Forgiving a loved one who has hurt you is necessary if you want to continue by his side without resentment, it is a toxic emotion that will prevent you from being happy. This is why we must learn to forgive him, build, and be able to move forward.
The importance of forgiveness: why is it difficult for us to forgive?
Forgiveness is not an act of charity or submission to the other, nor does it mean approving what they did to us. Forgiveness means accepting that that person was wrong and hurt us, restricting said fact to the context in which it occurred, and avoiding seeing it as a general attitude in the relationship, any type of relationship. Whether family, friendship, love, colleagues, etc.
However, forgiving is not easy, and even if we put all our will into it; memories, discomfort and our own minds do not always allow us to accept the other’s apologies.
Contradictory messages become part of our internal self-dialogue and can even make things worse by making us develop contradictory feelings towards the other person that lead us to move away from them without really knowing why.
This probably occurs as a response to the pain experienced when we are next to him; a pain that is surely the result of the emotional tangle that we do not know how to explain. To forgive is learned, but for this it will be necessary to have motivation, information and strategies.
Why is it sometimes difficult for us to forgive others?
Forgiveness is difficult when the act that caused you pain is the work of a person you love (parents, close friends, partner, siblings, classmates). In those situations where the relationship is lighter, we expect less of the other
in which the relationship was insignificant, the balance between the harm caused and what the person responsible can bring us, causes the relationship to be directly blocked (it does not advance towards a closer relationship), or directly broken.
The problem and emotional discomfort come when the act to forgive is linked to a person we really love and who occupies a privileged place in our lives. Forgiveness is difficult when your partner betrays you, when your best friend does not know how to rise to the occasion in one of your worst moments, when you feel abandoned by your parents or siblings in a situation where what you most wanted was to support you in that situation. family bond.
One of the main reasons that make forgiveness difficult is the disappointment suffered. In relationships with others, we generate expectations about what we mean to those people and what they would be willing to do for us, and when there is a clash between that expectation and reality, disappointment appears, an emotion that arises from the need to accept that things are not (or will be) as we thought. Applied to a person it means that person is not, or does not act, as I expected.
It is common that in this type of situation, the disappointed person feels that the relationship with the one who has offended him “was a lie”, that everything that happened to her with her has not been worth it, that it was not real. And it is common for disappointment to be joined by feelings such as anger (for feeling cheated), shame (for not having realized what the other was really like), or sadness (related to the feeling of loss of a person that they will never see as they thought it was).
Another key factor that prevents us from forgiving is the fear that that person will hurt us again. “What if he does it again?” “What if he really doesn’t regret it?” “How can I know for sure that this situation is not going to happen again?” The impossibility of giving a 100% reliable answer to these questions only adds to the previous feelings others such as anxiety, insecurity and mistrust. And finally, pride, another of the great protagonists that makes it difficult for us to forgive when we feel that someone has hurt our ego and that they do not value us as we deserve.