example, someone broke your trust in the past by constantly reassuring you and telling you that you are the best person they have ever met, then they leave you. In reaction to this, you may have a hard time trusting anything anyone says to you because you haven’t forgiven the actual person who hurt you. It’s significant to take life one step at a time by assessing problems before moving on to what’s next for you. Moving too fast can cause you to lose good opportunities that may have worked out if you had just focused on using forgiveness to heal first.
Forgiving and forgetting is a lot easier said than done. I am sure many of you have tried to work on yourself first and get to forgiveness and ultimately haven’t been able to achieve it yet. Forgiveness is an extremely difficult process to go through because it takes a level of understanding and empathy for the person who hurt you. It’s obviously not very easy to care for someone who caused you pain. The first step is to back away from the situation and all of your angry thoughts. Next, think about all of the fun memories you have with this person and remember why you cared about them. It will be a lot easier to forgive someone when you realize the reason why it hurt so much was because of how much you cared about them. Once you are able to understand this, the process will slowly get easier and you can head towards using the pain as a lesson for the future.
At the end of the day, I am sure everyone wants to be content and happy with not only the people in their lives but with themselves as well. A major role in happiness is positivity throughout every factor in your life. This can begin with digging deep into your past and asking yourself if you have forgiven everyone who has hurt you. Be the bigger person and use these obstacles from the past as lessons to better improve yourself in the future.