With many of us, there is usually someone who has hurt us whether intention-ally or not. Often the resentment will build up inside us, doing no more than making us ill and more bitter. In fact, many wars and forms of hatred have been started through the inability to forgive. A good way of dealing with this is to try to put ourselves in the position of the person who hurt you and trying to understand their reasons for what they did. Many hurtful actions are a result of people not being particularly sensitive or misunderstandings. In which case, it helps the hurt to understand that this is the case and try to forgive the person so that you can carry on with your life. Forgiving doesn’t mean you have to continue to be friends with someone who has hurt you; if they’re continually insensitive and hurt your feelings, it would probably be better if you knew them from a distance. However, by forgiving them, their actions, or your memory of their actions, won’t continue to hurt you any longer.
Sadly, there are those of us who have suffered much more serious forms of hurt where the hurt was very intentional. These can also be forgiven, not for the sake of the perpetrator, but for your own piece of mind. You may have suffered in the past because of what one person did to you and you had no or little control over this situation. However, you do have control over whether this will continue to affect your life. By forgiving, you can let go of the pain and move on.
Whether you have trouble forgiving yourself for a mistake, or someone else, you can use the experience so that you can help others going through some-thing similar. This helps to alleviate the pain as you know it wasn’t completely in vain. If you’ve made a mistake and have trouble forgiving yourself for it, think about how you could possibly atone this mistake. Everyone makes mistakes and deserves forgiveness and atonement is a positive way to help you forgive yourself, which can be one of the hardest forms of forgiveness.