Unforgiveness in my opinion is a weapon of the enemy that can hinder healing, open doors, and cause us to suffer unnecessarily, yet we have all carried it with us like a familiar security blanket because we were never going to let anything like that happen again.
I’ve heard many different opinions on how and when to ask a survivor to forgive those who hurt them. Some say you cannot forgive until you have connected with the pain and memory of what was done to you. Some say it’s simply an act of your will; a decision you make to let go of your right to retaliate or get even. Others say you just have to do it because the Bible says so, then there is the opposite belief that a survivor should not have to forgive at all.
I think there is some truth to all of those things, but for me there wasn’t just one cut and dry answer that I could land on. None of them painted enough of a picture for me to think forgiveness was warranted.
I believe you do need to get in touch with what you are forgiving someone for so that you can release it and let it process out of your body. For me, that reasoning alone didn’t work because I was too disconnected from the emotions and that part of myself. I could tell you every detail of the situation without the slightest reaction to it in my conscious awareness. The pain was being held by another part that I was not connected to, so it wasn’t that difficult to say I forgive them. We can only do what we can do, so I chose to forgive to the best of my ability. I started asking Yeshua to let me connect with the part of myself that held that pain so that she can release it and let it go.
Forgiveness came in stages for me. I had to start out with it just being an act of my will to forgive because logically I did not want anything keeping me in bondage. I had to trust the people trying to help when they said that forgiving them would help me close the door to the enemy in that area. When the memory became clearer and I started feeling the emotions connected to it I had to ask myself if I was still willing to choose forgiveness. I do think it helped me that I had the mindset that I wanted to forgive before I felt the horror of the emotions connected to it.
The idea that it’s simply an act of your will; a decision you make to let go of your right to retaliate or get even wasn’t enough for me either. I needed to understand the rest of the story. I needed to know that Yahweh was my vindicator and that He would hold them accountable and work it out in ways that was much better than anything I could do. I needed to understand and accept that He works all things together for good and sometimes that looks different than what I think it needs to look. I’ve seen Him give people a chance to repent and when they didn’t, they ended up with way bigger consequences than anything I would have accomplished by taking matters into my own hands.
Telling me I had to forgive because the Bible said that I wouldn’t be forgiven unless I forgave was the hardest and most frustrating thing I was told as far as forgiving my abusers. I can’t count the number of times that people said that to me, but they never told me anything else. They never validated my pain or tried to understand my circumstances. They never took the time to have a conversation with me about what unforgiveness does to my body or how it leads to anxiety, unresolved anger, sleeplessness, or how it gets heavier the longer I rehearse what they did to me in my mind. Nobody told me that it builds walls around my heart and makes it difficult to trust people, make friends, or trust God in other areas of my life. Nobody explained how Yahweh sees the bigger picture and has my best interest at heart or that we are all given free will and we all have the same right to have our sins forgiven. In early healing, we don’t understand our need for forgiveness of the things that we have participated in that hurt others because the things we did are still behind amnesic walls. A lot of survivors won’t remember until later in their healing that they were both the abused and the abuser because that is what the occult does.
At the end of the day, forgiveness is a choice, an act of our will, and we will have to make that choice again and again as we move through the layers of what was done to us and what we did to others in the process of trying to stay alive. It’s a process, and it’s okay that our feelings do not always match our decisions. We can still take a step forward and continue to work with our parts as they reveal their story. We have the opportunity to give them the whole bigger picture of what forgiveness does for us and the consequences of holding onto unforgiveness.
UNFORGIVENESS AND HOW IT CAN HOLD US IN CHAINS OF BONDAGE pdf: