After reading a few books of Augustine's Confessions, I feel like I know what he would say. He talks about the origin of thought, how do we think about thinking? We can witness our own thinking, but how can we think about our thinking? He would say that god creates these thoughts in our mind. He would probably also say that because god forgives us, we can forgive. God gives us the example and we must follow it. If god forgave us, it would be a lot easier to forgive ourselves.
But unfortunately I don't believe in god.
I'm pretty good at forgetting. I can forget about something. But forgiveness is different. It's a deep level of understanding, putting ourselves in someone else's shoes and changing our attitudes towards that person. "She really didn't have to call me terrible names. Why would she do that? Maybe she had a bad day. I don't know." Usually it's easier to forgive one-time things because we know the person who did it isn't usually like that. They didn't mean it. It's especially easy to forgive someone who's sorry. We see that they regret their actions, but then we pity them? Is that forgiveness? Because someone regrets their actions doesn't always make it easier to forgive. Then it depends on the size of the wrong they committed against you.
Is it easier to forgive someone you love? Sometimes it is. I would assume this is because we understand that person more than people less close to us. We also care enough to try to move on from whatever happened. But what if they make you question how much you love them? What if what they did is so great that you're not sure if it's worth it. If you love them it's always worth it. If you truly love someone you can make it work. But you have to work together to make it work. Sometimes with people you love it's even harder to put yourself in their shoes. Sometimes it's too painful to put yourself in their shoes. Sometimes it doesn't matter if you're in their shoes because it's just against your principles.
So is it all a matter of principles? That, depending on the principle challenged, it is easier to forgive. If the principle challenged is one that doesn't have so much sway over your life, it is easy to forgive the person who challenged it. If it is one that dictates a lot of how you live your life, it will be much harder to forgive. That makes sense right?
And if someone who is not close to you challenges a strong principle of yours, it is easy to write them off as just "someone you don't like".
So how do we forgive ourselves? If we don't forgive ourselves, things can get messy. Life seems a lot more stressful, the burdens on our backs get much bigger and heavier, we have a hard time dealing with emotional stress in other ways, and we have a hard time forgiving others. This may be the most difficult one. First of all, if we don't forgive ourselves, it's going to be really hard to just write ourselves off and say "I just don't like myself". We all know that doesn't work. So what if we used the same method that we use to forgive people we love? I suppose putting ourselves in our own shoes is a good method. We put ourselves into context. "Well I did call her all those terrible names, I was having a bad day."
To truly forgive ourselves though, first takes admitting the mistakes we made (which could be a whole other blog, so we won't get into that). If we admit we're wrong, we're no longer in denial, which is something that usually takes forgiveness's place. If we are not in denial about what we did wrong we can face the facts and move forward towards truly forgiving ourselves.
So what does true forgiveness look like? It's not just understanding, it's a lack of bad feelings about an event, and a lack of negative associations with an event. We no longer look back at it and cringe or get nauseous, or get angry or feel hate. We also won't be afraid of that event reoccurring if we've truly forgiven ourselves or someone else. It could reoccur (probably not if we've had to forgive ourselves), but we can trust people again.
So is forgiveness about trust? Relearning to trust people or ourselves? After we admit something wrong happened, and we've understood both sides of the story, we relearn to trust people or ourselves so that when we look back at what happened we see it as the past, completely over, with no lingering negative feelings.
"But it's so difficult!" It's difficult, but don't beat yourself up about it- forgiving is difficult for everyone.
