FORGIVENESS

Forgiveness is an essential part of healing and growth. Its very common to hear a lot of misconceptions about forgiveness. Some of the them :

a)When you forgive the person who has hurt/ troubled you, you are accepting his/ her misdeed.

b)When you forgive, the other person will change.

c)When you forgive, it means you wont to patch up in the relationship.

d)When you ask for forgiveness, you are demeaning yourself.

e)When you ask for forgiveness, you are considering the other person superior to you.

None of the above is true. Firstly, forgiveness helps you heal; helps you let go; helps you move on. You forgive, because you don’t wish to carry resentment/ hurt/ pain as a baggage with you any longer and it has nothing to do with the other person. You may or may not want to continue the relationship and it has nothing to do with your forgiving act. Asking for forgiveness also helps you clear your guilt/ remorse; helps you to reform and change and grow. So both acts are important in healing . Another very important part, which is mostly neglected, is forgiving self. This is where everyone falters. One may even be able to forgive others , ask for forgiveness from others, but it gets extremely difficult to forgive self. This is because, we cannot “ accept” ourselves having committed “ the” act.

I help clients on Forgiveness as an important form of interventionwhenever they come in for sessions related to relationship harmony and marital therapy. A client of mine was working on all her emotional distress related to her divorce. As sessions progressed and many of the trauma had been worked on, yet, she was unable to experience inner peace. As a response to her query, I helped her recognize that she had not forgiven herself for her actions . This came as a shock to her. And as expected, these sessions moved at snail speed . But after many sessions, she finally succeeded in forgiving herself and accepting herself as a beautiful person with a negative past actions that she forgave.

Another area of my work is with adults who have not healed of the trauma of child sexual abuse. Here, mostly, they find it very difficult to forgive the perpetrator, which is surely understandable. Butthis part of therapy is essential for them to be able to heal the trauma. A young client working on such an issue had difficulty forgiving her mother, as somewhere in her childhood belief, she had begun to believe that her mom, being her caregiver, had failed to protect her from the abuse. These issues get complex , as an adult , she could understand that the abuse happened in her mother’s absence. But the limiting belief of childhood caused her to hold resentment against her mother and she required therapeutic sessions to clear the belief and then forgive her mother.

Forgiveness sessions help them to perceive the shift in their beliefs, in their relationships very clearly and this also beautifully helps in healing the strain in different dimensions of relationships.