How To Forgive (And Why)

There’s an old saying that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. If only it were so simple and easy as just choosing to let go!

But it’s not, is it?

When people have wronged us and/or wronged our loved ones, it’s hard to forgive, especially if they have not changed. For that matter, it can be hard to forgive ourselves for mistakes that we made, too.

Either way, “drinking that poison” can be close to literal, in terms of what harboring such anger and resentment can do for our cortisol levels.

So, what to do about it?

If you have a dialogue with the person, our previous article on communication may help a lot.

If you don’t, there are various other angles that can be taken:

The Unsent Letter

You can even send it, if you like, but it’s not the point here. The idea is to write to the person, expressing your grievances. But, (as per the above-linked article on communication) try to focus at least as much on your feelings as their actions. “When you did/said x, I felt y”, etc.

This is important for helping you process your feelings. If you send the letter, it’s also important for the other person to be able to understand your feelings.

Sometimes, we feel the things we do so strongly because we don’t have an outlet for them. Pouring out our emotions in such a fashion, on the other hand, means (to labor the metaphor) they’re no longer bottled up. Even just in and of itself, that can provide us a lot of relief.

And when we the negative emotions are no longer such high pressure, it can be easier to let go of them.

Mindfulness

Following on from the above idea, a good strategy can be simply sitting and feeling everything you need to feel, noticing it without judgement, like a curious observer.

Sometimes what we need is just to be heard, and that starts with hearing ourselves.

Compassion

There’s a Buddhist exercise that involves actively feeling compassion for three people: a loved one, a stranger, and an enemy. Many people report that it’s actually harder to feel compassion for a random stranger, than an enemy. Why? Because we don’t know them; we don’t know what’s good and bad about them in our estimation.

If you’re reading this because you want to be able to gain the peace of being able to forgive someone (even if that someone is yourself), then in at least some respect right now, that person is in the “enemy” category. So how do we unpack that?

To err is human. Everybody screws up sometimes. And also, everyone has a reason (or a complex of reasons) for acting the way they do. This does not mean that those reasons excuse the behavior, but it can explain it.

You don’t get angry at a storm for soaking you through. Even if you might not understand the physics of it in the way a meteorologist might, you understand that there were things that led to that, and you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So why do we get angry at someone else for wronging us? Even if we might not understand the personal background of it in the way their psychologist or therapist might, we (hopefully) understand that there were things that caused them to be the way they were, and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And ourselves? We probably know, when we made a mistake, why we made it. Maybe we were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Whatever it was, we did our best at the time and, apparently, our best wasn’t as good as we’d like.

If we didn’t deserve forgiveness, we wouldn’t be critical of our past selves in the first place.

And, the science is very clear that it’s important for our health for other reasons besides cortisol management, too.

And as for others? They did the best they knew how. Maybe they were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Same story, different character.

Remembering that can be key to “accepting the apology we never received”.

Forgiving without forgetting

Developing the ability to forgive is a useful tool for our own mental health. It doesn’t mean we must or even should make ourselves a doormat.

“I forgive you” does not have to mean a clean slate; it means remembering that the thing happened, and just not holding on to the anger/resentment associated with it.

It may be water under the bridge now, but it might have been a devastatingly destructive wave at the time, and continuing to acknowledge truth that is sensible. Just, from a position of peace now, hopefully.

When The World Moves Without Us…

We’ve written before about how reduced social engagement can strike people of all ages, and what can be done about it:

How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation

…but today we’re going to talk more about a specific aspect of it, namely, the alienation that can come with old age—and other life transitions too, but getting older is something that (unless accident or incident befall us first) all of us will definitely do.

What’s the difference?

Loneliness is a status, alienation is more of a process. It can be the alienation in the sense of an implicit “you don’t belong here” message from the world that’s geared around the average person and thus alienates those who are not that (a lack of accessibility to people with disabilities can be an important and very active example of this), and it can also be an alienation from what we’ve previously considered our “niche” in the world—the loss of purpose many people feel upon retirement fits this bill. It can even be a more generalized alienation from our younger selves; it’s easy to have a self-image that doesn’t match one’s current reality, for instance.

Read more: Estranged by Time: Alienation in the Aging Process

So, how to “un-alienate”?

To “un-alienate”, that is to say, to integrate/reintegrate, can be hard. Some things may even be outright impossible, but most will not be!

Consider how, for example, former athletes become coaches—or for that matter, how former party-goers might become party-hosts (even if the kind of “party” might change with time, give or take the pace at which we like to live our lives).

What’s important is that we take what matters the most to us, and examine how we can realistically still engage with that thing.

This is different from trying to hold on grimly to something that’s no longer our speed.

Letting go of the only thing we’ve known will always be scary; sometimes it’s for the best, and sometimes what we really need is just more of a pivot, like the examples above. The crux lies in knowing which:

• Is our relationship with the thing (whatever it may be) still working for us, or is it just bringing strife now?
• If it’s not working for us, is it because of a specific aspect that could be side-stepped while keeping the rest?
• If we’re going to drop that thing entirely (or be dropped by it, which, while cruel, also happens in life), then where are we going to land?

This latter is one where foresight is a gift, because if we bury our heads in the sand we’re going to land wherever we’re dropped, whereas if we acknowledge the process, we can make a strategic move and land on our feet.

Here’s a good pop-science article about this—it’s aimed at people around retirement age, but honestly the advice is relevant for people of all ages, and facing all manner of life transitions, e.g. career transitions (of which retirement is of course the career transition to end all career transitions), relationship transitions (including B/B/B/B: births, betrothals/break-ups, and bereavements) health transitions (usually: life-changing illnesses and/or disabilities—which again, happens to most of us if something doesn’t get us first), etc. So with all that in mind, this becomes more of a “how to reassess your life at those times when it needs reassessing”:

How to Reassess Your Life in Retirement

But that doesn’t mean that letting go is always necessary

Sometimes, the opposite! Sometimes, the age-old advice to “lean in” really is all the situation calls for, which means:

• Be ready to say “yes” to things, and if nobody’s asking, be ready to “hey, do you wanna…?” and take a “build it and they will come” approach. This includes with people of different ages, too! Intergenerational friendships can be very rewarding for all concerned, if done right. Communities that span age-ranges can be great for this—they might be about special interests (this writer has friends ranging through four generations from playing chess, for instance), they could be religious communities if we be religious, LGBT groups if that fits for us, even mutual support groups such as for specific disabilities or chronic illness if we have such—notice how the very things that might isolate us can also bring us together!
• Be open-minded to new experiences; it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of “I’ve never done that” and mistake that self-assessment for an uncritical assumption of “I’m not the kind of person who does that”. Sometimes, you really won’t be! But at least think about it and entertain the possibility, before dismissing it out of hand. And, here’s a life tip: it can be really good to (within the realms of safety, and one’s personal moral principles, of course) take an approach of “try anything once”. Even if we’re almost certain we won’t like it, and even if we then turn out to indeed not like it, it can be a refreshing experience—and now we can say “Yep, tried that, not doing that again” from a position of informed knowledge. That’s the only way we get to look back on a richly lived life of broad experiences, after all, and it is never too late for such.
• Be comfortable prioritizing quality over quantity. This goes for friends, it goes for activities, it goes for experiences. The topic of “what’s the best number of friends to have?” has been a matter of discussion since at least ancient Greek times (Plato and Aristotle examined this extensively), but whatever number we might arrive at, it’s clear that quality is the critical factor, and quantity after that is just a matter of optimizing.

In short: make sure you’re investing—in your relationships, in your areas of interest, in your community (whatever that may mean for you personally), and most of all, and never forget this: in yourself.

Take care!