✅ Stages we all go through before forgiveness

Anger and pain when we have just been hurt 💔:

Thirst for revenge and justice ⚖️

Analyzing what happened from the outside 🩹 (healing little by little, everything will depend on what happened and personal circumstances. We are all different and have different times, no one goes faster or slower)

Finally, the freedom of forgiveness 🙌

My experience 🌟

From my point of view, it seems to me that forgiveness is something that is worked on with age. In my case, my way of seeing it has transformed at each stage of my life until I realized that, if we really want to heal, we must forgive in order to move forward.

By this I do not mean that we take back a family, friendship or love relationship that hurt us in the past, because forgiving the other person does not mean forgetting what he/she did to us. We learn from that experience, forgive and move on, we do not have to sit at the table with that particular person again.

Letting go of people who have already served their time in our lives is part of closing old cycles and opening new ones, precisely so that new and better people can come to us. If we do not say goodbye to the old, the new will not manifest itself.

It reads pretty easy, doesn't it? But it took me years and years to reach this conclusion... as I mentioned at the beginning, my way of seeing forgiveness has been changing. For example, there was a time when I was extremely resentful, I lived contaminated by remembering all the times I had been wronged and I refused to forgive.

In fact, I loved to wait for karma to do its thing and I was distracted by that instead of being more aware of myself... an immature me from the past that I used to be ashamed of, but now I remember it with patience and understanding, we are not perfect.

Also, I had a time when I blamed myself to extremes where I allowed other people to hurt me even more. I was the one who didn't stand up for myself and ended up apologizing for things I hadn't done. It was like a kind of self-bullying and self-sabotage, I remember those moments and it makes me go back in time to tell myself a few things 😂...

But again I practice patience and remember that it is another version of me from the past that was very necessary to learn, being at the other pole of the issue 🩹.

We also cannot judge someone who is in the grudge stage because you have to ask yourself what things that person will have lived through and be more empathetic. Most likely, this is someone with a lot of internal suffering from having been the target of bad actions by others. As I have been in that place, I understand and do not make judgments.

Also, things get complicated when you never receive an apology and we see them continue their lives quietly... “the axe forgets, but the tree does not”. We are the ones who are left with those axes unjustly and by the way, we have to do the exercise of forgiveness 😅... well yes, that's the way it is because that's how the wound is closed.

What would be ideal? That they themselves recognize their bad acts and apologize, however, that is a utopia and to expect it is also another. Each person is different and we cannot expect others to be like us. There will be people who do change and assume their mistakes and others who will never do it and will continue to calmly handing out axes to more trees 🤷‍♀...

The important thing is not to become that which once hurt us!

Not to be like our aggressors, because I have known people that because of so much pain, have become the same thing that marked them and when they have children, they take the worst part 😖... I know it is not fair to carry something that, in theory, was not ours and that was garbage that they deposited at some point, but we have to transform it into part of our growth.

We have no other option because not forgiving enslaves and the one who becomes bitter is us.

The fire and the letter of forgiveness 🔥

The first time someone talked to me about writing a letter to people who have harmed us, I didn't take it well. I saw it as a way of making them right, why should I have to write and do the work for those people? In any case, those who have to write to me are others....

“And what good is that going to do me?” ”That's not going to fix or take away the bad...” Many more phrases like that, accompanied my obfuscation 😂 until I dared to do it and then I didn't stop anymore.

I did it in two parts, first I wrote everything I felt with what they did to me, the consequences of that in my mental health and, finally, everything I would have liked to say and do at that moment and that I did not do. (This is the part where we expand to release all the pain freely, we insult them, we get upset again, we tell them even how bad they are going to die, etc., 🤣). This must be done until it no longer bothers and at the end we burn the leaf.

Once we empty ourselves of all that and when we are ready, we can do, now yes 🙌 the letter of forgiveness, in which we have truly healed and we say phrases like “I have decided to forgive you to let go of this situation that kept me tied to you”... everything will depend on how we feel it, there is no certain way to write it.

This was my contribution to the initiative proposed by @rosahidalgo about forgiveness. Hope you had a happy Tuesday 🤗, see you in another post. A hug to the whole community 😘.