5 Reasons Why forgiveness is so hard

I know that everyone reading this can think of a life situation where someone treated them badly and they are still angry, hurt, or upset over it. If that person is someone they interact with regularly the hurt is replayed in excruciating detail everything you see them or even think about them. People say we should forgive the other person in these situations and let it go. Maybe we should but it is hard to do for a lot of reasons, all of them valid. 

Forgiveness is a choice we can make much more easily when we understand and validate the reasons why we don’t, can’t, or won’t forgive, and then use the forgiveness process in a way that doesn’t make us feel like we’re betraying our own emotions and giving someone else a free pass for their bad behavior.

Here are 5 reasons why forgiveness is so hard, and then I’ll tell you how you can forgive with grace and ease and feel like a winner.

1. We want validation of our emotions and our pain from the person who was responsible for creating it. We all feel this way, no matter who we are or how spiritually enlightened we are. When someone does something that requires us to consider forgiveness, it involves inconsiderate, mean, rude, or otherwise bad behavior. And we want them to admit that they caused us pain. Of course we probably won’t get it but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it.

2. Our anger empowers us and becomes our purpose. Anger may be limiting in some ways but it is empowering in other ways and if we’re angry enough about something we can use that anger to move forward to prove someone wrong. Who doesn’t remember the scene in the movie Gone with the Wind where Scarlett O’Hara vows that she ‘will never be hungry again’ or in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces, where Barbara Streisand’s character uses her anger at being rejected by her husband to lose weight and create a new image? Anger can a powerful motivating tool that we can use to show someone that we’re going to succeed in spite of what they have done to us or to keep us locked into victim mode to compel acknowledgement of our pain. And if we forgive them we have to let go of our anger and we lose access to it as a source of power.

3.  We grieve the unfulfilled expectations that are now lost forever.  Every relationship has some level of expectations connected to it, which is what we use to create our plans and map out the future we believe we have with this relationship. And the more expectations we have, the more we suffer the blow back when the relationship ends. Can we forgive someone for destroying our carefully made future plans and projects? What do we use to fill in the gap that is left when our expectations aren’t realized? 

4. We cannot accept that someone’s behavior towards us is actually aligned with who they are and we take it personally. We cannot forgive them, in the context of forgiveness as a process of release and the completion and closure that goes along with it, because we believe that it is about us when it is not, it is about that person.

We also do not acknowledge that our light and energy are what compels people to reject us. It simply does not occur to us that there is a mismatch in our energetic frequency that makes someone so uncomfortable that they will engage in behavior that forces a separation. Our intentions are good, noble, and are in their best interests. We want them to see the light, to be happier, to have more joy, and to expand into the potential that we see in them and that we believe is right and best for them. While it is a wonderful gift to hold 

5. We think we have to forgive everything without any benefit to us and mistake the term forgiveness for excusing bad behavior as though it did not exist or the situation did not happen. Then we have to allow that person or situation to victimize us again.Because the process of forgiveness is defined in such a general way, implying that we should just let everything go and ‘forgive and forget’, we think that by giving forgiveness we become the victim of something we have no control over, now or in the future. It’s like an endless replay of the movie Ground Hog Day, where we never get out of the victim cycle, we never get the respect we want and deserve, and we are subject to behavior and abuse that never ends. 

Unless we view forgiveness in a different way, it is rather unappealing and disempowering. No wonder it is so hard for us to see it as empowering and beneficial for us. 

Everyone has a situation in their life, whether it is happening now or has happened in the past, that they feel was unfair, mean, rude, or abusive, And the energy echoes of that situation stay with us, even if we forgive. We do not forget anything. And to force us into that just goes against the way our mind works. 

But if we view forgiveness differently, in a way that does empower us, we can see it as a step on our path to empowerment, breaking free of a limiting and painful past and take control over our relationships and our life. 

Read the rest of the article on the blog at enlighteninglife.com 

Created, narrated, and produced by Jennifer Hoffman.

Artwork by Jennifer Hoffman.

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