FORGIVENESS
4 OCTOBER 2022 (14 MIN READ)
Thinking back to the moments where somebody wronged us, we all secretly love it. Consider the times where you have imagined yourself to be incredibly successful and that person who broke your heart will finally realize what they lost. Or seeing someone who fucked you over become successful, and feeling like all you want to do is overpower them. Even darker, reflect on the never-ending moments where you sat thinking about how much you fucking hate somebody’s guts, as well as blaming them for all your current ailments. As human beings, we all have a tendency to get into these dark patterns of thought. But what exactly is causing them? And why do we unconsciously enjoy taking part in the repeated mental scenarios? On the surface level, it’s our inability to forgive those who have wronged us, and using that as fuel to motivate ourselves to perform. But on a deeper level, it all stems from an inability to forgive ourselves and projecting that inability onto other people, so we can take away the focus from ourselves and not have to think about the moments where we did something that we refuse to forgive ourselves for. I still can’t believe I used to wear Uggs. There are some things you can just never forgive yourself for.
As you can see, to learn to forgive, we first need to learn how to forgive ourselves.
(Of course, it’s not all roses, and sometimes people do seriously disgusting things to others that cause paralyzing trauma. The last section of this article will carefully explore how to handle situations like this in the lens of forgiveness).
FORGIVING YOURSELF
Right now, in this moment, think about a time where you made a mistake that you deeply regret. No, not that time you genuinely thought it would be a fart. Take this seriously! You are probably feeling a great deal of shame and a feeling of distaste towards yourself. Although it is not enjoyable to sit with these emotions, you must use the energy of shame as a compass to how much you need to forgive yourself. In other words, the more shame that comes up, the more you need to forgive yourself, as this restrictive, painful emotion is holding you back in many ways. But how do you actually go about forgiving yourself and moving past this shame? In short, understanding what pain or life experience caused you to make the mistake. For example, we all have those risky texts we sent back in the day to a romantic interest that just bombed. Hello seventeen-year-old self who sent “You up?” texts accompanied by a fire emoji. You can choose to objectively look at the text and realize how much of a cringey dumbass you were, or you can investigate what was going on inside of you to send a message like that. When I was sending cringey texts as a teenager, I needed female approval so badly because I felt so insecure about myself and my abilities. Furthermore, unbeknownst to me at the time, I had severe abandonment issues from my mother growing up, which made me unconsciously search for female love wherever I could get it, to compensate for the trauma.
If you look at the painful history behind an embarrassing moment, such as, in this instance, a deeply insecure teenager with abandonment issues, then you can forgive yourself much easier. Love asks why and hate condemns. Keep asking yourself why and you will continue being able to open your heart and forgive. However, how do you know if you have really forgiven yourself? What’s the metric? In my eyes, you have truly forgiven yourself over a past mistake if you can openly talk about it with no problem. Yes, I peed in your hot tub, grandpa. I am very sorry. You were inside one of the times. I am only being honest. Taking it a step further, if you can have a billboard taken out that states your mistake, then you have officially reached the master level of forgiveness. As you may have noticed, forgiveness entails radical ownership over something that happened. And that’s because once you can genuinely own something you did with an open heart, you have lost the shame that once paralyzed you so deeply. Backing up this claim, people who live in deep shame and regret over something they did will refuse to ever talk about it or own up to it. **Cough cough** everyone who used to send me FarmVille requests on Facebook. Losing this shame that so many of us live with seems so appealing and liberating due to the pain it causes, but if that were the case, then why do so many of us keep holding on to it? Because we are addicted to the stories that come with it, specifically in the lens of using those stories for personal motivation, such as needing to prove that you were never that nerdy kid who got bullied so badly that you must become the most powerful person you can possibly be.
Once you lose those stories, what are you left with?
THE FALSE ALLURE OF THE DARK SIDE
We all have a tendency to turn our moments of shame into an invitation to prove that moment, and the people who caused it, wrong. For example, if the popular guys or girls in high school would make fun of you for a specific reason. I used to be called The Notorious P.I.G. The name is too good for me to even be mad at it. Instead of nurturing the pain we felt from that moment and owning it, as well as loving and owning who we were at that moment in time, we settle for using the dark energy to create a motivational personal story of doing whatever we can to prove those people wrong. This is what can be referred to as your dark side. Personally, I’ve been there.
The girls in my middle school would call me disgusting and the girls at my high school would not give me the time of day romantically. All I wanted to do was prove them wrong. Once I got to a place where I was confident, looked a lot better, and had a much higher reputation romantically, I realized that those people who I felt wronged me really didn’t give a fuck. They might have had a thought along the lines of, “Oh wow, that guy changed for the better.” Also, some definitely thought, “That guy became a complete douchebag.” The gold chain and Yeezys didn’t help. But guess what? It’s one fucking thought and then they forget about me. Now, sitting with this reality, are the years of using their potential reaction as fuel to better yourself really worth it when their reaction is at best a couple of thoughts? God no. The idea of proving those who hurt you wrong may get you to the destination you want to get to, but what’s the point? Because once you get there, everything you were expecting to occur doesn’t happen. As the great David Foster Wallace once said, “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” The people you are trying to prove wrong genuinely couldn't care less if you do. They are only worrying about themselves, as you are too.
So, we spend years in this dark vibration of hate, attempting to not only prove a version of ourselves that we shame wrong, but the people who mistreated us during that time as well. And the feeling of hatred perpetuates because the people we are trying to prove wrong end up not caring, as well as the version of ourselves that we shame is still begging for our love. Put differently, the goal you end up obtaining that you thought would prove everything wrong never does, so you actually end up feeling worse about yourself than when you did when you set the goal, because you lose all the hope you once had of moving beyond this painful feeling. Considering the strategy of using your dark side as motivation only causes pain, what’s the alternative? Cocaine. (I only kid). And is it as effective in terms of leading to external success?
The key in moving away from the dark side as motivation is moving beyond yourself, in the sense of realizing that the work you are being called to provide to the world is purely to help others. In other words, in terms of accomplishing your goals, instead of thinking about yourself and how people may see you as more powerful, shift that to how many lives you could be changing for the better. This process is how we move from darkness to light. Once you start paying attention to the lives you are improving, whether it be offering a service to make someone’s day easier or reading a message that your social media post helped someone move through their pain, I promise it will light a fire under your ass like nothing you have ever experienced before. Maybe not Mexican food, I forgot about that one. And guess what? You’ll feel good throughout the process, as well as when you accomplish your goals.
However, one thing must happen before you can make that shift from darkness to light. You need to forgive yourself for the moments that caused you all that shame. Specifically, the moments that you feel the need to prove to others never happened. I never used to record myself dancing to Katy Perry. Never fucking happened. And finally, the next step is forgiving the people that you feel contributed to those moments of deep shame. Once you forgive them, you stop needing to feel like you have to prove something to them.
LEARNING TO FORGIVE OTHERS
For every person you don’t forgive, they are taking up massive space in your mind rent-free. My asshole ex-landlord still hasn’t forgiven me for breaking a wall. Jokes on him! They dominate a lot of your thoughts, which come with an energy that activates hate in your body. This is a lot for another person to be doing without being anywhere near you physically. Following this logic, whoever you do not forgive and mentally lament on becomes your master, since they own your mind and emotions. You should never hand someone that much power, even if the dark energy motivates you to accomplish your goals. Not only is it unfair to yourself and your personal freedom, but it also removes a piece of your heart, as it gets covered in hatred by your perception of the person. So, how do you move past this mental space and take back your autonomy? You first need to use the steps you learned when figuring out how to forgive yourself and transfer that to the other person.
As explained earlier, to forgive yourself, you have to ask yourself, “why?” Why the fuck did I ever use to say, “YOLO”? It’s not helping, Lucas!! Specifically, in the lens of understanding what pain in your life caused you to make the mistake that you hold so much shame over. The better you get at doing this for yourself, the more you can do it for other people when they emotionally hurt you. To begin with, once you feel that sting from someone else’s actions, allow yourself to process the emotion as best as you can. To do so, attempt to remove the situation that caused it from your mind and just move through the emotion itself, without any of the accompanying mental stories. Now that your body is calmer and you can think rationally, put yourself in the mind of the person who triggered a negative reaction in you. What was their childhood like? What insecurities do they have? How may you threaten their perception of self? What emotions could they be projecting onto you? These are essential questions to ask yourself. And the more you answer them, the more you realize that their actions towards you have almost nothing to do with you. They are just throwing their pain onto you unconsciously, hoping that you will feel the same miserable way they do.
Once you genuinely understand why they did the thing that hurt you, it makes it much easier to forgive them. At this point in the process, I recommend you to break away from the previous kumbaya pieces of advice and become a little ruthless. No way, I finally get to smack that piece of shit! You must get real with yourself and use your discernment to figure out if this person is genuinely someone you want in your life. BORING! This guy never fails to disappoint. People misunderstand forgiveness in the sense of feeling like you need to include the person in your life after forgiving them. Wrong. You can forgive and let go. Let me say that differently actually: you must forgive and let go when the situation calls for it. It’s a different situation when a friend has a shitty day and says something mean, vs. when you have a friend who never has a shitty day and always manages to say something mean. I’d be mad too if I was always constipated… You can cut the former some slack, but the latter needs to get let go of. And you cannot let go with hate. Letting go with hate makes that person your master. It is the single most dangerous recipe for disaster. Thus, you must let go with love. Letting go with love sounds counterintuitive, but I promise you it is not. As the GOAT Tupac once said, “Just because you lost me as a friend doesn’t mean you gained me as an enemy. I’m bigger than that. I still wanna see you eat, just not at my table.”
Understand their pain, pray they can heal it, and let them live their life far away from you, both physically and mentally. That’s the best you can do. But what should we do when someone does something genuinely evil? Where it’s incredibly hard to compassionately figure out why they did the thing they did. How can we forgive something like that? Alright! Now’s the moment where he’s going to tell us to smack a bitch.
FORGIVING EVIL
Personally, in my heart, I believe that no matter how evil something is, room always exists to understand why and forgive. However, many people get flushed and start to throw things at me when I say this, which I understand, so here’s a different strategy that may appeal to you. Mashed potatoes were my favorite one. And that’s mainly because they missed and rocked their grandpa right in the face. In short, you don’t need to forgive the perpetrator of evil to move into a higher vibration, but you can dedicate your life, or part of it, to understanding the system that influenced their action and do your part in changing it. You will get the same energetic result that forgiveness will give you, but done with a different method. In my life, the biggest act of evil that was perpetrated against me/my family was that I believe the doctors in the hospital killed my mother. Other people see the situation differently, but deep down I know this to be true. With my understanding of healing, the treatment they gave her was completely incorrect from the get-go. Because of this negligence, right after she passed away, I felt a deep visceral anger for the doctors. My shadow wanted to go beat the doctors to a pulp. That would’ve been a fire Grey’s Anatomy episode. However, I chose to channel my energy differently and understand why they treated her the way they did. They followed their education, which instructed them how to match symptoms with pharmaceutical medications to fuel a trillion dollar industry that has no interest in healing people, because healed people don’t generate profits. Once I understood this reality, I found it quite easy to forgive the doctors, but I couldn’t exactly forgive the system that hijacked their perceptions of health.
As a way to heal from this pain, and move some of that negative charge in my body, I have dedicated my life to shifting the collective awareness of health into one that is more based on trauma and mental health, so I can do my part in fixing the system that is killing so many on a daily basis. My work is grounded in the philosophy that disease almost always begins with unhealed trauma, which causes stress and unhealthy thinking patterns. We don’t realize enough that the mind is the body. And a broken mind will, without a doubt, cause rampant disease in the ecosystem of the human body. Due to this truth, a focus on healing the mind and the body will follow. However, this healing has to take place as early as possible, as repressed trauma will increase its potential for pain the more it is left in the dark. Sounds like my friend’s son, Joe. He always gets mad when we don’t unlock him from his cage. So, my job is to help people not only become aware of the trauma tucked away in the back corner of their mind, but also learn how to heal from it too. Although I can’t necessarily forgive the American health care system, by doing my part in healing the negative effects caused by it and receiving messages about how I have changed lives, the hatred in my body is slowly alchemizing into love.
To summarize, if an act of evil has ruined your positive perception of life and fueled hatred in your system, you don’t need to forgive the perpetrator, but at least try to understand the broken system that influenced their behavior and dedicate a portion of your life to healing it. By doing so, you turn that visceral hate into powerful love, especially when you see people never having to face the same evil you once did.
