Quote:
Originally Posted by senor rubirosa  I don't quite get it, AE. To me, unforgiveness is a point of contraction in the being that prevents the flow of everything ... but most especially of love. It's a state in which you are actively punishing yourself. To achieve forgiveness is to achieve liberation from a life-withering contraction. (Of course, there's a whole continuum, some of our states of unforgiveness are more minor and hence less debilitating than others.)
Acceptance without forgiving is better, of course, than neither accepting nor forgiving. But I wonder how possible it really is. Because you would be accepting a state of contraction that, with the requisite momentary insight and decision, you might relinquish.
But I have a feeling that you will have a good answer to this. I've probably not quite understood you.
(And this is kind of a do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do post. Because I can't pretend that I don't have many points of unforgiveness in my heart. They are hard to identify sometimes, much less release.)
QFT. |
When you refuse to forgive someone, and also refuse to accept them for who they are, you punnish yourself more than you punnish anyone else. They are free not to have anythhing to do with you, but you perpetuate your relationship with them by loathing them, reviling them, and revisiting your injuries more often than is healthy.
When you forgive someone superficially, becasue you feel it is the moral high road, or because you are satisfied simply to get along with them even though you harbor resentment, you are doing yourself a diservice, and you cannot have a healthy relationship with them, nor prevent similar relationships from cropping up with others in the future.
However, if you can learn to accept people, and understand that they hurt you because they wer just being themselves, you are emancipated. You can see clearly that you take only a certain portion of the blame for whatever happened between you, and no more blame than what is fair. They mostly acted because they are them, and not because you are you. During acceptance, however, it is critical to note your own part in the outcome. With acceptance, you can find a way to stop obsessing over what went wrong. With acceptance you can move on from an injury even if the other person cannot or will not earn forgiveness. They don;t have to be in your life at all. They could be a deceased relative, or an evil villain. It won't matter. You can let go, by accepting that they do what they do, and you can take steps not to repeat your own complicit errors.
Forgiveness given without being earned can only be superficial. There will always be that part of you that is aching, because it never got validated. Sometimes it gets to a point where you can ignore that pain, but actually healing it by accepting an unforgivable person is healthier, I think.
It was a difficult concept for me to grasp as well, but
a book I read helped me heal a lot of traumas that were strangling me. There are people I cannot ever forgive. But now I am so much less angry about what they did to me, and I will eventually stop reliving the worst things that have ever happened to me, because I am getting closer every day to letting go. I look forward to not hating anyone.