“Forgiveness is the ability to make peace with the word no.” Dr. Fred Luskin.
There is an elemental question inside all of unforgiveness and it is: “I didn’t get something I wanted! I got the word “no”. (Ie. “I wanted someone to tell the truth, they didn’t, I got no”, “I wanted a partner to stay faithful to me, he wasn’t, I got no”, “I wanted a wife that would always talk nice to me, she doesn’t, I got no”).
According to Dr. Fred Luskin, It is important to understand the harm in objecting to the way life IS and want to substitute the way I WANT it to be and then getting upset when that substitution doesn’t take.
The essence of forgiveness is the ability to be resilient when things don’t go the way you want them to! That can be in memory, in a current relationship, in a past relationship, it can be in a situation, it can be repetitive, it can be once, it can be anything that doesn’t go the way you wanted it to go.
Unforgiveness creates resentment because something is different than the picture in my mind of how life SHOULD be. If I have someone treat me differently than I think I should be treated then I got “no” to what I wanted. And the essence of forgiveness is being able to, after grieving, be at peace with NO. Be at peace with the fact that we can’t always make things the way we want them to be and be able to forgive and move forward in life without prejudice.
Can I forgive whatever it was that caused me No? Can I forgive my unskillful responses that may have intensified the resentment or made it last too long?
How are you at forgiving the “no’s” in your life? I have to work on this daily.
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