Forgiveness - Easy to Say, Not as Easy to Do

Today’s topic is forgiveness… and I’ve gotta say, forgiveness is something that’s easy to think you know what it is and sorta, kinda understand it, but real forgiveness, truly, is not very easy to put into practice. I did some forgiveness work in my mid to late twenties, but it took me a long time to fully release the old resentments and hurts I was holding onto from my upbringing. If you’re a person that feels like you have some resentments you’d like to release or knows there’s more harmony for you just on the other side of an old memory, then let this personal story from my life be an inspiration to you.

I originally come from a family of five - a brother, a sister, my mom, my dad, and me. We lived in La Paz, Mexico and we were very, very poor. Not having enough food to eat, living in literally a cardboard house, being cold in the winters, lacking the essentials kind of poor. When I turned five my parents got divorced. At that point in her life, my mother couldn’t support the family financially and my father got remarried to a woman who was a very bad person and mean to us kids. And just like that I was put in foster homes. I moved from one foster home to another, four different times. By the age of eight years old, I was dropped in an orphanage. And I was put in that orphanage because my stepmother had talked my father into putting my siblings and me there. From age eight to fifteen, I lived behind the chain link fences of an orphanage in my own hometown. For seven years, I watched my old friends running and playing on their way to school while I was forced to stay inside. It felt like living in a prison. I had no freedom, while both of my parents were still very much alive out in the regular world.

Once I got out of the orphanage at age fifteen, I went to live at my mother’s house and I was very, very angry. I was angry all the time, but I continued to live my life and eventually became successful. Years passed. I got married, had my beautiful twin girls, but I still wasn’t 100% happy. Even with a thriving career and a happy, healthy family, something was still missing. At times I was still angry. I felt like there was a missing part of me and that I’d never be a good enough mom.

So I decided to seek professional help and I found a psychologist that really supported me. I went to my therapy sessions, and, little by little, my psychologist helped me to understand my upbringing in a different light. He helped me see that when I was put in the orphanage, I had no freedom, I had no love, I had no support, I was abandoned. So of course I felt undeserving of the life I had built for myself and my family. Deep down I was still very angry and resentful towards my stepmom, along with my dad, but I did NOT know it at the time I would ask myself, “Why did he put me there? Why did he say ‘yes’ to her?” And so, back to the psychologist I went. In therapy, my psychologist helped me understand that my dad was doing the very best he could. He helped me to see that maybe my dad was trying to protect me from my stepmom. She was very verbally and mentally abusive to me. Maybe my dad thought that was the way he wanted to protect me, protect my sister, protect my brother. And so we ended up in the orphanage.

My therapy sessions are also where I first really learned about JOURNALING, and so I started writing about my feelings and what was going on for me. I wrote about how I still felt so angry at my stepmom and my dad. What I realized through my journaling practice was that I would consistently latch my angry emotions onto my husband and my children. So, little by little, as I discerned what was really going on for me, I got to work through that anger, begin to release it, and start to experience compassion and forgiveness towards my father. Then came the forgiveness towards my stepmom which, if I’m being honest, felt like it was going to take a little more time.

Not long after I really made a firm decision to forgive my dad and my stepmom, and knew I was going to talk to them about it and share my feelings, I received a phone call late at night from my Dad letting me know that their oldest son had died in a car accident. This tragic accident really caused me to look at my stepmother and my father with immense compassion for the first time. No one, absolutely no one, deserves to lose their own child. And they did. I was filled with so much sadness for them. So I went to their house at around 11pm the night I’d heard about the accident. And my stepmom came out of their house. I opened my arms and I hugged her. I hugged her and had no feelings of resentment or anger or anything like it. And that moment, though it was very painful for both of us, was the beginning of my forgiving her, slowly but surely.

It took time and it was not easy. I’d say it honestly took a little over a year, once I’d started building a new relationship with my stepmom, to fully open up to her about how I felt and truly forgive her. But I did it. At one point, in one of my visits to go see my dad and stepmom, by then I’d moved away from Mexico and was living in the States, I told my stepmom how I felt, what I thought, and that I was still mad at her. I also asked her to forgive me for the behaviors and bad actions I'd taken towards her too. And you know what? She responded by asking me to forgive her as well - to forgive her for all the pain she had caused me. She was as a completely different person. She took my apologies, she took my amends. The healing of this relationship has opened me up in immeasurable ways in my life. My anger is gone. I’m a much more patient woman now.

Radical, deep forgiveness has given me my life back. It is a beautiful way of healing and part of becoming a better version of myself. I am now more serene, happier, and I feel a sense of freedom and release. I am at peace with myself and my loved ones, and I can look back on those hard times with compassion for everyone involved. When it’s all said and done, the most important part about forgiving someone is that it’s not for the other person, it’s for yourself. Forgiveness is for you.