Columnist Dan Abernathy.

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Forgive yourself and don't blame yourself any longer. Forgive the other person who doesn’t even need to be present or aware of your forgiveness. The final step is to forgive the situation. Let whatever happened go, to be part of the past and no longer in the moment.”

Chapters in living will always include a paragraph that will stage a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events will be determined. This crisis is the condition of instability and perhaps danger. This point of course may feel like you’re losing your mind as it evokes questioning everything around you.

This catastrophic moment may arrive once, or it may become a frequent confrontation. Don’t worry about these impasses. There is a way out. When you feel the discomfort of uneasiness and hurt, observe. Listen to what is happening. Perhaps life is trying to show you something in your story of living.

While we all seemingly are seeking joy in the confusion we have stumbled into, we have become receivers, receiving distortions that have clogged our filters. We have found ease in diminishing the positive and over generalizing the negative. Seeking a false reasoning, we take all that is projected, sift through it and quickly strain it until we carelessly find a fragmented piece that can be manipulated into offensive possession. We then engage in it endlessly.

We’ve all been hurt by the actions or words of another. These abrasions can leave lasting feelings of resentment, bitterness and anger. If you hold on to this discomfort, you might be the one who pays the most. Embracing forgiveness can diminish all of this aching anxiety.

Forgiveness means different things to people, but in general, it involves an intentional decision to rid yourself of resentment and anger. The act that hurt or offended you might always be with you, but working on forgiveness can lessen its grip. It will help to free you from the control of the situation that harmed you.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or excusing the harm done. It also doesn’t necessarily mean making up with a person who has caused harm. Forgiveness brings a kind of peace that allows you to focus on yourself and helps you go on with life.

Without forgiveness you will not depart from anger. It involves an intentional decision to willfully put aside feelings of resentment and anger towards someone or something that has committed a wrong. Forgiveness is not accepting what happened, it is just letting it move on so you cease with angry and lessen that act’s grip.

Psychologists generally define forgiveness as a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness.

The 18th century English poet, Alexander Pope, gave us, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” But finding a way to forgive without giving up our principles is often no easy task.

Forgiveness is a complex concept and embodies three different things, each applying to different situations and provides different results. The three types of forgiveness are: exoneration, forbearance and release.

Exoneration is wiping the slate entirely clean and restoring a relationship to the full state of innocence that it had before the harmful action took place. There are situations in which exoneration applies. For instance, when the harmful action was a genuine accident for which no fault can be assigned.

Another situation for exoneration is when the person who hurt you is truly sorry. When they take full responsibility, without excuses, for what they did and ask forgiveness. In this setting you find confidence that they will not knowingly repeat their transgression in the future.

In these circumstances you accept their apology and offer them the complete forgiveness of exoneration. It will clear the air, but to not offer forgiveness in these circumstances could be harmful to your own well-being.

The second type of forgiveness is forbearance. Forbearance applies when the offender makes a partial apology and mingles their expression of sorrow with blame that you somehow caused them to behave badly. An apology is offered but it’s bogus and unauthentic.

While you should always reflect on whether there was a provocation on your part, you should exercise forbearance, if the relationship matters to you. You must discontinue dwelling on the particular offense and remember to forgive but not forget. By using forbearance you are able to maintain the ties with the people who are not perfect, but are still important to you.

The third type of forgiveness is release. Release does not exonerate the offender. Nor does it require forbearance. It doesn’t even demand that you continue the relationship. However it does ask that instead of continuing to define much of your life in terms of the hurt done, you release your bad feelings and your preoccupation with the negative things that have happened.

Release does something that is critically important: it allows you to let go of the burden that is eating away at your chance of happiness. If you do not release the pain and anger and move past dwelling on old wounds and betrayals, you will be allowing the ones who hurt you to live in your mind. Here forever, you will relive the persecution that the original incident started.

Release liberates you from the oppression of living in a traumatic past when the other forms of forgiveness, exoneration and forbearance, are not possible. To forgive may be divine, but when we understand its dimensions we find that it is within our ability to do it.

Complete forgiveness is a three-step procedure that when consciously implemented will achieve the right result for you, the forgiver. Forgive yourself and don't blame yourself any longer. Forgive the other person who doesn’t even need to be present or aware of your forgiveness. The final step is to forgive the situation. Let whatever happened go, to be part of the past and no longer in the moment.

The Eastern concept of forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past and to move on. It’s a way to end suffering and to bring back dignity and harmony into your life. The Dalai Lama advocates that all major religious traditions carry basically the same message. The important thing is that love, compassion and forgiveness is part of our daily lives.

With the knowledge gained from time spent, it’s not about trying to understand more. It’s not about losing empathy and not caring. It’s more about needing to know progressively less about the unimportance of what so many deem important. You don’t always need to have a point, change a mind, have the last word or give your side of the story. You are comfortable with what you’ve gained and not mentally or emotionally roused into disorder about the other sides of anything. 

“When a deep injury is done to us, we never heal until we forgive.” - Nelson Mandela. 

- dbA

You can find more of the unfiltered insight and the Art of Dan Abernathy at www.contributechaos.com.