Love and Forgiveness

Excerpt from my book "Healing Secrets":

The first step in truly loving yourself is to become familiar with positive affirmations. There is power in intently looking into your eyes in a mirror and saying “I love you… You mean a lot to me… etc.” So often, we do just the opposite. If a person attempts to give himself positive affirmations continuously for two weeks, that person will notice a drastic change in the way he perceives himself and his environment.

When a lawyer asked Jesus, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” he answered, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matt. 22:36–39.) Notice that Jesus said you are to love your neighbor as yourself. God wants you to love yourself just as much as he wants you to love others. Dr. Clark Swain stated, “If you truly love yourself, you will remember that you are a physical, mental, and spiritual being. Loving yourself as God wants you to means that you use wisdom in protecting your life and conserving your health.”

Loving yourself also means to be grateful for yourself and your abilities, and to be grateful to God. It has been shown in research that attitude of gratitude can significantly increase a lasting sense of well-being. In an experimental comparison, those who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). Also, it has been shown that a related benefit of the attitude of gratitude was observed in the realm of personal goal attainment: Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions. Moreover, daily gratitude interventions (self-guided exercises) with young adults resulted in higher reported levels of the positive states of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy compared to a focus on hassles or a downward social comparison (ways in which participants thought they were better off than others). There was no difference in levels of unpleasant emotions reported in the three groups. It was also found by Drs. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough that in a sample of adults with neuromuscular disease, a 21-day gratitude intervention resulted in greater amounts of high-energy positive moods, a greater sense of feeling connected to others, more optimistic ratings of one’s life, and better sleep duration and sleep quality, relative to a control group.

Forgiveness of self and others

This section is a little longer than the former, because this concept is essential to healing. There are two principles all people need to learn to overcome the shadow identity. These are repenting and forgiving. Repenting is essential, because this action leads to an understanding that we make mistakes, we are not perfect, and that we are “okay.” When we do something wrong, say sorry and make restitution. Asking God for forgiveness is liberating and evokes healthy shame and guilt, which as John Bradshaw states “safeguards the soul” because we will conceptualize that we have limits and boundaries, and truly we are good people who perform badly at times. Again, it is “okay,” we must not be so hard on ourselves. The danger of the shadow identity is that an individual can become dichotomous in thought, action and belief. On one extreme a person may need to be “perfect,” achieving extremely in everything. They also are compelled to show little-to-no emotions, because this is weakness. These people “have to” and “have no choice” in their need to achieve. On the other side of the spectrum of the shadow identity, an individual sees himself as a “no-good sinner” not worthy of “redemption.” Both sides of the spectrum are toxic and can lead to personal destruction.

The Greek word for which the English term “repentance” was derived denotes a change of mind, or in effect, a fresh view about God (Bible Dictionary, p. 760). This idea is truly at odds with the notions of punishment and pain, with which many people associate the term of repentance.


Forgiveness of ourselves is important and forgiveness of others is essential for our healing. Anyone who has ever been victimized—and that includes survivors of crime, accidents, childhood abuse, political imprisonment, warfare, and so on—must decide whether or not to forgive those who made the violation, even if that person is not repentant. There can be no way around this choice: either you decide to forgive the person who hurt you, or you hold on to bitterness and anger until it consumes you. Holding on to bitterness and anger can perpetuate further bitterness and anger. One example I witnessed was an individual who had been molested by a grandfather, who had passed away without ever acknowledging his wrongdoing. The survivor’s anger and desire for revenge became an obsession. She so focused on the crime that she completely missed the opportunity she had been given to learn about real love, forgiveness and letting go. In its place, she seemed to believe that hatred would satisfy her thirst for vengeance and would somehow bring healing. As a result, this individual repeated over and over, “I’ll never forgive.” One of my favorite examples to use with children and adults of a character who didn’t forgive was that of Darth Vader. He was so preoccupied with those who trespassed against him that his hatred and revenge turned him literally into a machine. What a powerful archetype Darth Vader is of vengeance.

To forgive can be a problem for some to conceptualize because it can be a concept that is obscure, especially to our Western perspective, simply because we have been bombarded by the ideas of “getting even” and “mercy is for the weak.” And many times, the concept of forgiveness gets confused with the concept of reconciliation, which is related to forgiveness. Tangentially, reconciliation and restitution are even more closely related than forgiveness and reconciliation, although all three terms are orbital. Restitution “denotes a return of something once present, but has been taken away or lost.” (Bible Dictionary. P. 761) Reconciliation comes from the Latin words re-, meaning “again,” and conciliare, which means “to bring together.”

Again, the difficulty surrounding forgiveness is an understanding of the difference between reconciliation and forgiveness. And in many instances persons who have wronged another do not “own up” to their mistakes, especially when pride is involved, thus restitution does not happen and reconciliation doesn’t take place. And when reconciliation is not present, then what is the victim to do? Most victims don’t realize that forgiveness is a choice on their part, no matter what the victimizer does, or does not, do. Furthermore, if the victimizer seeks reconciliation, that action and healing can only occur if the victim is willing and able to forgive. Forgiveness is always the victim’s, or the survivor’s, decision. Again and in addition, reconciliation is impossible except the victim/survivor is willing and able to forgive and the victimizer apologizes or restores that which has been taken or was lost. Now I have been using the verbs “willing and able” because there is something problematic concerning forgiveness—you can’t fully forgive until you can allow yourself to feel the pain you were caused. And in our Western society, it seems that everyone attempts to avoid pain, or any other emotion for that matter. This is why forgiveness can be tricky. And if we don’t feel that pain, something much more toxic will take its place—anger and revenge! This occurs because a person who does not allow the expression of pain unconsciously builds resentment. This resentment, as it builds, needs to find an outlet. This outlet may be a physical one, such as hypertension or headaches, but usually the outlet is a more psychological one, such as depression or anger (turned outward or inward towards one’s self).

I once worked with a gentleman who, after twenty years of work, was fired because of office politics. He came in to see me because of an addiction to pain pills. He was a very sophisticated individual and saw himself as an enlightened and intellectual individual. In groups, this man would make many wonderful insights into other group members. He revealed one day that he felt he was addicted to anger. Anger began to fill the void that drugs had occupied. He began to say in group, “Those bastards who took away my job… I did nothing wrong, they were intimidated by me and because of their power issues they fired me.” Of course, his former employer made no restitution, so therefore he could “never forgive them,” although at the time of his firing he had said to his wife, “Oh well, it’s not that big of a deal, I’m just going to forget about it.” He had prematurely forgiven his employer, which leads to resentment, which led him to become addicted to pain pills. Psychologically, the concept of “forget” is called “repressed.” And when something is repressed, it hangs around, under the surface, needing expression somehow, physically or emotionally. When pain is repressed, it drags down all the emotions associated with that pain, thus making forgiveness impossible, because on some level you are just “keeping score.” Forgiveness is not the same thing as forgetting. To forgive is simply to stop wishing for revenge or to stop wanting to see the other person suffer in some way. But forgiveness is not blind. Because trust has been violated you cannot just forget what happened or else the same thing might happen again.