Why People Don’t Forgive

By Roz Jones

We’ve all been hurt by people we love and trust. Too often, we’re told to ‘forgive and forget.’

That’s easier said than done.

Things happen and it becomes more and more difficult to move on. This is either because of a certain pattern forcing us to stay stuck and not let go.

We gathered five reasons why people don’t forgive, and ways you can move forward.

They Don’t Know How to Forgive

Before we can forgive, we have to understand what forgiveness actually is. When you forgive someone, you don’t have to be okay with them as a person, nor do you have to sign off on what they did.

If you wait until you feel that way, you may never forgive the other party at all. What they did will always trigger negative emotions any time you recall.

The alternative is to look at forgiveness as a cancellation of debt. Forgiving someone is finally feeling like no one owes you anything.

You let them out of any obligation towards you, even an apology. It’s just taking a step towards freeing your heart from any responsibilities.

They Find It Hard Letting Go of the Bitterness

If you’re feeling bitter and sad, it can be hard to forgive. You always feel stuck and powerless.

Plus, many times, it’s just easier to deal with the added benefits of having been wronged. We feel sorry for ourselves. Then, we talk and complain, and it makes people listen. That kind of attention can be addictive, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons. It makes us feel important and wanted.

Not only that, but not forgiving can also be because holding onto the bitterness is just simpler. Playing the victim becomes part of who we are. Soon, we lose sight of everything else, even the good things that make us interesting and fun.

One of our favorite quotes by Nelson Mandela is, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

In a nutshell, you’re much more than one bad situation. You’re a beautiful individual deserving of living a fully engaging life.

They Attach Present Losses with the Past

Any time someone abuses our trust, it can trigger past pains. If left unchecked, it can cause a snowball effect of deep, intense emotions. The worst part is when it becomes a pattern that keeps repeating itself whenever we’re hurt.

Forgiving something like that can be extremely difficult. Many times it’s only because what we end up facing is too overwhelming and big, so much so that we don’t even know where to start.

The only way out is to stop recreating those patterns of pain. Let go of the past and separate yourself from the cycle of hurt. Once you do that, you can stop putting yourself in a position of having to forgive people over and over again.

They’re Not Being Honest with Themselves

When we’re hurt, the quickest and safest reaction is to cover it up. Or at least not be honest about the real reason why we’re upset.

Maybe you’re mad at your sister for not calling you back. But you’re actually secretly furious that she said something snarky about the state of your marriage.

So, the first step is to be honest with yourself about what’s really making you angry. Then, letting go and forgiving becomes easier.

They Don’t Want to Be Vulnerable

Feeling mad and angry makes us feel in control and tough. It even acts as an armor to keep the hurt away.

At the same time, not forgiving someone keeps you stuck. It forces you to keep replaying that painful situation in your mind. It leaves you feeling weak, vulnerable, and lacking in self-confidence.

However, there’s power in forgiveness. By letting go of the resentment and pain, you actually have more control than you think.

You no longer feel anxious or threatened every time you see them. As a result, you take away whatever control they have over you.

So, what does that mean? It means that forgiving takes strength and willpower. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The weak don’t forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.”

EXCITING NEWS!!

I am excited and thrilled to share with you my new adventure, “The Caregiver Café Podcast”. This podcast tackles and highlights the daily situations caregivers face with their aging loved ones. We also empower you to navigate the care and challenges of your loved one with relevant topics and through the voices of your peers and their life experiences.

Monday April 4th we launched our first episode, and you can learn all about it at this link.

Visit http://www.rozjonesent.com for more information on addressing issues that caregivers face on a daily basis, and check out my newly-published book!

5 Reasons To Forgive Someone Who Has Wronged You

By Roz Jones

For April, we’re covering spring cleaning – getting your ducks in a row in your physical home, as well as clearing your mental space by practicing forgiveness. We hope you’ll be ready to charge into May with a new spring in your step!

At some point in time, someone will wrong you. It might be big or it might be small. The likelihood of having your feathers ruffled is upped by close quarters and lots of time together, which can make the caregiver/patient relationship sticky.

Whenever the offense happens, I can almost guarantee that you will have a choice to make. Will you choose to forgive them and move on with your life, or will you hold that grudge and those ugly emotions?

Here are five reasons why you should choose to forgive the person who wrongs you.

1. It Helps Your Health

When you forgive someone, you are helping your own health. If you decide to not forgive someone, you end up harboring emotions like anger, frustration, disappointment, and more. They become constant stress on your heart and body but flare up when you think about that person or interact with them. This is not healthy for you.

It is reasonable to hold this resentment for them for a little bit, but at some point, the best thing you can do is to let it go and move on with your life. It’s better for you to forgive.

2. Take the High Road

Forgiving is the high road. It is the more morally correct path. By forgiving, you are being a better person and showing others in your life (and yourself!) that you can take the better route and be successful.

You don’t want to become the person who holds every slight against them close to their heart and never forgives. That is a toxic attitude and one that will not be good for anyone involved. Take the higher road and be the better person. Forgive them.

3. Everyone Makes Mistakes

They made a mistake. It might have been a giant one, but they still messed up. Something that everyone does. You mess up and I mess up. We all have failed and let people down in one way or another at some point in our lives.

Forgiving someone who makes a mistake does not mean that you are forgetting about the mistake or that you are willing to let them do it again. It just means that you won’t carry it on your heart.

4. Forgiving Helps You Move On

It is hard to move on from something if you don’t forgive. Forgiving is moving on. If you never stop blaming Jerry for eating your meatloaf, then you will never be able to move on from it. If you don’t forgive him, every time you see Jerry you will probably become angry because he ate your food.

Maybe every time you see meatloaf you will be reminded of that time. You cannot move on from something if you don’t first forgive. Forgiveness allows for peace. Forgiveness helps take you from the past to enjoy your present. It is a calm to the chaos so that you can move on.

5. Inner Peace and Healing

Forgiving allows for healing. Perhaps healing for both parties, but most importantly it helps you find peace. At its root forgiveness is not about the other person especially when the transgression is egregious. What they did might have been awful, but when you forgive you do it for you.

You might feel like you benefit the least because you were the person harmed initially. This might be true, but you will not benefit at all by not forgiving.

6. Forgiving Others Helps You Forgive Yourself

When you forgive others, it becomes easier to forgive yourself. Grace is contagious. Often when we identify and realize how resentment, anger, and grudges affect us when they are about other people, we can also see how those emotions affect us when they are about things we find difficult to forgive ourselves for. When you forgive other people, it becomes much easier to forgive yourself.

EXCITING NEWS!!

Monday April 4th we launched our first episode, and you can learn all about it at this link.

Visit http://www.rozjonesent.com for more information on addressing issues that caregivers face on a daily basis, and check out my newly-published book!

5 Reasons Why It’s Hard To Forgive

By Roz Jones

This is part of our April series for caregivers on spring cleaning – both physical and mental. Forgiveness or a lack thereof can make up a big part of our lives, so we wanted to make sure we addressed it.

Anything that betrays your trust and love in a person is hard to get over. More so, because the person who probably did that to you was someone close to you. You allowed them to come close and they caught you off guard.

Now, you’re left there with all those terrible memories. You’re hurt, you’re angry, and you’ve vowed to never, ever forgive them!

But the problem is not forgiving them isn’t going to teach them a lesson. It’s not going to rake them over the coals for what they did to you. Nor will it bring you justice or set things right once again. All it’s going to do is keep amassing your bitterness and anger. Pretty soon, it’ll be all you have left.

Nevertheless, forgiveness can’t be done overnight. It’s a process that takes time and a lot of effort. Here are five reasons why it’s so hard to forgive.

You Can’t Open Up About Your True Feelings

Opening up means being vulnerable and exposing raw wounds. So, what’s the alternative? Just stay quiet. Staying hushed up and keeping your emotions bottled up is many people’s go-to reaction.

The problem is that when you don’t open up about your feelings, you make it extremely hard to forgive whoever wronged you. You feel like you’ve been backed into a corner with no way out.

Because when you’re not talking about emotions, they don’t just go away! They’ll never disappear into thin air.

To get closure, you need to get a trusted buddy you can confide in. You can also seek therapy or counseling where you’ll get the support and help you need.

You Can’t Control Your Anger

This is the opposite of the first reason. If you feel you’re not able to forgive because you lack anger management, you’re not alone.

A lot of people are gripped by blinding anger. That makes forgiveness a hard thing to come by or accept. Then you allow anger and rage to take over, the only thing you want is revenge.

The problem with anger is that it distracts you from the real problems. It clouds your judgment and makes forgiving practically impossible.

You Don’t Want The Person To Get Off The Hook

Many times our grudges are meant to be a sort of punishment for the person who hurt us. It gives us the illusion of power and control over our feelings.

However, that punishment is rarely ever effective. The other person may not even be aware of your grudge, or even that they offended you in the first place. They’re just living their life, while you’re left with the heavy burden.

One of the hardest things about forgiveness is acknowledging that it’s not about the person at all! When you forgive someone, it’s about how you can finally move on with your life.

Forgiving doesn’t exonerate them and it doesn’t get them off the hook for what they did. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can take the first step towards healing.

You Don’t Want To Risk Disappointment Again

Perhaps you’re afraid that if you forgive, you’ll be vulnerable. No one wants to get hurt or disappointed a second time, even if it’s at the hands of a different person.

According to expert psychologists, this is a well-known defense mechanism. It’s aimed at keeping safe from future disappointments. Before you can learn to forgive, you have to realize that life is messy. It has its ups and downs with its fair share of happy days and not-so-happy days.

You Feel Misunderstood

How can you forgive if you feel you haven’t been heard? If you feel misunderstood, it’s often easier to justify holding on to your grudges and resentment.

You keep fencing yourself in more and more. The higher those walls go up, the angrier and more bitter you become. It’s a vicious cycle that goes on and on. And still, you don’t see any other way out. Letting go of what happened becomes harder and harder. And as long as you feel the need for them to hear you out, you’ll never be able to let go. After all, they didn’t treat you right, so why should you forgive them?

But, by holding onto all that rage and hurt, the only person you’re hurting is you.

Isn’t it time you started showing yourself the kindness and compassion you deserve? It all starts with forgiveness.

EXCITING NEWS!!

We launched our first episode on April 4th, and you can learn all about it at this link.

Visit http://www.rozjonesent.com for more information on addressing issues that caregivers face on a daily basis, and check out my upcoming book!

5 Reasons to Forgive Yourself

By Roz Jones

In life, there will probably come a time when you fail and disappoint yourself. Maybe you set a goal to graduate this semester, but now you need to add one more. Perhaps you promised yourself that you would master the art of caregiving, but work keeps you too busy to keep yourself organized.

There could be countless times when you find yourself upset, frustrated, or disappointed in yourself. When this happens, the next step to moving on is forgiving yourself. Here are five reasons that you should forgive yourself.

Everyone Makes Mistakes

You are not the only person to get into an accident, tell a lie, yell at someone, or turn on the wrong burner. Everyone makes mistakes. Thankfully for you, you will not make every mistake possible, but you won’t come out clean either.

We are human and this work is messy. It is impossible to not make mistakes. That doesn’t mean that you should stop trying to keep yourself from making mistakes. It just means that you should forgive yourself and move on. Someone else has done what you have and you should find comfort in that. You now need to move on and forgive yourself. It was a mistake that you can learn from and move on from.

Trouble Trusting Yourself

If something happens and you are having a hard time forgiving yourself, that is going to carry over into other parts of your life. You might create trust problems with yourself. Because you already messed up one way, who’s to say that you won’t mess up in another?

But that’s not a good way to think about yourself. There are going to be a lot of people in this world who think poorly of you or talk down to you. Don’t join them. It is okay to admit that you made a mistake and work to fix it. But then let it go, let yourself off the hook so that you can believe in yourself once more.

Health Problems

By not forgiving yourself, you could cause health problems. Being at peace allows your body to feel good. When there is chaos within, that can cause a lot of strain on your heart and your mind. This amount of stress is not healthy to carry around. You do not need to hold on to all that baggage. All it does is destroy you, mentally, physically and emotionally. You do not need to hold on to that, forgive yourself and set it aside.

Future Success

If you don’t forgive yourself, you are going to have a harder time succeeding in the future. Either you’ll be too stressed about making a mistake that you won’t do anything at all or you will live too cautiously because you are afraid of messing up.

Neither of these options are good ways to live. By forgiving yourself, you can move past the failure and be able to work towards future successes without that fear and stress.

You Deserve It

You deserve to be happy. You deserve to enjoy your life. You deserve to not hold a mistake over your own head forever. Forgive yourself because you deserve it. Yes, you made a mistake and let yourself down, we all do that. It is a part of life. You fell down.

After you have enough time to sit on the ground, pick yourself back up again. You deserve to continue climbing and moving forward.

Falling down doesn’t change that. You deserve to be forgiven by the person whose opinion matters the most: yours. That doesn’t mean that you forget about the mistake or don’t learn from it. It means that you care about yourself enough to move on.

EXCITING NEWS!!

Monday April 4th we launched our first episode, and you can learn all about it at this link.

Visit http://www.rozjonesent.com for more information on addressing issues that caregivers face on a daily basis, and check out my upcoming book!