As we travel on in my book Opening the Gates of the Heart: A Journey of Healing, we come to forgiveness. I shall talk about how to forgive, a way I discovered that worked on a 40-year resentment against others from my childhood.

Before sobriety, I spent most of my life angry at others for their mistreatment of me as a child. I drank heavily over it, and spent much time blaming them for my misery.

Then, once sober, I was conducting a self-appraisal, and I realized that I had done to my husband and other men in my life the very same thing that another had done to me… called me worthless.

I was appalled, as I realized I had not meant that. I had said it because I had felt worthless about myself. I began to have compassion for the hurt being and mentally sick person I was in the moments that I said that.

Then I realized that if I had felt that about myself, maybe that other person did also. Maybe he called me worthless because he felt that about himself.

My compassion expanded to include him. From that, I was able to forgive and years of resentment began to melt away. For me, it occurred over time, in tiers, or stages.

Holding resentments is the number one thing that keeps us from maintaining our sobriety and finding peace. They keep us blaming others instead of taking responsibility for ourselves. In order to gain forgiveness, I suggest the following:

1. we identify the person(s) against whom we have a resentment
2. we identify the reason why we feel that resentment
3. then, we do a self-appraisal and ferret out times when we may have done the very same thing to others for which we resent the person identified in #1.
4. we are honest about this, and shine the spotlight on our behaviors and own them
5. chances exist that, at one point in life, we may have done the same thing that was done to us
6. we look at ourselves with compassion, recognizing our mental anguish at that time
7. then. we turn our attention to the one we resent and consider that they were feeling mental anguish like we did
8. we see that person(s) as a sick individual at the point in time that they harmed us
9. we extend our compassionto include the object of our resentment
10. in stages, or tiers, we allow for forgiveness to this mentally unbalanced person

In my experience, this is my way of how to forgive. For today, try this exercise and see if it gives you some relief from your resentments. Let us know what happens by leaving a comment, so we can all learn from what you found.

 

Tags: compassion, finding peace, inner peace, peace, self-appraisal, Sober Living, sobriety

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 9:53 am and is filed under Healing Emotional Pain, Inspirational Quotes About Life, Inspirational Sayings, Self Improvement, Sober Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.