Forgiveness Comes In Many Ways

Forgiveness comes in many ways.

By definition, forgiveness is very precise; we are asked to stop blaming someone for his or her actions or attitudes. We are not asked to like or love the person or their actions, only to forgive them and in doing so, we free ourselves as much as the person we forgive. As long as we hold on to hate, blame, and resentment we remain trapped by the incident, no matter how long ago it took place.

Forgiveness requires us to stop blaming and to let go of the negatives that form the attachment to the pain and fear we feel. Before we can do this, we must forgive others and more importantly ourselves, we have to try and begin to understand the actions that require the act of forgiveness.

Blame and resentment are indicative of more dangerous emotions such as anger and guilt. We can feel anger at being a victim, and guilt through misplaced responsibility for whatever happened, a vicious circle is set in motion that is both debilitating and self-perpetuating.

Forgiveness for things that took place in adulthood is easier to give than situations that happened in childhood. Childhood experiences are influenced by two major issues, firstly the people involved may not be alive, and secondly, our perception of those people and the events that took place were from a child’s point of view. A child’s perspective has value in itself at that time and place; these things were experienced, viewed, and understood through the eyes of a child. Problems arise when we try to judge and blame others and ourselves based on “mental snapshots” taken and kept by a child.

We may feel completely justified feeling the way we do and we may have every right to blame and resent those involved, yet how much of those events were based on reality instead of childhood perception and how much emotion are we placing on those people and events when we view them from an adults point of view. It’s like looking back in time through a telescope the wrong way around, and evaluating, judging what you see as an adult in the year 2005.

While we can be affected by our childhood experiences, we can also affect them, in the way we relive and evaluate them, just by observing them in retrospect we affect events real or remembered. Our minds are complex organs that we don’t yet fully understand and research continually provides us with new and fascinating insights into how our brains work and what separates our minds from the physical organ of the brain. One thing that is certain is that our memory is not foolproof and is at times suspect and unreliable.

Because of the way it works, our brain can’t handle confusion and it will try to make sense of ant situation it finds itself in. If as a child we remember certain things that are charged with emotion, our brain will take those images and make a picture of them, if something doesn’t quite fit, it will modify it until it does.
Part of our picture may be totally unrelated to the experience or the memory, but our brain will use anything it can find to fill in the blank spaces.

We never remember everything or every detail, we are selective in the memories we retain, and this in itself creates gaps in the story of our lives. These gaps can be no more than a word or a sentence on the pages of our memory, but in some cases, whole chapters disappear from our “memoirs” and our brain will fill in these gaps in such a way as to ensure they provide a sequence of events.

Further problems arise because we think that what we see is real and that our eyes can’t deceive us, unfortunately they do, and this adds to the confusion. Our eyes aren’t very good at seeing, but our brain is and because of their relationship, we believe what we see and we also see what we believe. Our brain takes the information provided by our eyes and then interprets it in order to make sense of it based on our past experiences and memories.

Personal experience is subjective and relevant to our belief system as much as it is to reality and actual events. A group of people may