Forgiveness Tips for Your Everyday Life

As a fatherless woman, I haven’t always forgiven easily. I’ve held my share of grudges, ignored the problem, and tried to carry on. It’s been a journey. One thing I’ve learned is how important forgiving is for a person’s mental health. Carrying around the weight of resentment gets heavy. The negative energy it brings with it weighs us down. Since forgiving my father, I’ve seen such a difference in my mental health. How much lighter I feel daily, or especially when life gets stressful. In the process of forgiving, I’ve found these three tips extremely helpful for me. I wanted these three tips in hopes I can help more people be able to forgive others. While these three tips have helped me learn to forgive, they can only really help if you want them to.

1.      Make the decision that you are going to forgive. This might sound silly, but making this decision will help propel you into committing to forgiving. Once we decide that we are going to do something, we can hold ourselves to that commitment. This is something that helped me when I wanted to learn to forgive.

2.      Write a letter to the person you are forgiving (but don’t send it). This will help you get any residual feelings out, and let you say your peace. Writing how I had been feeling for so long, and just getting all my words out, felt so great. This tip allowed me to feel as though I had said my peace. Since my father left me, I never had the opportunity to tell him how it made me feel. This step allowed me the control to finally feel like I could let those feelings out.

3.      Developing empathy. Understanding that we might have also hurt people in the past, and maybe we’ve been lucky enough to be forgiven. This tip is hard but could be very helpful in the process of forgiving. As an empathy, this step was not as hard for me. However, it can be very hard for others. Allowing empathy for a person who has hurt us might not make sense to everyone. But this really can (if you let it), propel you forward in your journey towards healing.

Forgiveness is something that takes time and patience. But it is possible. We are all capable of forgiving, we just have to put in the work. Forgiveness is so important for our mental health. To let the pain were holding onto, go. The weight we feel when we don’t forgive someone is like a cavity for our brain. That negative energy is always with us, whether we are focusing on it or not.

Forgiving is a journey. But I truly believe that it is a journey worth enduring.