How To Forgive

Lewis B. Smedes said,

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” 

Welcome to The Soul Podcast. I’m Stacey Wheeler                          

Today I’m going to talk about the power of forgiveness and why forgiving is sometimes difficult. The idea of the power of forgiveness goes back further than the written word. The earliest philosophers and mystics talked about it. The idea appears in the oldest religious texts, including words spoken by Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha. 

The Buddha said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” 

And the Bible mentions forgiveness at least 127 times. So, it’s clear that people have always done others wrong. And those who’ve been hurt have had to figure out how to navigate the pain of it. And it seems forgiveness is the universal antidote. Forgiveness is an important skill to learn, if we want to be happy. 

Around a hundred and twenty five years ago Mark Twain said,

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” 

Sounds a bit like the Buddha quote about the hot coal, doesn’t it? That’s because there is a truth to it -and truths always come back around. Holding anger -like acid in a vessel, does not give us relief. We may wait for the other person to either own their crime, or for an opportunity to somehow get them back for what they did… but all that time we are stuck in a pattern of pain. We clutch the coal of hurt in our hand. In doing this, we’re not pushing the pain away, we’re holding it closer. The person who hurt you is not hurt by this. They don’t even know that you’re walking around with the hot coal in your rasp. But you are extending the pain process by not releasing it.  

Holding pain is a choice. 

Yeah, I get that it’s an easy thing to say. Letting go is not so easy to do... unless you’ve learned how. Have you learned how? 

Even if you don’t think you can forgive the person who wronged you, keep listening. I’ve been there. And I’m going to show you a way to start releasing the coal you’re clutching. We’ve all been hurt. But how do you forgive someone who hurt you?                                     When we’ve been hurt, our sense of fairness tells us that the person who hurt us should pay for what they did, or at least apologize for it. And we have a sense that if they do, we will feel better. But is that true? Will we? Will an apology or retribution erase what’s happened?     When we experience something that’s bad, do we ever leave it completely behind? Does it stop being part of our life experience because they apologize?                    

One reason it’s hard to forgive is that when we’ve been hurt or wronged, we make a caricature in our mind of the person who did it to us. This is reflexive. We don’t even have to try. We begin to see them only as the thing they did -not as a whole person. We define them by the thing they did. We label them. We see them as a jerk, or an asshole or a monster. In our minds, their good human traits are stripped away, and they become a one-dimensional character to us. We may even start to hate them. And we grasp that anger and hate. We hold it like a hot coal. Our hate may have been triggered by their actions, but our hate isn’t about them.

Consider this - When you say, I love you to another you’re telling them about you not about them. You’re telling them your deep feelings. I love you. When you say I hate you, it’s the same. Hate is an emotion we project on another. And hate is a choice. It’s a choice that grows from anger.

And anger…. there’s a reason we go to anger. It’s a self-protective response to pain. When we have been hurt, we experience emotions that make us feel week. Think of a time you felt betrayed, or were lied to, or were abused in some way. Do you remember how you felt in that moment? The emotion we ultimately feel might be anger, but the first emotion we feal in these moments is from a sense of powerless. When we’ve been taken advantage of or abused, it makes us feel weak. This powerless feeling may last only a brief moment for some of us -before we shift to anger. But when we relive the moment in our mind we will again recall that sense of powerlessness… of feeling weak. 

In the moment where we know we’ve been wronged; we shift the emotion that makes us feel weak to one that makes us feel stronger. We choose anger.  

You see, anger is a strong emotion. Anger gives us a sense of power. When we are angry, we feel more control. We feel less weak. When we choose anger, we reject the weakness we feel in the moment and choose an emotion that’s comforting to us. Anger lets us feel like less of a victim to the event that hurt us. 

Anger helps us stabilize and take our power back. For that reason, anger is a helpful tool. It allows us to get out of the weakness rut. But anger is a trap we can get caught in, if we don’t understand it’s supposed to be a layover, not a destination. And the reason we get trapped there is because we sense, once our anger or hate is gone, we’ll be forced to deal with pain that created it.  You must release the hate and anger to get to the good. You must release it to move past the hurt. If you can forgive the person, you can move forward. Some people are quite good at this. Like most skills, we get better at forgiveness through practice. But many of us find it hard to forgive so, we get stuck.  

Sometimes it is because of the event itself. You might think to yourself, “How can I forgive someone who did that?” 

Sometimes it’s hard to forgive because the person hasn’t shown remorse or tried to make it right in some way. So, you might think to yourself, “How can I forgive someone who hasn’t even apologized?” 

We get stuck in this thinking because we’re thinking all wrong.  

It can be easy to forgive. When you know how. Learning how begins when you understand that you’re the one holding the hot coal… and holding it does nothing to the person who hurt you. And most importantly you must understand this one thing. Forgiveness is not for the person who hurt you. Forgiveness is for you.                                                           

Forgiveness used to be a difficult word for me… for the two reasons I mentioned. But I also knew I didn’t want to carry around the hot coal of anger the rest of my life. I didn’t want to feel like a victim of things that happened. So, I knew I had to learn how to forgive. And I did. 

So, if you find it hard to forgive because you trip over the word, the way I did… I offer this tool, which I used to practice learning to forgive. The tool I used is empathy. 

With empathy, you learn to see the person who hurt you in a different way.  A way that makes them less one dimensional. You allow yourself to see their damage and their pain. Yeah, I know they’re damaged. Only damaged people hurt other people and then do nothing to make it right. But their damage should not keep you from releasing the hot coal of anger. So, we can learn to look at them with empathy. 

First of all, I must say, empathy doesn’t mean you understand someone’s experience because you haven’t experienced what they’ve experienced. It doesn’t mean you can relate to it. You can never know what someone has been through. Their life has been different from yours. But you probably know enough about them to know they are a damaged person. You might even know some of the reasons why they are damaged. 

Now, to be clear, what their life experience has been does not justify the way they treated you. It also doesn’t mean you need to ever trust them again. We only look at their life experience with empathy to start to see them as more than one-dimensional.  

Here’s how to put empathy in motion through a 3-step process: 

First: Recognize the challenges they’ve face or are facing – if you can.

 When I was 12 there was a kid in school named Danny. He was mean. He’d do things like throw a basketball at your face for fun. No one liked him. In 8th grade he cracked one of my teeth with a basketball. He had an angry streak. Teachers weren’t even safe from his abuse. He was suspended many times. Later that year, when his parents divorced, he and his father moved away and he moved to another school district. I never saw him again. Years later I got to know a guy who had been his stepbrother. I asked him about Danny. He acknowledged that Danny was a mean kid and he told me how Danny’s dad had been an abusive guy. It had been five years since I’d seen Danny but suddenly, I felt empathy for him. He was a mean kid. And being mean isn’t okay. But at least I had some context for why he had so much anger.                                                   

Second: Look inward and connect to the emotion the empathy provokes in you.

When I heard how Danny had been treated by his father it affected me.  I connected with the emotion it evoked. I was thankful that I didn’t have an abusive home and that I never had to wonder if I was loved, the way Danny did.

Third: Transfer the emotion into actions. 

When I understood why Danny had been a bully, and allowed myself to connect with the emotions I felt about his situation, I was able to see him more completely. He stopped being one-dimensional. I was able to feel empathy for him. I didn’t have to forgive him. I didn’t need to think “It was okay that he hurt me.” But understanding how he became a bully allowed me to see him differently and to let go of my anger towards him. Empathy helped me arrive at forgiveness. 

Empathy leads to forgiveness. And if it doesn’t, it will still help you let go of anger or hate. It will help you drop the hot coal. And like most things, active practice will help you improve.  When you learn how to apply empathy, you will become better at applying it in a new situation.

I want to acknowledge here that there are much more traumatic things you might be dealing with than a school bully. Those situations may be more charged, but this tool works the same in all situations. 

1.      Recognize

2.      Look inward

3.      Transfer the emotion to action (inside of ourself)

When you forgive you can start the healing. Again- We forgive for us, not for them. 

And one final thought about the process of suffering and forgiving… 

Kahlil Gibran wrote,

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive                                                 characters are seared with scars.”

You get many benefits from moving past anger or hate. You get to release the hot coal and be happier. But you also strengthen your soul when you learn empathy and forgiveness. Pain makes us feel weak. Being able to release the pain makes us feel strong. Makes us feal powerful. Learning to release pain is like a magic trick. Become a magician. Be a wizard. Drop your hot coals. And eventually… you’ll stop picking them up at all. 

Lewis B. Smedes has written several good books on healing and forgiveness. I’ll share links for two I recommend, in the show notes. These are affiliate links. If you buy the book, use the link. Your cost will be the same, but a portion of your purchase will go to support The Soul Podcast. 

Who can you grant forgiveness to today? Do it. Do it for you.