How to Forgive Completely

From: Positively Positive

By: Christie Hassler

Forgiveness is hard. One of the hardest things to do, especially done correctly.

This article by Christine Hassler answers a lot of questions.

I consider forgiveness one of the most powerful and spiritual things we have the ability to do as humans. Yet it is often misused and misunderstood.

First let me address the misuse – or rather the idea of moving into forgiveness to early. An important part of the healing journey is to express and release the feelings we stuffed inside because usually at the time of a painful event we had to go into survival mode and could not express what we needed to in a healthy way. Even if we did express our feelings, chances are it usually wasn’t greeted with compassion.

For example, let’s say you were abandoned or abused as a child or young adult. You may not have had an emotionally mature or capable adult around to hold a space of compassion for you and tell you that you didn’t do anything wrong. So it’s important that as an adult you feel and express those feelings in a healthy way – I teach about this both in Expectation Hangover and in even more detail in my personal mastery course (which is open for enrollment here) because I know from my own personal experience how important it is to feel the feelings that are attached to the painful experiences in our past.

I see a lot of encouragement in the personal development community to “forgive” as a spiritual practice but if we jump to forgiveness too quickly without first acknowledging and expressing any anger, sadness, or shame inside, we are indulging in spiritual bypass.

This means we are attempting to forgive something in our mind without first moving it through our emotional body. If we don’t do this we will not experience the true freedom that comes from forgiveness.

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