Forgiving Means Understanding, Not Justifying
Knowing how to forgive has always been seen as a virtue. There are people who have a hard time forgetting everything and starting over when someone does something that hurts them. On the other hand, there are others who forgive absolutely everything that others do… How to find balance?
Knowing how to forgive does not mean forgetting everything others do without caring how we feel. It’s important to learn to let go of resentment, but not justify the unjustifiable… Read on to learn how to use forgiveness with balance and thus improve your emotional well-being!
The virtue of forgiving starts with yourself
Learning to forgive doesn’t imply that we don’t care what others do, but that we don’t let the initial irritation or annoyance turn into resentment and unease our lives and our relationship with the person who hurt us. In fact, forgiving helps us to let go of what happened, but make decisions that protect us from what would harm us in the future.
We think about forgiving others, but we have the bad habit of forgetting to forgive ourselves. The reality is that nobody is perfect. As cliché as it sounds, we all make mistakes. It is important to understand this, as in many situations we establish levels of self-reliance that are impossible to achieve, which can lead to feelings of frustration, anxiety, or anger toward ourselves.
Therefore, recognizing that we are human is the first step in learning to forgive yourself. But we can go a step further: if we did something that we consider wrong, we can stop going around and around and look for a solution.
The question is to change this spiral of thoughts that lead us to a dead end for a more adequate way to face the problem. So we have two alternatives: fix what we’ve done and, if that option doesn’t exist, think about what we can do to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
Forgiving means understanding that others make mistakes too
Once we become aware that we are not perfect, it remains for us to consider the same for other people. It is often easier to justify our mistakes than those of the people we live with. The truth is, just as we have demands on ourselves, we also have demands on other people.
So we expect things from other people that they can’t always give us. Understanding that others don’t have to live up to our expectations is very important to learning to forgive what we feel they’ve done wrong. The same happens when we’re disappointed in ourselves, it’s important to leave the bitterness behind.
Again, going round and round about what the person in question has done doesn’t help us at all. If something bothers us, we need to try to understand the reasons the person may have had for acting in a certain way. In this sense, having a conversation about the topic, trying to find a solution to what happened, can be positive.
Forgiving does not mean that everything is justifiable
However, one should not forgive everything that people do out of a habit of forgiving. It is important to consider our own rights and our own needs. If we constantly excuse the harm that others do to us, we damage our own well-being and impede our self-assertion.
Learning to listen to our emotions in these cases will give us clues about what to do. So we learn to put limits on others and defend our own rights.
So in order to learn not to forgive at all, it’s important to reflect on what happened and what we’re upset about. In this way, we will try to assign responsibility for what happened to whoever corresponds.
It is not a question of looking for the guilty, but of giving each one what corresponds to him. Because before excusing the other out of the blue, it is recommended to talk about the behavior and what we expected or would have liked to have happened. It is, therefore, about balancing the balance between our needs and those of other people. Learn to forgive!
