Surrender

The Importance of Forgiveness

By Sarah Hooper
Senior Staff Writer

Forgiveness. Even just the word itself terrifies me. As human beings we develop different ways of dealing with our pain or more often avoiding our pain. I admit that the act of forgiving someone truly scares me. However, what terrifies me even more is thinking I will never be forgiven by the people I’ve hurt. This is human nature, our instinct, but where does that bring us?

Well, for the people harmed, it can bring resentment, anger, and bitterness. As for the ones who have hurt people, guilt, shame, and regret. Although the two may appear different, it’s a fast process from being hurt to hurting another people.

I spent most of my life in the role most would call the victim. Unable to control my poor circumstances as a child, I learned to hide from them, so I thought. I masked the abandonment, neglect, and abuse by trying to control everything. I was a mother to my mother, a mother to my little brother, and the caretaker of the house by age nine. Drugs, men, and instability were the only three things I truly expected from my mother. The more I pretended, the more resentment I built.

Anytime I came to close to letting go, I never could, I kept thinking of letting go as letting her win. This thinking is pretty common for people who have been hurt, but it’s actually the opposite of the truth. The truth is holding on to it has only served to hurt me more, as she is blissfully unaware of my resentments.

GuidetoPsychology.com, a website designed to inform about all areas of clinical psychology by Dr. Raymond Richmond, says “Forgiveness can be a problem for many people simply because they are not clear about what forgiveness really is. All too often forgiveness gets confused with reconciliation.” Thus, forgiving someone does not always mean you have to have them in your life; you are simply letting go of what they have done to you.

However, “you cannot forgive someone until you have fully felt the pain he or she has caused you,” says guidetopsychology.com. Therefore, acting like it doesn’t bother you, that you were never hurt, or running from it like I did only slows down the process of forgiveness.

Only when you face your pain, deal with how it has hurt you, and allow yourself to feel everything that you are avoiding will you find true healing and be able to forgive, says guidetopsychology.com.

Webster’s dictionary defines forgiveness as an absolution, to grant a pardon to something or to someone. Reading that, most could turn their situation around, thinking there has to be someone who you would want a pardon from. Some person you have hurt and would want forgiveness from. The bible tells us that we forgive so we can be forgiven, now that I want forgiveness I find comfort in that.

I am not sure how it happened, how I went from being the victim to the pretender, the wounded to the inflictor, but somewhere along the way I switched roles. It began with one boy, the only relationship I really ever knew. Meeting the person you are meant to be with at age 12 seems nearly impossible; however, from then until I was 19 years old I believed I had.
After nearly seven years of an on and off again relationship, we broke up, and like all the times before it was my doing. This time I was starting over, exploring, leaving the only state I knew. My plan was to reconnect with my family, to mend some estranged relationships, and for some reason I needed to prove I could do it without him.

Freedom.
Somewhere in Virginia I leaned out the window to take this picture.

After six months of living out of state I came home for a visit and found something I wasn’t expecting to: I missed us. I saw him for the first time since I had left and something inside me clicked. I got a glimpse of what I had lost.

In a panic, I was determined to get it back, regardless of who it would hurt. I then began a series of bad choices, selfish decisions, which hurt a lot of people: mainly his new girlfriend. Though I never met her, I hurt her and in the process, I not only lost the boy, but also any chance of us having a friendship. I left Connecticut for the second time.

In this situation I inflicted pain on someone else, whose only mistake was she loved the same boy I did. Though this is only one example of how I hurt someone, we all make wrong choices at some point in our lives, my mother did, I did, and when we do innocent people get hurt. Whether I messed up once or a hundred times, forgiveness isn’t easy to give. Maybe his girlfriend carries that pain still, the truth is I don’t know, but I do know that I struggle with guilt.

GuidetoPsychology.com says, “If anyone has ever hurt you, you don’t find forgiveness, you give it. And if you have ever hurt others, all you can do is feel sorrow for your behavior; whether or not others forgive you is their choice.”