Forgiveness is a tough thing to do but very rewarding once achieved!

I know that it can be really tough to forgive someone especially if you believe the harm is irreparable. I have had so many instances in my life where I just struggled with forgiveness and really let my anger/sadness control me and my decisions. I believed that the people who hurt me did not deserve my forgiveness. There are a few people right now in my life that I have forgiven who I have been told by some, don't deserve to be forgiven. The key here is that forgiveness was not for them but for me and my healing. Once I made it through the forgiveness process, I really felt light and free. Everyone deserves to feel this freedom and weight lifted off their shoulders. I want to offer some tips on how I achieved this freedom, and hope my insights will be helpful to you. Remember the goal is to heal yourself and not worry about the other person.

Learn as much as possible about the person that you need to forgive.

The first key I have found to begin the healing and forgiveness process was learning about the person who "did me wrong". I discovered this quite by accident. My father was a particularly abusive man, physically and mentally. He was abusive to my mother, my siblings and me. I was afraid of him most of my life. When I was a teenager, my parents got divorced and we moved from Connecticut to Utah. My dad remarried and moved to California. He would always ask us to visit him for Christmas. I refused to ever go. I think that my siblings all spent at least one Christmas with him but I absolutely refused to go. He did not deserve to have my time and attention. Also, I believed that I would be betraying my mother if I did and she with through hell with my dad.

As the years passed, I began to learn about my dad. I learned from my grandmother briefly about his childhood in Australia and how he suffered great abuse at his caregivers. My grandfather left my grandmother for another woman during WWII. She was left to care for my father and my aunt with no job. Her family would not be much help other than taking the children and passing them from one relative to the next while my grandmother looked for work. Several of these family members would beat my father and at 5 and 6 years old give him extreme responsibilities on a sheep ranch that would have been tough for an older child. He watched as his sister, while not being treated well herself, was treated better than he was.

My grandmother met and married the man that we all called Grandpa. I learned from my aunt that Grandpa was very physically abusive to my father. They also lived in the rough section of Hartford, Connecticut where there were tough people who were less than kind. My father really had a rough go as a kid and a teenager which shaped the man he became.

Also, once my father married my mother, my mother's father, who was a very controlling man, made things very difficult in the marriage. This added to the frustration my father felt and helped contribute to his anger coming out on the family. I won't go into all of the details here but learning about my father's background did teach me empathy for him. I didn't go about learning about his life in order to forgive him, it was a happy coincidence. Over the time of learning about him, I realized that my anger was dissipating and now, I have no anger towards him at all. He is just a person who had struggles and didn't know how to overcome them. He had no real support system to help him growing up and his generation was one that the man needed to be in control. He himself was a victim of his circumstances.

Recognize that the person who needs forgiveness is not going to change.

"Forgiveness is designed to set you free. When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is 'I know what you did is not okay, but I recognize that you are more than that. I don't want to hold us captive to this thing anymore. I can heal myself, and I don't need anything from you.'" Sarah Montana (TEDx Talk)

If you are waiting for someone to change in order to forgive them, you will be waiting a very long time. We cannot change other people, all we can do is to change our reactions and behaviors. The key to forgiveness is to focus on yourself. Once you have learned everything you can about the other person and hopefully have learned some empathy, it is time to focus on yourself. We all make mistakes and we also need to forgive ourselves. Oftentimes, we project our own insecurities with mistakes that we have made onto other people. How can we forgive others if we can't even forgive ourselves? This is the hardest thing to do. Forgiving oneself is much more challenging. This is the part that I am working on now. If other's can forgive me for mistakes, I should be able to forgive myself. I oftentimes, mentally beat myself up for mistakes that I made with my children as I raised them. I constantly am overcome with sadness and many times will tell my children how sorry I am for not being a better mother. They always tell me that they are not angry with me. They understand that I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time.

We can't change the past. All we can do is learn from it to make different choices in the future.

"Forgiveness is not pretending that the wrong did not occur. It is letting go of the past pain that could seep into tomorrow and affect one's entire well being." Lynette Comma, "Oprah's Insider"

When we hold onto anger and sadness resulting from someone's actions toward us, we are giving them power over us. We are allowing that person to control our feelings and mental health. We can find ourselves depressed and possibly take out our frustrations on loved ones.

There is no way to change the past. What the person did was hurtful and caused pain but that person can't change the past either. Most likely they are mentally beating themselves up or they may not even realize that they have caused pain or it could be they don't seem to care. We don't know what is going on in another's minds or hearts. We can't control them at all. All we can do is work on ourselves.

Learning how we can avoid holding onto anger in the future is very important. Why did we feel anger and hurt? What purpose is it serving to hold onto it?

It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

Maya Angelou

This statement by Maya Angelou is so true. Forgiveness is a gift you can give yourself. Once I forgave my father, I had such a tremendous sense of peace in my heart and soul. I still have others to forgive including myself, but knowing it can be done is a great start. If I can forgive the person who hurt me the most, I can forgive myself and others. This is a long process and one that is well worth the time spent. My hope is that if anyone who is reading this and bears the burden of carrying around anger and sadness, that person will work on forgiveness and free themselves of the weight holding them back from a life of a lighter heart and soul.