When We Feed The Grudges, We Die Little By Little

The daughter comes to her father and says:

– Dad, I can’t stand the neighbor anymore! I want to kill her, but I’m afraid of being discovered. Can you help me with this?

The father answers him:

– Of course I do, my love, but I have one condition… you will have to make peace with her so that later no one suspects you when she dies. You will have to take good care of her, be kind, grateful, patient, affectionate, less selfish, always reciprocate, listen to her more… can you see this little powder? Every day you will put some of it in her food. So she will die little by little.

After 30 days, the daughter tells her father again:

– I don’t want her to die anymore. I love her. And now? How do I cut the poison effect?

The father then answers:

– Do not worry! What I gave you was rice powder. She won’t die, because the poison was in you.

When someone hurts you, it’s like a snake biting you.  The wound may be more or less severe, but we can close it and heal it. The worst is when the bite is poisonous. As therapist José Antonio Garcia points out, the most common poisons are revenge, an eye for an eye and the search for justice at all costs.

Anger is human, very human.  But it’s also human to forgive. And get it wrong. They say that those who don’t love don’t forgive. In fact, it is precisely love that is guilty of forgiveness; love for the other, for life, for the world and for oneself.

In other words, forgiveness, the truth, does not exist if there is nothing to justify it. There can be kindness, responsibility and indifference, whatever you want, but  the only way to achieve it is love.

Also, let’s say that somehow forgiving is synonymous with being  free. If there is nothing that holds us back, resentments, fears and hatred towards the other, there will be nothing that justifies living closed in the prison of resentment.

Forgiving does not mean that we have to erase the past or that we must forget the pain. Forgiving is creating a new way of remembering and looking at our present and our future.

Forgiveness, indispensable for emotional freedom

Forgiving is essential to achieving emotional freedom and, with it, our mental well-being. It can be very difficult, but it’s the only way we can heal. Let’s see how to do it below:

1. Acknowledge your wound and your pain. That’s the only thing that will allow you to emotionally distance yourself and rebuild empathy with the person who hurt you. Doing this will allow us to analyze the motivations that led the person to act in such a way, which will help to reduce their need to blame the other and to attribute to them a specific intentionality.

2. Choose the option to forgive. 

Those who have already done us wrong have stuck a hook that goes through the bowels, making us feel an enormous pain. We want to give that person what he deserves, we want to make him suffer the same and stick him on that same hook, in an act of justice, that suffers the same as us. If we make the effort to get the hook into her, we will do so knowing full well what wound she has caused us and how much it hurts to be stuck on the hook she has put us on. As long as we hook it, or try to, we’ll stay inside our hook. If we could get her on the hook, we’d be between her and the end of it, and to get out, we’d have to get the person out first.

If we get off the hook, we’ll be careful not to be close to the person, because they can get the hook back into us, and if we ever get back together, it should be with the confidence that they won’t hurt us again. But it is not the option of not suffering that justifies the choice, but an option based on what is desired in the long term.

3. Accept pain and anger. It’s natural for us to feel angry and hurt, but the only way to stop suffering is to let go of the confrontation with our emotions, feelings, and thoughts.

4. Self-protection. When we analyze what happened and give way to forgiveness, we cannot forget the signs that were indicating danger to us. Therefore, it is necessary to be very clear and present what these signals are in order to protect ourselves from future damage and threats.

5. It is not enough to say “I forgive you”. Any of our expressions can be completely empty of content. That’s what usually happens, we think we’ve forgiven, but our resentment keeps feeding inside of us.

Forgiveness is something you feel. Therefore, if the thoughts, emotions and feelings are repeated again, we must go back to doing the whole process again until we are able to empty the pain that is undermining our character.