What if there was something you could do that would lower your risk of having a heart attack, improve your cholesterol levels, help you sleep better, and lower your blood pressure, anxiety, depression and stress, all without having to change your diet or exercise at all?
Sound too good to be true?
Well, research has shown that forgiving others and letting go of grudges can do all of that for you.
In my experience as a licensed counselor, offering forgiveness to someone who has wronged you can be incredibly difficult. There are some things that others have done to us that have caused deep wounds, and the closer the person is to us, often the harder it is to forgive. Sometimes people even want to forgive someone, but they haven’t been able to yet.
What can you do to get over a grudge and forgive?
First, recognize that forgiving someone is a choice you make. In situations with deep-seated wounds, it is often a choice that you have to make more than once. Sometimes we have to forgive someone over and over for the ways that person has hurt us, as our emotions don’t necessarily always immediately move through the hurt and anger we feel once we forgive someone.
Second, sometimes you have to forgive even when you don’t want to do it. I think of all the apologies that my parents made me and my brother tell each other after we got into a fight. “Go tell him you’re sorry,” they would say, and one of us would say the most unconvincing “sorry” just to get it over with and move on. In the same way, sometimes we have to choose to forgive even when we aren’t feeling ready to actually forgive. We can get to this point when we realize that our lack of forgiveness is actually hurting us more than anyone else, as we are the one living with the anger and resentment.
It is important to remember that forgiveness doesn’t mean that you no longer remember what happened. We hear the expression “forgive and forget,” but that’s not realistic, especially if the person we are working on forgiving isn’t changing his or her actions. In those situations, it is important to both forgive and set up boundaries to avoid repeated instances in which you might have to forgive again.
While this isn’t true in all situations in which forgiveness is required, sometimes it can be important to recognize your own role in what happened. It is important to accept responsibility for your part, even if it seems small in significance compared to what the other person did. In doing this, we work on not creating a dynamic of saint and villain, but instead humanizing both yourself and the other person. Again, there are definitely situations where one person might have done nothing wrong.
Finally, while forgiveness often feels like something we do for someone else, it is important to remember all the benefits you experience when you do it. Not only are there the health benefits listed earlier, but there is emotional freedom from the weight of hurt and anger that we carry when we haven’t forgiven someone. Forgiveness also helps us to move out of living in the past and into the present moment, as anyone who is struggling to forgive is at some level stuck in the memories of the hurt they have experienced.
I think it is important to remember that forgiveness is never fair. We don’t offer it because someone has earned it — they can earn back our trust, but the thing still happened. Instead, it’s something that we give freely, that is unearned. But when we do, we also receive a whole host of benefits.
- Mischa McCray is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist. Send questions or topics you’d like him to discuss to mmccray@wpcgreenwood.org.
