Forgiveness is All About You

Author : Ian Crossley
It is quite amazing that the part of all the self help teachings that gives the greatest satisfaction, is the bit that is almost ignored and used the least.I must admit that I was always guilty of bearing grudges and not readily forgiving anyone. In our high speed, competitive world we are not really taught the finer points of life, we are mainly concerned with achieving money and possessions. Our misguided life skills are firmly focused on just barging through regardless, as long as we get what we think we want, it will all be OK. The trouble is though, that we are in such a rush, that we do not do any maintenance on the way through, if someone did the wrong thing by us, we just took it on board and let it fester away in our mind. If the thing was of a significant nature, there would be certain events or reminders of the grievance and everytime you brought it to the front of your mind, it would eat away at you. You would relive the event and get worked up. During the course of your life, you will experience a few real big grudges, and hundreds of small ones. You keep carrying them around with you and feel really miserable each time you think about them.Have you ever given any real deep thought as to the make up of a grudge? It is usually someone has done something to you that has either hurt you financially, has betrayed your friendship or many other things, that at the time are definite reasons to say I do not want that person in my life. You file the action and the person, into the grudge area of your mind and carry on.
Immediately after the event you recall it hourly and imagine all the horrible things that you are going to do to the person, as time goes on you reduce your revenge thinking to a daily dose, and each time you recall it, it makes you feel terrible, as time passes on you recall the event less frequently, but you have certain triggers that bring it right back to centre court, and everytime it makes you upset and feel sick.Let's now look at the villain, they obviously either do not know what they did was wrong, or they do know it was wrong and do not care, or they manage to justify it to themselves. Either way they are not feeling bad about it, infact they may not after a couple of days even be thinking of it at all. This seems totally unfair, you are the aggrieved party, you have been wronged in some way, yet the person who caused this is carrying on as normal. What on earth can you do? Well the first thing to do is to put every thing into context. Whatever the person did there are two explanations, they either knew it was wrong and did not care, or they did not know that it was wrong.
Having brought the situation down to these basic scenarios it is easier to deal with, you can now forget what happened and just think of the why. If the person has done this thing to hurt you, the greatest prize they can get is to see you, or imagine you suffering on an ongoing basis. The situation now is that you are still the only one suffering, and there is nothing you can do about it, or is there? What if you said, as there is nothing I can do I may as well move on. There is no use trying to move on if you still have this baggage to carry, so you may as well dump it. At this point it is a good time to really cleanse your thoughts, and the only way to really cleanse your thoughts is to say that you cannot change anything, so you may as well forgive the person and move on. "Never, not in a million years" I hear you cry, well just think, nothing is going to change only your mind. You are saying that I am going to let go of this horrible thought, and I am going to totally forgive the villain, because unless I do I cannot move on. You have to decide that you will unconditionally forgive this person. The hard part now is that you have to contact the villain, preferably by mail, but the phone or any other means of communication will do, the only no no is to do it via a third party. The villain must know that the forgiveness came direct from you. Now this is not really part of the deal, but just imagine that the villain had some remorse, or had even given the slightest bit of consideration, to what had happened to you, as a result of their actions, and then out of the blue you contact them and unconditionally forgive them.What will they make of that?, it must at least confuse them. They may even after a period of time make contact with you and apologise, I doubt it but you have given them that option. The great thing is that if you have genuinely put this behind you, and because there is no other alternative, you have unconditionally forgiven the person, you will feel as if you are reborn. A situation that has been eating away at you has been put to rest and you can move on. The ironic thing is that forgiveness is a selfish act, because it is all about you. You feel better, you can now move on without a constant pain and what the villain is feeling at this point in time is irrelevant. You feel great!The other scenario was, that the villain did not know that what they did was wrong, in this instance, you can genuinely feel sorry for them because it means that the hurt was caused in ignorance, and you can just go through the steps mentioned above and move on.
The biggest hurdle for most people is that they think forgiving is a weak thing to do, let me tell you it is one of the toughest things you will ever do. What really confuses me is the fact that people have a solution, yet they spend years punishing themselves for something that someone has done to them.My first real forgiveness experience was on a biggie, I had made a guy a director of one of my companies and he also became the operations manager. He was in direct contact with all our clients, one day I woke up and found that he had formed his own company and been working on the clients over a period of time, to follow him to the new company, with a reduction of $1.00 per hour for the services we provided. I had no opportunity to rectify anything, it was a done deal. Overnight I had lost my income from that company, and the value of the company, that at that time would have been half a million dollars. As you can imagine I was devastated, I was ill with worry, I kept working out ways that I could enact revenge on the guy etc. Eventually I went to my lawyer and asked for his help. He said something really wise to me that day, I did not appreciate at the time. He said " Get on with your life, and by the time this could be settled through the courts, you will be in a better financial situation and you will also be much healthier, if you just move on," I took his advice purely because he said that he wanted $75.000 up front to start the proceedings. I was in no shape to lodge that type of money.Over the next approx 10 years I lived with this event haunting me, every time I saw our company doing its work around town I felt sick, thinking of what might have been. I thought of terrible things I could do to this guy. I was in bits and whatever I decided to do I always came up with this 'What if' situation, I spent years licking my wounds and telling everyone how I had been wronged. I could not get this thing out of my mind. Then I stumbled on a book that gave me a new direction in my life and answered a lot of questions that had puzzled me for years. The very last thing it told me to do was to forgive someone for doing something horrible to me. Well I definitely had the event, but the ability to forgive this cretin I was not sure. Everything else I had learnt made so much sense and made me feel so much better, but to do this I was not sure. After many days of debate with my wife, we decide to do as we were told. We wrote a letter to this guy absolutely forgiving him for what he had done, and saying that although we could not understand why he had done it, we unconditionally forgave him for doing it. At that precise moment, I felt as though I had just been operated on, and all the bad had been taken away, I felt great. Nothing had changed only the way I chose to look at the situation. At that point I also realised the wisdom of my lawyer, if only I had truly moved on and forgiven the guy then, I would have had all those years without having to keep punishing myself.So you can see that forgiveness is actually all about you.Why don't you find a person who you could forgive right now? It may not be anything major it may just be a silly tiff, but just contact them and invite them round, or if it is a biggie just unhitch it and feel the freedom of not having to think about it anymore. I assure you that this is one of the greatest lessons in life, life is far too short to spend time suffering over past events. Give it a go and GOOD LUCK.Croz is a motivational speaker and personal mentor. His specialist subject is a DE-STRESS programme that he has formulated. Find out more about him on http://www.croz.com.au
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