Forgiving In A Relationship

Posted on 12/04/2009

Forgiving is telling the person who injured you that you no longer hurt. Perhaps the greatest pain in a relationship is caused by cheating, but even smaller injuries can be a threat unless they are forgiven.

To forgive another you need to be vulnerable and admit you have been injured. You also need to take responsibility for exposing yourself to injury, especially if that person has hurt you before.

When you allow someone to hurt you, you feel angry for not protecting yourself. You need to realize that people usually hurt each other unintentionally and, therefore, deserve a second chance. People hurt others on purpose when they have been hurt.

They also deserve a second chance. People hurt others when they are weak, afraid to tell the truth, are addicted or thoughtless. They may not deserve a second chance, but you still need to forgive them.

You can’t forgive another person if you are unwilling to let go of your pain. When you refuse to forgive, your prolonged expression of hurt becomes an annoyance because it is an attempt to make the other person feel guilty. Consider how you’ve felt when you hurt someone. Even if you had good reason to be angry and to hurt back, hurting another never feels good. When you seek revenge, you become an injuring.

It is universally common to have angry fantasies before expressing hurt. However, when these fantasies are allowed to build we can become so enraged that we fear we will lose control and do harm to the other person if we express ourselves. This traps us in our anger, a dangerous position, because withheld anger always ends up hurting us.

It’s difficult to think well of yourself if you are preoccupied with doing someone in. Still, when we cannot express ourselves directly, we humiliate our tormentors in fantasy and bring them to their knees. It is a perverse victory.

If you attempt to act on these angry feelings, you have to put your love aside and change your attitude from caring to hurtful. You have to wallow in hatred, a terrible place to rest your consciousness. From such a place the whole world appears evil. You look all around you to build a case that justifies being nasty and it drains your energy to do so. You have to shut out the good in your relationship, deny that you love the other person, that he is lovable or loves you.

Learn to say “That hurts.” It will do more to keep your relationship open to love than anything else. For your own sake, you need to let go of your hurt. You need to forgive your partner, not to free him from guilt, but to free yourself from anger. You need to live in the present. Holding on to pain always ties you to the past. This is especially true when your partner has hurt you deeply enough to destroy your relationship.

Even if the relationship seems beyond hope, you need to set the emotional accounts straight. It’s one thing to lose a relationship. You can get over that. It’s quite another matter to get lost in selfpity, to refuse to recover from an injury in order to make your partner appear the villain.

As much as others may sympathize with you, no one really cares when you feel sorry for yourself. Eventually you lose self-esteem and come to believe that you deserve to be treated the way you were.

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