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The importance of forgiveness

Most people think forgiveness is a weak thing to do. Let me tell you, it is one of the toughest things you will ever do. I know.

My first real forgiveness experience was on a biggie. I had made a guy director of one of my companies and he also became the operation manager. He was in direct contact with all our clients. One day I woke up and found that he had formed his own company, taking our old clients with him. He had been working on the clients over a period of time, without me realizing, and managed to make them follow him to the new company as he offered a reduction of one dollar per hour for the services we had provided. I had no opportunity to rectify anything; it was a done deal.

Overnight I lost both my income from that company and the value of the company - at that time the value was something like half a million dollars. As you can imagine I was devastated. I was ill with worry. I kept working out ways that I could enact revenge on the guy. I went to my lawyer and asked for help. He said something really wise to me that day, though I did not appreciate it then: “With the time it’ll take before this will be settled in court you’ll be in a better financial situation and much healthier if you leave this behind and get on with your life. Move on.” But I didn’t take this to court purely because he wanted 75.000 dollar up front to start the proceedings. I was in no shape to lodge that type of money. The grudge stayed with me.

Over the next 10 years I lived with this event haunting me. Every time I saw our company doing work around town I felt sick, thinking of what might have been. I thought of terrible things I could do to this guy. I was in bits. I spent years licking my wounds and telling everyone how I had been wronged. I could not get this thing out of my mind.

Then I stumbled over a book that gave me a new direction in my life and answered a lot of questions that had puzzled me for years. The very last thing the writer of the book asks you to do is to forgive someone who’s done you wrong. Well, I definitely had the case, but I was not sure if I had the ability to forgive this cretin. Everything else I had learnt from this book made so much sense and made me feel so much better, but to forgive - I was not sure. After many days of debating with my wife we decided to do as the book said. We wrote a letter to this guy, telling him we absolutely did forgive him, and saying that although we could not understand why he had done it, we unconditionally forgave him for doing it.

At that precise moment, I felt as I had being operated and everything that had made me feel bad was removed. I felt great. Though nothing had changed but the way I choose to look at the situation. At that point I also realised the wisdom of my lawyer. If only I had truly moved on and forgiven the guy then, I would have been spared all those years punishing myself.

It is quite amazing that the part of all the self help teachings that gives the greatest satisfaction is the bit that is almost ignored and used the least. I must admit that I was always guilty of bearing grudges and not readily forgiving anyone. In our high speed, competitive world we are not really taught the finer points of life. We are mainly concerned with achieving money and possessions. Our misguided life skills are firmly focused on just barging through regardless. As long as we get what we think we want, it will all be OK. The trouble is though, that we are in such a rush that we do not do any maintenance on the way through. If someone does the wrong thing by us we just take it on board and let it fester away in our mind. If the thing was of a significant nature there would be certain events or reminders of the grievance, and every time you bring it to the front of your mind it will eat away at you. You will relive the event and get worked up. During the course of your life you will experience a few real big grudges and hundreds of small ones. If you keep carrying them around with you you’ll feel really miserable each time you think about whom and how someone did you wrong.

Have you ever given any real deep thought as to the make up of a grudge? It is someone who has done something to you that has either hurt you financially, has betrayed your friendship or something else that makes you decide that you no longer want this person in your life. You file the action and the person into the grudge area of your mind and carry on. Immediately after the event you recall it hourly and imagine all the horrible things that you are going to do to the person that hurt you. As time goes on you reduce your revenge thinking to a daily dose, but each time it makes you feel terrible. As time passes on you recall the event less frequently, but you have certain triggers that bring it right back to centre court, and every time it makes you upset and feel sick.

Let’s now look at the villain. He obviously either do not know that what he did was wrong, or he did know it was wrong and does not care. Or maybe he manages to justify his wrong deeds to himself. Either way, he is not feeling bad about it. In fact, after a couple of days, he might not even be thinking about it. This, of course, is totally unfair! You are the aggrieved party, you have been wronged in some way, yet the person who caused this is carrying on as normal!

What on earth can you do? Well the first thing to do is to put every thing into context. If the person has done this on purpose to hurt you, the greatest prize he can get is to see you that you, or imagine that you, are suffering. But it’s still only you suffering! As you can’t do anything about it you might as well move on. And there is no use trying to move on if you still have this baggage to carry, so you may as well dump it. At this point it is a good time to really cleanse your thoughts, and the only way to really cleanse your thoughts is to say that you cannot change anything, so you may as well forgive the person.

“Never, not in a million years!” I hear you cry.

Well, if you don’t forgive the villain you can’t go on. You have to change your thinking and unconditionally forgive the person you feel has done you wrong. The hard part now is that you have to contact the villain, preferably by mail, but the phone or any other means of communication will do. The only “no no” is to do it via a third party. The villain must know that the forgiveness came direct from you.

Now, this is not really part of the deal, but just imagine that the villain had some remorse or had even given the slightest bit of consideration to what had happened to you as a result of his actions. Imagine his reaction when you out of the blue contact him and say you unconditionally forgive him. What will he make of that? It must at least confuse him. He may even after a period of time make contact with you and apologise. It might not happen, but at least you have given him that option. The great thing is that if you have genuinely put this behind you and - because there is no other alternative - unconditionally forgiven the person, you will feel as if you are reborn. A situation that has been eating away at you has been put to rest. You can move on.

The ironic thing is that forgiveness is such a selfish act. It is all about you. You are the one that will feel better. You are the one who can now move on without a constant pain. What the villain is feeling at this point in time is irrelevant. You are the one feeling great!

The other scenario was that the villain did not know that what he did was wrong. In this instance you can genuinely feel sorry for him. It means that the hurt was caused in ignorance, and you can just go through the steps mentioned above and move on.

Why don’t you find a person who you could forgive right now? It may not be anything major. It may just be a silly tiff, but just contact the person you’ve been angry at and invite him around. Or if it is a biggie just unhitch it. Feel the freedom of not having to think about it anymore. I assure you that this is one of the greatest lessons in life: Life is far too short to spend time suffering over past events. Give forgiveness a go and GOOD LUCK.

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