Do you find it hard to forgive? You aren’t alone. Many people feel the same way, and some psychologists even say our brains are hard-wired not to forgive as a way to protect ourselves from perceived danger. Yet, even if this is true in the short term, several studies have shown that long-term effects of being unable to forgive could be harmful to our emotional and physical health.

For 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion’s January theme of Forgiveness, several people wrote about how hard they find it to forgive specific people in their lives.

Others wrote about how they’d found ways to forgive the “unforgivable.”

Does this mean that some people are just more forgiving? (And, sneaky thought – does it mean some people are better?)

Let’s answer that sneaky thought first.

NO.

If you find it hard to forgive, you are not a bad person, a lesser person or anything else. You’re just a person who thinks they find it hard to forgive. And even that might not even be as true as you think!

What if those psychologists are right and we are all hard-wired not to forgive? Wouldn’t cats, dogs or polar bears also be as hard-wired to protect themselves as we are? Yet after an argument, animals tend to shake themselves and release tension. Eckhart Tolle talks about how if two ducks have a fight, they flap their wings and then swim away as if nothing has happened. He says that if ducks had human minds, their thinking would go something like this:

“I can’t believe what he just did. He came within five inches of me. He has no consideration for my private space. He thinks he owns this pond.”

And they would keep going over things in their minds, feeling the original hurt all over again.

So what if it’s not so much that we are hard-wired for resentment, but that we watched and learned from the generations before us? Our ability to think and to use language is a wonderful gift if we use it to advantage – and it is also what causes much of our suffering.

How do we unlearn the lessons handed down through centuries?

How Identity Affects Us

Before we go any further, let’s talk a little about identity. We’re all ever-so-slightly obsessed by it. Even if we aren’t teenagers posting selfies on Instagram every five minutes, we still consider our identity a hundred (thousand) times a day.

We say things like, “It’s just not me.” “I could never do that.” “I’m a tidy person/messy person/ditzy/organised.” “I don’t like carrots/ cheese/chocolate.” (Actually, no, nobody says, “I don’t like chocolate,” – do they?)

But you get the picture, we form beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs become our identities and we cling to them. We look for evidence that they are true, even when they cause us suffering.

Let’s imagine that when you were six that your little sister stole your favourite toy and then hit you when you tried to take it back. You were mad.

Someone (most likely a parent) told you to forgive her because she was only little.

You still felt mad. Your parent repeated that she was only little, it was no big deal, and you should to be a big girl (or boy.)

Ever since then, you’ve been noticing times you find it hard to forgive people, and wishing you didn’t feel that way.

This is the way we form negative beliefs about ourselves. It’s not New Age woohoo to say that we get what we focus on – several years ago my daughters liked to play a game of counting cars when we were out walking. One day, I asked them to count red ones, so they did. Then we switched to white. At least, they did. But when they’d finished counting white cars, I asked how many red ones had gone past. “Two,” they said. “Three.”

The true number was eleven. (And of course, since I’d been secretly counting red cars, I had no idea how many white ones had gone by.)

If we persistently look out for times we didn’t manage to forgive, or if we ruminate on the one person (or thing) that we still feel resentful towards, then we miss all times we do forgive and we come to believe that we aren’t forgiving by nature.

Forgiveness is in our nature

In the article, Forgiving Others, Joshua O’Brien says:

To a greater or lesser degree, we all practice forgiveness every day. We forgave the person who brought too many items to the express check-out lane. We forgave the person who crossed in front of our car in the parking lot.

In other words, all day long, we are forgiving people, without even realising it. It’s time to give ourselves credit for that. I forgave my cat for waking me up early this morning, I forgave the wind for blowing, I forgave one of my teens for snapping at me. I forgave the person on this blog theme’s support forum when their answer to my question didn’t help a bit. I then checked through the forum and found the answer I needed. I even forgave myself for identifying as “useless at techie stuff.”

Yes, these are all tiny things, but the point is we forgive far more often than we think we do. Again this is where identity comes in. It’s far easier to make a leap from small acts of forgiveness to bigger ones than it is to start from believing you don’t forgive and then try to force yourself to do it.

So start to pay attention to when you do forgive. What have you forgiven other people or yourself for today? Take a quick scan through your day, and you’ll soon notice a few things. And then try this quiz to see how forgiving you are. You might be surprised.

Of course, there are other reasons besides identity why forgiving can feel hard. In The Difficult and Compelling Art of Forgiving Robert Caldwell says:

Afraid to face ourselves as we are, we project our unacceptable parts onto others, thus creating a separation between them and us–and between our darker and lighter side.

We don’t want to forgive because we don’t want to face the aspects of ourselves that we are ashamed of. We believe to do so would be unbearable, and because we avoid facing these qualities in ourselves, we also want to avoid them in others. I used to feel ashamed of competitive feelings, and believed jealousy was wrong. That meant I didn’t speak up for myself as well as I could have done; it also meant that I disliked anyone who was openly competitive, especially if their competitiveness was directed towards me or my family. Since I started to allow jealousy, and occasionally even to enjoy it, I feel it far less often and forgive it more easily in others.

“I’m better than you are!”

Another reason we resist letting go because we think that means what the other person did was okay. Robert Caldwell says that in a world where it is sometimes difficult to know what is right or wrong, feeling resentment gives us a sense of certainty. He also says there’s another pay-off. We hold onto resentment because, in the short term at least, it feels satisfying. We can become:

addicted to the “drug-like high,” the adrenaline rush of self-pity, rage, and revenge that can be called forth, again and again, to distract us from our feelings of hurt.

But living with a constant adrenaline rush is exhausting and, as with any drug, there is a hangover, and with that hangover comes remorse. Put simply – it feels shitty to keep on holding resentment. Whether or not the other person knows it, we do. Whether or not the other person suffers, we do.

Another form of confusion that leads to lack of forgiveness is confusion about what forgiveness means. If we believe it means we say it’s okay for someone to hurt us, then of course it’s going to be hard. Instead it helps to think of forgiveness as letting go of the past, or of past mistakes. You might let go of resentment towards a person who hit you, and never see them again. If they come into your mind, the old feelings aren’t stirred up. You are free.

Another common misconception is that forgiveness needs to happen straight away, but as Martin Luther King Jr said,

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

We don’t forgive once and then that’s it. Life gives us repeated opportunities to practice the art! Forgiveness is also a process. Often it begins with anger. During research for an article I wrote on the Benefits of Forgiveness, I read about a man who’d forgiven someone who murdered his son. Before that happened, he was filled with rage for a year. Nelson Mandela was also at first angry with the people who incarcerated him. Mandela chose to forgive in order to create the society he wanted to see.

In their posts for 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion both Kristi Campbell and Michelle Grewe write about how not forgiving would have meant they gave in – to carrying pain, and to behaviour they don’t enjoy. This self-empathy, this recognition of our own need for harmony, is essential to forgiveness.

So too is recognising our own hurt, and only once we’ve done that are we able to forgive. As a teenager, I was attacked and held hostage. I tried to forgive the attacker, right from the start, but I forgot about forgiving myself. I felt ashamed of my own naivety for not realising the danger I was in, and so I blamed myself. Until I forgave my younger self, hearing a song the attacker played just before he turned on me used to be unbearable. Now, I can hear it and feel no fear. All the while I held onto resentment towards myself, I secretly also held onto it towards him. On the surface, I had forgiven, yet when I heard he’d done something similar again I felt a strange satisfaction. This isn’t surprising really – it let me off the hook a little, meant it wasn’t just some terrible flaw in me that led to the attack. Forgiving myself means I am free to want the best for him.

Who forgave you?

Finally, research suggests that it’s easier to forgive if we have first experienced being forgiven. So perhaps it’s also a good idea to check who forgave you? My cat forgave me today for grumping at her when I got up to feed her. My teen forgave me for reminding her to hurry or she’d be late. The person on the support forum forgave me for not understanding and explained again. As for the wind – it stopped blowing. Make of that what you will…