How to fOrgive someone who has hurt You

I’ll often get asked this question by clients..

“How can I forgive someone who has hurt me?”

Because although learning about the connection between our thinking and feeling has the natural effect of making us more compassionate, something people can struggle with is forgiving those who have wronged us.

I’ll often be asked:

• How can I forgive someone who has abused me?
  
• How does it make sense to forgive someone who has deeply hurt me?
• Aren’t I letting them off the hook by being so quick to forgive them? How will they learn their lesson?
• They haven’t even apologised, so why would I forgive them?

What I will always highlight to my clients, is that there is a difference in forgiving someone and forgiving the action.

When we look at forgiving someone, we can recognise that whatever action that person took that resulted in them wronging us, was based on an illusion they were suffering with.

They believed that carrying out that certain action would give them a certain feeling - that their well-being depended on them doing it. They innocently but incorrectly believed that their feelings would come from carrying out that action and were not able to see the truth of how their mind really works - that their feelings are only ever going to come from their thinking.

And it's this misunderstanding that leads people to commit all types of wrongs against each other.

So what we're really forgiving is the fact that they were caught in this illusion and unable to see the truth in that moment of wrongdoing.

However, when it comes to the action that they committed, we will still always recognise that what they did was not OK. We can put certain measures in place to ensure that they aren't able to treat us that way again.

As the saying goes, 'Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me'.

So we can be more understanding and forgiving, whilst at the same time recognising wrongdoing and protecting ourselves from it.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.

To learn more about how to forgive and move past hurt, then you’ll want to go through my ‘Effortless Relationships’ online training programme. You can watch the first module for free, by going here: www.ptissem.com/free

Love,
Ptissem