Why You Should Forgive Your Abusers
There is life after trauma.
It feels impossible, I know. But trust me when I say it is completely possible to forgive your abusers.
The way it happens is by getting deeply in touch with your self and journeying into Self Love.
If that sounds hokey to you, I understand. That’s exactly how it sounded to me too.
The only way you can truly fully forgive your abusers is by loving yourself enough to stop allowing them to continue to hold power over you. Your choice of living in perpetual victimhood because of things that happened in your past only hurts you. No matter how strongly justified you feel in your status as a victim (and you are definitely justified), the only person who suffers is you.
This is why it is crucial to your sanity, wellbeing, and happiness to forgive your abusers.
It isn’t the same as forgiving the abusive acts. It isn’t the same as saying “I forgive you because what you did is ok.” In choosing to forgive someone who hurt you, you are only releasing their power over you. You are not saying that what happened was ok.
Why does this matter?
It matters because when you make the conscious effort to step out from under the cloud of trauma and victimhood, you’re making the choice to take back your power. In taking back your power, you can finally feel whole again. It isn’t like flipping a light switch but it does come in time.
But that very first step of deciding that you will (somehow-someway-someday) forgive your abusers is the most important step you could take. Once you decide that you will eventually forgive your abusers, things begin to click into place behind the scenes. Just keep that thought in your head. Trust the process.
As often as you used to think about the traumas you endured, replace those thoughts and feelings with the new thought of “I am going to forgive my abusers so I can take back my power.”
Keep in mind that forgiving your abusers does not need to involve facing them, speaking to them, or contacting them in any way.
Forgiving them is an internal process 100% personal to you, for you. It doesn’t mean you let them know you’ve forgiven them, or let them back into your life, or that any of their future behaviors are acceptable (if they are still in your life). Forgiving them does not mean you are suddenly ok with what happened to you, or that you aren’t still affected by the traumas you suffered.
Forgiving is only about You
Forgiving is about returning your personal power back solidly and completely into your hands and out of theirs.
As long as you keep yourself identified with and entangled in your trauma, you will continue to suffer. Even worse, you allow yourself to remain under their power.
That is why you must forgive them.
Shed the identity of being a victim, like taking off an old tattered coat and leaving it on the ground as you walk away.
You deserve a life that is Yours, not one that is marred by things someone else did to you. You don’t have to stay that victim label forever. You get to choose whether you want to define yourself by your traumas, or if you want to live instead defined by your amazing qualities as a human being. You get to say “Yes, I endured horrible things and I choose to be more than my traumas. I am more than my traumas.”
You are most than your traumas
Because you are more than your traumas. Your abusers don’t deserve the continued hold over your quality of Life and Self.
What happened to you was not ok. It was unjust and wrong. You did not do anything wrong to deserve what happened to you.
And there is nothing wrong with you because of what happened to you.
You are still worthy of being here in this world. You are worthy of being loved. You are important and you need to be here in this world because no one else is like you.
The first step to taking back your life is to decide you are going to forgive them. Just decide to do it. Don’t put a timeline on it. Don’t worry about how you will be able to come to feel that forgiveness. Don’t worry about doing anything but just deciding that you will, someday, forgive them.
Then practicing loving yourself. Start small. Maybe today just say one kind thing about yourself. Or take a 10-minute walk if you don’t normally exercise your body. Or try taking a couple of deep breaths to calm your anxious mind. Or just look in the mirror and smile at yourself for 3 seconds and don’t judge anything that you see. Or close your eyes and say “Thank you” to yourself for making the decision to do something important for your own wellbeing.
Just try little things at first and build up from there. Just like forgiveness, Self Love doesn’t come overnight. Self Love is practiced each day within the little microdecisions that you make in your daily life.
Keep reminding yourself of your goal: “I am going to forgive my abusers so I can take back my power.”
Taking back your power means you are stepping into the driver’s seat of your life. You are declaring to yourself that you are more than the sum of the bad things in your past.
Forgiving is about taking a bad situation and choosing to extract a lesson in strength from it, purely for your own benefit. Forgiveness is never about the other person. You can forgive someone and still never allow them back in your life. You can forgive someone without them being aware of it. You can forgive someone and still not like them or care about them. Forgiveness is about you.
Author Matt Khan has a useful way to describe forgiveness. I’m paraphrasing here but his general message from his book “The Universe Always Has a Plan” is this:
When you forgive someone, you are saying “Thank you For Giving me an opportunity to learn…xyz”.
The idea is that there is a lesson in every situation, no matter how strongly we perceive the situation as good or bad. Every lesson is an opportunity for us to gain something beneficial to ourselves. In forgiveness, the benefit can be any number of things.
What forgiving them does for you
For me, I found that forgiving my abusers gave me these lessons:
-inner strength to overcome hardship and to find myself whole and still standing after traumas
-courage to make the decision to step out from under the dark cloud of my victimhood; to identify as something greater than a victim or survivor of trauma
-compassion for myself to know and believe that I deserve more in life than to be marred by someone else’s darkness
-freedom to feel like a whole, worthy, lovable human being
-to know there is nothing wrong with me because of what happened to me
You can forgive your abusers too. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But I can promise it will be worthwhile because it is something you are doing for yourself. You may not believe it today, but it is possible.
Give yourself that gift and make the decision to forgive. You are absolutely, unquestionably worthy of being whole and being loved.
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