Forgiving is not forgetting; it is a journey from the mind to the heart

in Reflections9 hours ago (edited)

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Forgiving is not forgetting; it is a journey from the mind to the heart

Hello, friends! It is a pleasure to post again in this community.

This time, I bring you a reflective piece about what I have learned about forgiveness and how, along the way, I have learned to look with more compassion at the people who hurt me.

We often think that healing is a destination we reach and that once we are healed, nothing will hurt us anymore, and yes, that would be ideal. But as we grow in mind and spirit, we stop wanting the world to be the way we want it to be and start letting life be as it is.

At the age of 27, after years of living with shame and guilt, I made the decision to undergo spiritual therapy, which helped me greatly to begin to raise awareness of the importance of forgiving and closing cycles in order to move forward in life.

Spiritual guidance and education made me look beyond my beliefs and gave me the opportunity to undergo psychological therapy and go a little further to see what I was really looking for... I was looking for love and acceptance.

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Understanding and acceptance

Talking about myself in therapy was painful because it meant looking at my wounds without anaesthesia, but with a lot of understanding and compassion.

Looking at where the rejection, guilt and fears came from moved me emotionally and I understood why I kept so much pain inside and why lying was a way of protecting myself from everything I was going through.

Being a victim of bullying throughout my childhood and adolescence left me emotionally and psychologically scarred, leaving me with serious problems of insecurity, anxiety and low self-esteem, battered by the voices of mockery and abuse, which led me to drop out of school.

My sexual orientation was the trigger for all this, and it was initially the problem, but in the end it turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Obviously, there is no single path to healing, nor is there a single method, because some people need a more spiritual process and others a more rational one, but I needed both.

Because in this process it was essential for me to learn to forgive and also to trust.

This was not easy when you grow up with an absent father and a busy mother, but in the end, it was my personal story, and I had to learn to accept it in order to forgive and understand that everyone did what they could with the awareness and understanding they had to live.

Honestly, learning to forgive is neither easy nor quick. It is a journey from the mind to the heart, where we often get stuck in memories and pain.

But in therapy, I began to understand and reflect on why people hurt us, and that is because, in the end, we are all victims of victims, and that was very decisive in my case in raising awareness, because far from justifying it, it is about looking beyond to understand the pain of others and realise why they are like that.

No one apologised to me, but I chose not to carry the pain of others within me, and that was my way of forgiving them.

Being able to live a dignified life after all has been my greatest personal victory because I did not become like them.

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Now I accept myself as I am, and I know that I am full of scars, but they no longer define me; rather, they have taught me where I come from and where I am going.

Thank you very much for reading

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