Needing Others to Change in Order to Forgive Them
Q. How can I really forgiving someone when they won't change? ~ Lisa H. – Texas
A. This is a challenging piece to move through and I'm grateful you asked this, you are not alone in feeling this way. We don’t forgive someone else to make them feel better, to absolve them of their sins. No one needs another human’s absolution to be clear and considered pure again, thank God. We forgive so that we can get past the pain of our hurts and expand our capacity to love even more. We forgive so that we can let go of staying trapped in the old energy of pain and unhealthy connections to that other person/situation.
Ultimately we have no right to judge anyone, inherently there is good in bad people and bad in good people, myself included. I have also seen people choose not to forgive because they lack the courage to move forward with their life. It is safer to stay in that energetic rut than to allow themselves the freedom to move forward to get past the pain and open themselves to being vulnerable again. It can be scary situation to open yourself to fully trust. Quite frankly, the human experience is riddled with multiple experiences of “getting burned” or “being loved” and perhaps both from the same person. As long as we are not in a full state of enlightenment, we can switch rapidly from a state of love, to blame or hurt easily. We often project how we expect people to behave because that is what is reasonable to us and what we are conditioned to expect. We end up not taking into account that person's training or who they truly are as a person versus our projection of them. We hold onto our pain so that we can hold onto being right. We hold onto the pain because it is less scary than opening ourselves up and allowing another experience in that we cannot control. So how do we really get past forgiving someone when they won’t change – we change. We courageously, wholeheartedly open ourselves and let go of needing to be right, needing to control the actions of another, needing to have to have an apology to move on. We love ourselves so fully that we no longer grasp to any of these and when we truly do, the need to forgive dissolves because when we reach that miraculous state, we see that there was nothing really to forgive in the first place.
