Forgiveness (Part 1)

Hey y'all, I have been thinking a lot lately on forgiveness and how we all operate with it. Like do we honestly forgive people when they apologize, do we move on from it, or is the reason that we are more reactive then understanding... I pose all these different thoughts because I have been reading a book "Forgiving What You Cannot Forget" and my eyes have been opened because there are things that I have never realized about what forgiveness really means compared to how I actually forgive.. Let me clarify what I mean..

For most people, including myself, I find that I will accept people's apologies but I do not know if I really forgive them. For example: someone may apologize for cheating on me and I will accept the apology, claim to have forgiven them, BUT the next time we argue or they do something I bring up the fact they cheated. I HAVE NOT FORGIVEN THEM... When you truly forgive a person, you do not live in that moment or throw that back in someone's face or bring it up as a weapon. 

I mean let's be real with ourselves, do we honestly think about the impact the situation had on us and how it really needs to be processed for us to be able to forgive? Like do we really think about how to forgive and also set boundaries with said person so that it won't affect us moving forward? Or think about the fact that our reactiveness changes whenever we have been hurt and it changes how we respond to people? Have we ever looked at the fact that we respond to everything differently because of past trauma, PTSD, and even regular hurt that we experience?

I never really thought about it like that until I started reading the book a referenced earlier; this book opened my eyes to all the things that are affected by my unwillingness to truly forgive things that I cannot forget and even things that I probably can. The crazy thing is I found as I continued to really evaluate past situations in my life and things I have not honestly forgiven really; that it is something that triggers my mental health. Yes, I said that it triggers my mental health; how might you ask? Well look at it like this, when someone does something similar to what has happened to you before, you start to ask yourself questions like "Why is this always happening to me?" "What is wrong with me?" 

You see how you can go from being in a normal mental state to triggered and depressed in a matter of minutes. I know that not all people may come to a negative space on self inflicted pain; however they go into a very negative way of looking at people in general, which is not good either if you really think about it. When your eyes are opened to the different possibilities of things that are affected from being unforgiving, you start to think would it be easier just to forgive.

Now somethings take longer to forgive and like I posed have you ever looked into the process of forgiveness for really. Being a forgiving person does not make you a pushover or a person that does not have boundaries, it makes you a person that does not want to hold on to the negative energy. Now I am probably going to be talking about this topic for awhile because this topic is really deep. But today I just wanted to get you think about how forgiveness effects everything. 

Well until next time as always, I will be #LivingWhileSurvivingLife...

-Jess Lore'al