When we choose the high, hard road of forgiveness, forgiving those who wounded us, forgiving ourselves, and even releasing the regret of poor choices we wish we could undo, we are not excusing the past. We are refusing to let the past keep wounding our future.
Sometimes forgiveness feels unfair and that we are letting people off the hook. But forgiving others is about saving our own life.
I didn’t want to forgive my father. His addiction felt like a choice. It felt like he chose it over me.
But God gave me eyes to see the wounded man behind the addiction. I began to understand that his substance abuse was rooted in trauma he never knew how to heal.
Empathy entered my heart. Forgiveness followed. It was hard. It hurt.
But, when I forgave my father, I wasn’t just releasing him. I was releasing myself. I was set free from vengeance, free from carrying his wounds as my own and free to love myself and others with a heart no longer chained to the past.
Living in unforgiveness is like living in a closed room while inhaling poisonous carbon monoxide. Unforgiveness wrecks our body, mind and relationships.
Living amid ongoing grievance and resentment over past hurts is like taking the very knife used to stab you with and turning it on yourself.
Forgiveness is how you stop bleeding and start the healing.
The plague of unforgiveness
Look every direction in modern society, and you’ll see signs of unforgiveness metastasizing like a virulent illness every bit as dangerous spiritually as anything else that could hijack our lives.
The symptoms are easy to spot: grievance, resentment, hateful words, vindictive takedowns.
When past hurts go unhealed and unforgiven, they become barriers to intimacy and trust with God, yourself and others. Just like plaque buildup can block the heart and cause a heart attack, bitterness and resentment block us from truly letting people or God in.
Early in my marriage, I found myself pulling away from emotional intimacy with my wife, not because she hurt me but because others had. I hadn’t forgiven the people who betrayed me when I was younger, so I projected that hurt onto her.
I kept waiting for rejection that never came. And in doing so, I missed out on the fullness of her love.
Unforgiveness tells us, “They’ll hurt you like the others did.” So, we pull away. We build emotional walls. In trying to protect ourselves from pain, we also block ourselves from love.
This can even create distance between you and God. A heart that struggles to trust other people to enter one’s life naturally struggles to let God in too.
In every relationship, forgiveness can be key in opening the door to healing and relational intimacy.
Reclaiming your life from revenge
By the way, when you forgive, you’re not validating what someone else did. You’re taking a stand: “I can’t let what you did destroy me anymore.”
Forgiveness is not weakness. It’s power. When you forgive, from a Christian theological perspective, you reflect the heart of God, who forgave you through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross.
When you forgive, you reclaim your life — and break the cycle of revenge.
When Jesus commands his followers to forgive, it’s not to burden us. It’s to set us free from revenge and anger.
The biology of bitterness
Science agrees that the cost of unforgiveness is too high. Unforgiveness hijacks your nervous system and devastates your mental, emotional and physical health.
When you ruminate on what someone did to wound you, your brain reactivates that pain as if it’s happening all over again. That triggers your fight-or-flight response — prompting your body to flood with the stress hormone, cortisol.
This leads to chronic anxiety, poor sleeping habits and emotional burnout — especially when we replay the hurtful experience over and over.
Ruminating on how someone hurt you will only spiral you deeper into sadness, bitterness and eventually, depression.
Constantly replaying what wounded you is like picking at a scab over and over. The wound never gets a chance to heal. Instead of moving forward, you stay stuck in the pain.
Unforgiveness doesn’t just weigh on your heart. As you can see, it wears down your brain and body. The constant stress can even damage your hippocampus, the part of your brain that helps you remember, learn and stay emotionally balanced.
Research also shows that unforgiveness is connected to: high blood pressure, weakened immune system, heart disease, chronic pain and increased inflammation, which is a root cause of many diseases.
All this explains why it’s increasingly understood how forgiveness is medicine. Sometimes medicine tastes awful, but the results are for your good.
As reflected here, science affirms what scripture has always said: Forgiveness is holistically good for you. A 2001 study of more than 1,400 Americans found that those who practiced forgiveness experienced better physical and mental health.
Another study revealed that people with high levels of forgiveness had lower levels of stress and fewer mental health symptoms across their lives.
Forgiveness is oxygen for the heart. But none of this means forgetting the hell someone unleashed on you or that you unleashed on yourself.
It means releasing an active engagement with that ugliness so healing can begin. When we choose to forgive, we choose to move toward emotional and mental restoration. Along with other positive choices, that courageous act can move us out of merely surviving and into thriving.
Clearing the spiritual arteries
Please take this seriously. Unforgiveness is like a spiritual plague. It clogs the spiritual arteries of your heart and keeps love from flowing freely.
Unforgiveness also distorts your vision — becoming the lens through which you see everyone.
Is there someone or something from your past that you haven’t been able to let go of resentment about?
It’s time.... Time for you to discover life on the other side.