Is Forgiveness Necessary For Healing?

Do I have to forgive someone in order to heal? I get that question a lot. 

In this episode I hope to provide some answers to that question as well as others. 

When we understand that forgiving someone is about us and not about the other person  our entire perspective on the subject of forgiveness will dramatically shift. 

Forgiveness is ultimately about us and the choice is always ours. It ultimately is about releasing energy from our system and freeing ourselves from that energy that is only harming us. 

0:00 - Introduction to Forgiveness in Healing
4:02 - The Consequences of Unforgiveness
5:02 - How Unforgiveness Traps Us Emotionally and Physically
6:11 - Understanding Why We Resist Forgiveness
6:45 - Common Reasons for Holding Onto Unforgiveness
7:37 - Misconceptions and False Empowerment in Unforgiveness
8:57 - Unforgiveness as a Defense Mechanism
9:24 - Holding Grudges Against Those Who Have Passed
10:13 - The Dilemma of Forgiving to Honor Pain
11:28 - What Forgiveness Is Not: Dispelling Myths
13:41 - The Pressure and Misunderstanding Around Forced Forgiveness
14:13 - Forgiveness and People-Pleasing in Toxic Relationships
15:33 - Clarifying What True Forgiveness Entails
16:24 - Forgiveness as Personal Healing and Release
17:47 - Practical Steps Towards Genuine Forgiveness
18:49 - Making the Decision to Forgive and Its Impact
20:17 - Exploring the Benefits of Choosing Forgiveness
21:13 - Shifting Perspectives on Forgiveness
22:19 - The Importance of Intention in Forgiveness
23:30 - Letting Go of Emotional Baggage Through Forgiveness
24:33 - Healing the Original Wound to Enable Forgiveness
25:09 - Implementing Forgiveness in Daily Life
26:12 - The Ongoing Practice and Rewards of Forgiveness

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

When we force forgiveness, it really isn't forgiveness, because we're still carrying the energy and we feel like we're betraying ourselves and we actually get into self-betrayal and we're not honoring our process and our healing journey. Because we're trying to force something because we feel it's the right thing, we don't want to be a bad person or we don't want that other person to feel bad. All of that isn't actually honoring you and your healing journey as the one who was harmed, as the one who was hurt. So we have to really look at what we need, what we want as a part of the healing journey. Hello, friends, it's Jerry and welcome to the Permission to Love podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to helping people understand how to heal their relationship with themselves. Because when we heal our relationship with ourselves, everything in our life changes how we feel about ourselves changes, the relationships that we have changes and what we manifest in our life totally changes. You can live a life where you're at peace with yourself, you have healthy relationships in your life and that you're manifesting the things that you so deeply deserve and desire for your life. So I'm glad you're here and I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Today I want to discuss the topic of forgiving other people, other people. Now, before you shut me off and before you tune out of this podcast, I want to encourage you to stick with me, because I hope by the end of this you'll see that forgiveness is the gift that you give to yourself. It is not the gift that you give to somebody else. I know that can sound cliche, I know that can sound really self-help quotey, but the reality is it is the gift that you give to yourself. Forgiveness is about you and I hope that you can begin to see that in this episode. Now. I also want to be clear. This is not about trying to convince you or try to get you to a place where you feel like you should forgive them. There's no world where you have to forgive them. Your choice to forgive is yours and yours alone. This is simply an episode that, if you are on that journey and you are wanting to forgive, I'm hoping that this episode can provide you some insights about how to do that, why maybe you're not forgiving and how you can begin to move towards releasing that energy from your system that might have you stuck. So if you think that unforgiveness might have you stuck in your healing journey, then thisgiveness might have you stuck in your healing journey, then this is an episode that you can begin to evaluate, that look into that and make some decisions from.

Speaker 1: 2:33

I want to take a quick moment and talk about my book Returning. It's a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing. I designed this book to help you on your journey of moving from shame to self-love. It's divided in three sections. The first section is about seeing seeing that you're not alone. The second section is about understanding that healing is possible. And the third section is designed to remind you and to show you that loving yourself is the path back to yourself. I've heard from a lot of people that they're using it as a daily reflection guide, where each day they're selecting a passage, reading it, meditating on it, journaling on it, and it's really helping them in their healing journey and helping them understand that they are worthy of love, that they can heal, that they're not alone, and I know it can do the same for you. So if you haven't picked up a copy yet, please take a moment to do that, and if you have picked up a copy already, it would mean a lot to me if you'd take a moment and review the book, because the more positive reviews the book gets, the more likely people are going to become aware of it and benefit from the work. So thank you, thank you for picking it up, thank you for picking it up, thank you for reviewing it and thank you for passing it along. Maybe when you're done with it, you can pass it along to somebody else or pick up a copy for somebody else that you know could benefit from the work. You can get it on Amazon or you can simply see the show notes in this episode to get your copy.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Now let's first start by looking at some of the consequences of unforgiveness. It can have some health impacts. Mayo Clinic put out a whole article on unforgiveness and the impact that it has on us, health-wise, relationship-wise, etc. So it does have its consequences when we choose to not forgive people. But most importantly, I think the biggest consequence that it has is it keeps us trapped. It keeps us from being able to move on, because when we don't forgive, one of the things that winds up happening is that the person lives rent-free inside of us. That energy that we have towards them, the memories of it, the feelings that we have, that gets trapped in us and it gets stored inside of us. Now, while that person is off happily living their life, maybe not even thinking about the pain that they've caused us, we're over here in the corner, trapped in that cage of anger or bitterness and all of the emotions that come with it, and they're living with us. So one of the things that forgiveness can do is get that out of us, and we're going to talk about how forgiveness really is about energy release more than anything else.

Speaker 1: 5:02

Now, another consequence of not forgiving is it causes us to displace our pain. What do I mean by that? Well, what happens is I focus so much on you, what you did, the pain that you caused to me, that I never take the time to look underneath and begin to examine that pain. It can actually become a distraction mechanism for us. We get so focused in on that person, what they did, the pain that they caused and the anger that we're carrying towards them, and in the process of being so angry at them, we lose sight of us. I get lost in the fact that I need to do some healing because I'm clinging so tightly to the anger or the unforgiveness that I have towards that person and it is keeping my focus off of myself and what I might need to work on so that I can heal, and so that person and my anger towards them is preventing me from moving on and healing. So I want to encourage you don't stay trapped in that. Don't stay so focused in on how they hurt you that you can't look at the hurt that you have and begin to heal the hurt.

Speaker 1: 6:11

Sometimes we'll think that holding on to that unforgiveness is going to be a part of the healing or it's going to keep us safe, but what it can often do to us is actually keep us trapped in it and keep us from healing. So let's talk about why we don't forgive. Well, there's a lot of reasons and it's totally based off of who you are and the experiences that you've had. So I don't want to make this a blanket approach to unforgiveness, but I want to give some examples that maybe you'll see yourself in this and if you see yourself in it, maybe it'll help you begin to move on from some of those spaces.

Speaker 1: 6:45

And the first reason that many people don't forgive is they want to punish somebody. They want them to feel the pain that they felt. You did this to me and I want you to begin to see how much you hurt me, so that you can begin to feel the pain of what you did to me. And while it is important for that person to begin to see the pain that they've caused you, it doesn't usually come through us getting into a battle of causing them pain or punishing them so that they'll come to a place of awareness. We want them to come to that place of awareness on their own and we don't want to have to spend all of this energy, because when we get into the energy of punishing other people, we actually begin to punish ourselves. We begin to feel the pain of that because we keep reliving it. We'll talk about that some more here in just a second Now.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Sometimes people don't forgive because it makes them feel empowered, right. So it may not be the punishing energy, but it's the empowering energy that they have something that they can hold over somebody else and they want that person to come to them and say that they're sorry and they want to now feel in control, in control of the relationship, in control of how things happen and in control of when that other person can feel released from what they did. But I want you to maybe examine the fact that, even though it does feel empowering, that it might be actually disempowering to you. It might actually be causing you to get into an energy and a space that doesn't feel good to you. And even though you feel like you might want to control the narrative, control the outcomes, when you really sit with it and think about it you can start to ask yourself some questions. Is that the person that I want to be? Do I want to live my life with that type of energy trapped inside of my system? Now, as I'm sharing this, I can almost feel the energy that's going to come back to me to say well, you know, if I don't do those things, then how is that person going to learn their lesson? And if I don't do those things, how am I going to keep myself safe? If I don't do these things, I'm going to be hurt again. Well, now we're actually getting somewhere. Now we're getting to what the source of unforgiveness often is.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Unforgiveness is trying to keep us safe. It's trying to keep us from getting hurt again. It's trying to allow us to have some power where we once didn't have power. It is often the sense that we're afraid. We become afraid that if I forgive, I'm going to let my walls down, I'm going to get hurt again. That person is going to think that what they did was okay, etc. Etc. So it really is a way for us to try to stay safe.

Speaker 1: 9:24

So how does this play out with somebody who's no longer on this planet, who's passed away? Why do we still hold on to unforgiveness towards them? Well, it's that same thing. We have to get to the source of how that is serving us. How's that anger and bitterness towards somebody, somebody who violated us, somebody who harmed us? Why am I still holding on onto that energy around that? Once again, I'm not saying that you need to let go of it. Okay. You have every right to choose to not forgive. That's your choice. But if you do want to forgive and you want to get rid of some of that energy that's in you, it is a helpful practice to start asking that question of why I'm not forgiving. How is that keeping me safe? Do I have a fear that if I forgive them, then that's going to let all these guards down and I might open myself up too much and, as a result, I might wind up getting hurt again.

Speaker 1: 10:13

Now, another reason we often choose to not forgive is. We feel like that, if we forgive, that we're no longer going to be honoring our pain, we're not going to be honoring ourselves, and that unforgiveness is a way for us to honor what happened or to honor the pain. Now, this doesn't always happen at a conscious level, but at times we can feel like that if I forgive the person and I let this thing go, then I'm not honoring what happened to me and I'm actually thinking that by holding on to all of that energy that I'm honoring my pain, I'm honoring what happened to me, and if I let go of that, then I'm betraying myself. But I'm going to ask you to consider whether or not that thinking is true. Is it true that if you forgive that person, you're not going to be honoring your pain anymore? Is that true? And so I'm not saying it is or it isn't, I'm just asking you and inviting you to reflect on that, to reflect on the thought that if I forgive them, I won't be honoring my pain anymore, and not forgiving them is a way for me to honor it. So now let's talk about what is forgiveness, and I'm going to start as I often do we're talking about what forgiveness is not.

Speaker 1: 11:28

Forgiveness is not forced. We don't want to force forgiveness, and there's a number of reasons why we often do force forgiveness. One you might be in a religious system that puts a lot of pressure on you to forgive. If you know my story, you know that that was my case. I came into Christianity at the age of 17. I had a lot of abuse that I was dealing with, a lot of trauma that I was dealing with, and as soon as I started to share my story about that, I was immediately encouraged to forgive, and it was almost something that was pushed on me, like I couldn't be a good Christian if I didn't forgive. And so, instead of me being able to take the time to heal and to examine the impact of that behavior on my life, I immediately started forcing myself to forgive. I immediately started getting into a space where I felt guilty about not forgiving.

Speaker 1: 12:24

Now, all of a sudden, the person who's experienced all of the abuse is feeling guilty about not forgiving the person who has abused them. That is not at all healthy, right or anything that's honoring to you as a person. So if you've felt that, if you felt the forcing of forgiveness, that you feel like that you have to forgive the perpetrator and that you're not able to honor your own pain and go through your own process, I want to let you know it's just not healthy. That approach is toxic. Now, while I can find the truth in what they were saying about forgiveness and how forgiveness is something that's healthy, for me, what the challenge was was the timeline on it, the forcing of it, the making me feel like that, if I didn't forgive that there was something wrong with me, that that was something bad about who I was and I needed to just decide to forgive me, that that was something bad about who I was and I needed to just decide to forgive. Once again, not healthy behavior, and if you've experienced that, it isn't something that you need to be forced into doing and here's the truth about that is that forced forgiveness isn't forgiveness, because forgiveness is a choice, it is a process and it's something that we come to as a part of our journey. It's not something that we want forced onto us Now.

Speaker 1: 13:41

Another reason that people may force forgiveness is that feeling right that I want to be a good person. They may not be having outside pressure, but they still have that thinking inside of them that, in order for me to be a good person, I need to forgive them. I don't want to be the type of person who doesn't forgive other people and, while that's honorable, and I don't want to be the type of person who doesn't forgive other people and while that's honorable, you still don't want to force it. You don't want it to be from a motivation of thinking that if you don't forgive, you're a bad person. If you do forgive, you're a good person. So take some time to examine that motive and reflect on that.

Speaker 1: 14:13

And another reason that we force forgiveness is we don't want the other person to feel bad, and this happens a lot in toxic relationships, codependent relationships and from childhood abuse. We don't want the parent to feel bad. We don't want the partner to feel bad. We don't want the relationship or the person who's harmed us to feel bad. And we decide that we need to tell them that we forgive them and choose to forgive them so that they no longer feel bad about what they did. Well, once again, that isn't always taking your healing process into consideration, and I encourage you to examine that, because if that's often your reason for forgiveness and your motivation, it might be that you are prone to people-pleasing and codependency, and so begin to ask yourself some questions around that, because when we force forgiveness, it really isn't forgiveness, because we're still carrying the energy and we feel like we're betraying ourselves and we actually get into self-betrayal and we're not honoring our process and our healing journey because we're trying to force something because we feel it's the right thing. We don't want to be a bad person or we don't want that other person to feel bad. All of that isn't actually honoring you and your healing journey as the one who was harmed, as the one who was hurt. So we have to really look at what we need, what we want as a part of the healing journey. So here's some other things real quick.

Speaker 1: 15:33

That forgiveness is not. It is not saying that what the other person did was okay. We are not giving them a pass. We are not saying that they should not experience the consequences of their behavior. We are not saying that what they did was okay. That is not forgiveness. And the other thing that forgiveness is not it is not saying that the relationship has to be restored. It is not saying that you have to let the person back in your life. And that's a big fear as to why a lot of people will not forgive because they think that if I forgive, it's going to send the message that the other person can come back into my life, or it's going to cause me to let my guard down and then all of a sudden I'm going to be sucked back into that toxicity. All of that stuff is not what forgiveness is. You don't have to do all those things in order for you to forgive.

Speaker 1: 16:24

So what is forgiveness? Well, forgiveness is about you. It's about you honoring your pain, healing. It's about you deciding to release yourself. You see, we often think that forgiveness is about releasing that other person and what they did. That's actually about you releasing the energy that you have stored in you around that event or around that person. It's making the decision that I want to move on from that, that I no longer want to carry that inside of me. I don't want to carry that bitterness. I don't want to carry that anger. I don't want that to keep me from being in healthy relationships. I don't want all of that energy occupying that space in me anymore. So I want you to consider shifting your perspective about forgiveness from one that says if I forgive, then that means that they'll get the idea that it's okay, or I'm saying that it's okay, or it's about releasing them from the wrong that they did and the consequences, or it's about letting my walls down again, or whatever that narrative is. I want you to maybe look at shifting it from that to saying no, it's about releasing energy, it's about getting that stuff out of me so that I'm no longer holding on to that and I'm no longer trapped back in that moment or trapped back in that experience. Okay, I hope that's making sense to you today.

Speaker 1: 17:47

And if you're choosing to stay in a relationship with somebody and to reconcile and if you do, there's no judgment around that that's an option that obviously is always available to us but if you are staying in that relationship, then forgiveness is about releasing the energy of whatever event happened out of that relationship as well and allowing you to move forward. And so when we forgive somebody and we choose to stay in a relationship with them and we say that we forgive, but yet we hold all of that energy in the relationship for years and years and years, then what we've done is that we've said with our mouth I forgive you for what happened and I'm going to choose to try to reconcile and move on, but yet we still have the stored energy of the event and we continue to relive it, and so we really can't move on. In the relationship, you're moving forward based in time, but you're still stuck in the moment, the event that happened, so the relationship's not moving forward, even though you're moving forward in time. So how do we forgive?

Speaker 1: 18:49

If we're making the choice that we want to forgive, how do we actually do that? Well, first, I want to encourage you to wait until you're ready to forgive. You might be saying to yourself well, I'm never going to be ready to forgive, and that's okay. It's okay to feel that way, it's okay to be in that place right now no judgment in that and it's important that you're not forced into it. You're not pushing yourself into it. You're actually honoring the pain that you feel, the anger that you feel, and you're allowing the time that you need. And I do want to also point out that we may never feel ready, we may never feel like we can forgive, because sometimes it's really scary to forgive, for all the reasons that we've already talked about in this episode. And so if you are in that place where you feel like I'll never be able to forgive, and I don't know when I'll be ready, but I want to. I want to get this energy out of my system.

Speaker 1: 19:41

Then I want you to do the next step in how we forgive, which is to begin to ask yourself the question how is it serving you to not forgive? How is it keeping you safe? How is it giving you a sense of control? Why are you feeling maybe empowered by that decision to not forgive? So I encourage you to do some journaling and reflection around. How is it serving you to hold on to that? As a part of that reflecting process, you can ask yourself the question what would happen if I forgave them, like what would unfold if I decided to forgive them? And begin to write that out, because that's going to help reveal to you some of the stories that you have, or some of the reasons why you're choosing to not forgive Now.

Speaker 1: 20:17

Another thing as a part of this exercise why you're choosing to not forgive Now another thing as a part of this exercise is you might want to consider writing down some positive things that would happen if you chose to forgive Positive things for you, positive things for your life. What would begin to happen if you decided to forgive and then, after all that's happened, you've come to a place where you've decided that you're ready to at least investigate or move towards the thought of forgiveness and you've uncovered some reasons as to why. Maybe it's keeping you safe and how it's serving you to not forgive. Maybe, after all that process, you can come to a place where you decide that you know what. I'm ready to forgive, I'm ready to try to forgive this person, which that then moves us into the third part of how do we forgive, which is we make a decision and I know that sounds really overly simplified, but you are a person with free will and when you make the decision to forgive, and you set the intention to forgive, something powerful happens.

Speaker 1: 21:13

And I'm not saying that in that moment, in that decision being made, that all of a sudden everything's going to transform. You're going to forgive and the world's just going to become a much more beautiful and brighter place. No, but I'm saying that a choice of your will has been made. You've decided that you're going to move in that direction, that you've set your intention, and intention is everything. We never move in a direction without deciding to, without setting the intention, and your will and your choice to do. That is going to set in motion a lot of things.

Speaker 1: 21:46

Now, it might bring up a lot of emotions, and that's okay. And if it does, journal them out, write them out, begin to ask why is this emotion visiting you around, this thought of forgiveness? And so once I've made that decision, now I've got some choices to make. Right? You might be thinking to yourself well, isn't a decision and a choice the same thing? Not really. You see, when I make a decision to get into shape, I then have to make some choices. I've got to make some choices about the meals that I eat. I've got to make some choices about going to the gym or not going to the gym. And so this thought about a decision really is to decide something.

Speaker 1: 22:19

And when you look at the origin of the word decision, it's about dissecting, and dissecting in the concept that we're cutting off other options. Right, we're choosing to say that I'm not going to give myself the option to be unforgiving in this scenario or in this situation, and I'm going to decide and move towards forgiveness. And in choosing to forgive, I'm going to have choices to make. And the biggest choice that we have to make is we're going to choose to release the energy. Release the energy around the event and release the energy around the person. I might need to release the energy of trying to punish somebody or to be in control, or I might need to release the energy of the fear. Whatever it is, I'm going to be making choices to forgive. You see, decisions about forgiveness happen and then choices continually need to be made around that decision to forgive, and sometimes a decision to forgive happens over and over as well, like we'll decide to forgive and then we find ourselves trapped back into other patterns. We're not making the choices that support that decision, and so we often have to repeat the decision to forgive.

Speaker 1: 23:30

And when we make that decision, it is the choices that are going to uphold that decision to forgive, and those choices are going to look like letting go of that energy when it comes up inside of us. So, for example, when you're driving down the road and all of a sudden you see a blue car, and that blue car reminds you of your ex, or it reminds you of somebody or something that happened to you, and then all that energy begins to rise up inside of you, you then make the choice to not allow that energy to stay stuck. You allow that energy just to pass through. You don't start feeding that energy with the stories, with the memories, with the feelings and start getting entangled in it and spiraling down. You make the choice to go ahead and allow it to pass. You don't resist it, you don't fight it. You're not trying to push it down, you're not trying to keep it in there, you're not trying to do anything with it. You're just acknowledging that that feeling has arisen, that that has come up, and you choose to let it pass through you. You see, we're trying to get energy out of us.

Speaker 1: 24:33

What happens when we see the blue car is that the trapped energy that's in us starts to come up. Right, it's coming up from inside of us. It's not the blue car. The blue car didn't put any energy in us. It just triggered the energy that was already there. And so when we allow it to come up and we choose to just observe it, to see that it's there, and then to pass through and not give it all of the other energy that's going to try to support it, and we just observe it and let it go, and maybe we choose in that moment to say things like I forgive them, I release them and then we just decide to move on from that moment.

Speaker 1: 25:09

Well, another very important thing about forgiveness is healing the pain, healing the original source of the hurt, and see once again, if we're so distracted on not forgiving them and being angry at them, we're not examining the wound. And so, in order for us to forgive, we have to take a look at the pain that's there and begin to heal that, to begin to do the work to understand the betrayal, the pain, the abuse or whatever the scenario is, and get to the source of healing that. Because as we begin to heal the wound, the need to hold on to the anger and the bitterness about the wound, it begins to leave our systems as well. And so it is an ongoing practice of observing, allowing it to move through our systems, not attaching to it, realizing that we're doing the work of healing that original wound and that we don't want to fester that wound by allowing our attention to get back on the unforgiveness and the anger. We just want to allow it to pass through us.

Speaker 1: 26:12

And this ongoing practice can take a lot of work. I'm not going to say that it's easy, because we've gotten so used to feeling those feelings. We've gotten so used to being triggered and being angry and spiraling, that getting ourselves to rewire that space and allowing that energy to pass through us instead of it cycling over and over in us is not easy. It is work, but I want you to know that with this ongoing practice, you are going to rewire that and you might find yourself moving into a place where that doesn't have any power over you anymore. It's not occupying all of that space, and then you might find yourself, instead of thinking about it on a daily basis or a weekly basis or a monthly basis, you might be finding yourself thinking about it a few times a year or might be coming up less and less and less, and when it does come up, it doesn't have all that energy attached to it, and that is definitely my hope for you. That is definitely my hope in your journey if you choose to go the path of forgiving and letting go of that energy that can get stuck in us as a result of unforgiveness. I hope this episode has really helped you and helped you shift from seeing forgiveness as releasing somebody else or doing something for somebody else and begin to see how it is something that you're doing for yourself, a practice and a gift that you're giving to you Now.

Speaker 1: 27:34

In closing, I've just got a few reminders for you.

Speaker 1: 27:36

Number one if you've not yet had a chance to follow or subscribe to this podcast, please take a moment to do that, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out.

Speaker 1: 27:45

And the other thing is if you're finding value, if this podcast is impacting you in your journey, I encourage you to share it with somebody else, because if you're getting value out of it, they will too, and it's also the primary way that this podcast grows. So it would mean a lot to me if you take some time to share it. Share it on your social media or just pass it along to other people, because as you share it with other people, you're also giving them the gift of learning how to heal their relationship with themselves. Also, if you've not had a chance yet to pick up your free self-assessment and 30-day guide to a healthier relationship with yourself, I want to encourage you to do that. It's a free resource that I created for you, so you can download that resource by going to the show notes in this episode, or you can go to my website at jerryhendersonorg. And as I close, I want to remind you as always, you are worthy of your own love.