Smells like forgiveness

Forgiveness can seem elusive, confusing, and counterintuitive. At some point in my life, I understood forgiveness as letting the person who hurt us know we were okay with what they did to us. This led me to feel conflicted about the concept of simply letting something go to avoid holding someone accountable for their actions. This stuck until it was time for me to forgive someone for what they had done to me.

The residual pain of a past relationship can burden us in a way nothing else has the power to. When I faced my own relationship demons, I was forced to understand forgiveness to move on. Although difficult to do, it was the most rewarding lesson of my life.

My grandmother has always provided amazing foundational strength and wisdom. Before she passed, spending time at her house was a huge highlight of my youth. Just about every holiday was celebrated there, and several Sunday night dinners were enjoyed around her dining room table.

I remember vividly this small frame she had hanging on her staircase that read, "Forgiveness is the fragrance the flower sheds on the heel that crushed it." It bothered me a little because I didn't understand it, but I respected it because if it was worthy of being on her wall, there was surely a wise lesson to be learned. It would be almost 30 years until the opportunity to learn the lesson arrived.

When we experience a traumatic, abusive, or otherwise troubling event, more often than not, we can internalize it. When we internalize it, we get angry at the person who did the awful thing to us, because we think we are the reason the person did it to us. Believing we are the reason it happened means we feel we could have prevented it, did something to deserve it, or did something that made them do it when none of these are true.

People who do bad things to others are... bad. It's that simple. They often don't care who they hurt and will exploit anyone they can. When a survivor finds themselves in the path of a bad person, there is no way of knowing what that person is capable of or how that person will react to any given scenario; it is completely out of anyone's control other than the bad person.

Forgiveness is not about suddenly allowing the bad person grace for what they have done; it is about understanding that they have internal struggles they are unable to manage. When strong emotions are unmanageable, they are acted out and they are shared with others through no fault of their own.

To forgive is to release ourselves from the pain and the cold emotional grip of the bad person. When we remain in a freeze state because of the pain we feel, it gives the bad person power over us, power there is a chance the bad person doesn't even care about. Once we can allow ourselves to enter a space where we see that the behavior of the bad person had nothing to do with us, we have reached forgiveness.

You may wonder how something that felt so personal can have nothing to do with you. The bad person did indeed do something bad, and it may have greatly affected us. The lesson is that they would have done the same thing to whoever was where we were at the time of the incident, making it something that inflicted incredible pain without actually being targeted to us.

Bad people are careless in their actions, impulsive, insensitive, and will stop at nothing when the urge presents itself. They often lack boundaries, especially within others, and maturity. At times, it almost seems as though they are completely clueless about the damage they are doing and go on about their day seeking out another opportunity to get their needs met.

Bad people also do things to hurt others intentionally, and this is often under the premise of promising something positive and delivering something completely different. Forgiveness in a scenario like this is more difficult once we understand the abuse was intentional, however, the same rules apply.

They do it only because they don't understand healthy behavior, or have an interest in executing it. They struggle with allowing their own vulnerabilities and insecurities to show while battling a heap of emotional pain inside that has nowhere to go. Maybe they want others to feel as terrible as they do, or maybe they have released the oars and just don't care anymore. It doesn't matter why they have decided to behave that way, we just need to understand it's not about us.

Understanding forgiveness means seeing the wisdom in the frame my grandmother so proudly displayed on her staircase wall. "Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heal that crushed it," is about reaching the other side of forgiveness and finding the beauty beyond the pain. The beauty is in the lesson that we can't control the actions of others, and their actions often have nothing to do with us, releasing us from carrying around the pain of their internal struggles.