6 Steps to Forgiving and Letting Go When Someone Hurts You

Relationships are a part of human existence and with this social congeniality comes an inevitable part - offences. Because we are mortals and prone to making mistakes, we tend to hurt others intentionally or unintentionally. Whereas some hurts are easily overlooked or forgivable, some are not, and due to the differences in our individual natures, some people tend to feel emotional hurt more deeply than others.

It is not unusual to hear people urge the hurting individual to "just forgive and move on". In fact, they are further encouraged to forget what has happened. One question - can people really forget memories of hurts?

The mind is a hub and a memory storage. It tends to retain incidents that leave indelible marks on our memories. It is easier to remember an experience that fetched us a height of emotions - this could either be positive or negative emotions. With the mind working this way, it would be almost impossible to totally erase all the memories of hurt or enjoyment that one has had. Nevertheless, forgiveness is always possible regardless of the depth of the hurt caused to your emotions.

You know what they say about forgiveness? It is required not for the other person but for the betterment of your own emotional health and mental stability. The cliché analogy suggests that not forgiving is like setting oneself on fire while expecting one's offender to burn. You know that will never happen. Retaining bitterness and anger inside you is a recipe for illnesses and you know who will suffer from it? Well, you know.

Several times I have suffered one form of hurt or another both from people who I love and who said they loved me and also from acquaintances. With acquaintances, I found that it was easier to let go and move on but with people closer to me? It took so much from me, depending on the degree of hurt. Is that familiar? If it does, you will also agree that the emotional torture of enduring the hurt does no good at all.

Navigating through hurtful experiences, which includes a series of coaching and therapy sessions, fasting and prayers, confessing forgiveness and willing myself to forgive, I found that while therapy helped, the bulk of the work still laid with me. Not to hurt your faith, but praying and fasting did not work neither did merely confessing that I had forgiven my offenders shake anything. Instead, confessions and willing myself to forgive made me feel worse. I felt more guilt after I did all of these and prayed without getting results. Maybe something was wrong with my faith, I thought. Maybe. But the reality is that prayers weren't the solution to the problem. I found what was and I will be sharing them with you.

These steps are practical, pragmatic and realistic. They work regardless of your faith or beliefs. More importantly, they are applicable for both small and weighty offences.

1. What happened?

This is the first step. It is, because you need the details of the incident to set the foundation for the forgiveness process. It helps to have a journal as you walk through these steps. Your journal could either be written or in oral form depending on which one works better for you.

Be detailed. Write down or record everything that happened the way it happened. Write as much as you can remember about the incident.

2. Acknowledge and accept your hurtful state

Like I do say, it is impossible to change what you don't know and if you don't know a thing, how can you understand it? Therefore, you have to acknowledge how you feel. You will need a serene environment and a comfortable position. Gently and quietly tune into your mind and ask yourself, "How am I feeling?" Without censoring or filtering the responses, write down or record every feeling coming to your mind. This step is important because the entire forgiveness process is aimed towards releasing the negative emotions you are feeling as a result of the hurtful experience.

3. Be ready to forgive

The key to your freedom is in your hands. You have to make this decision to willingly and wholeheartedly forgive your offender. This step right here can be very difficult. How does one hop and just forgive all those times of pain? Will you let the person go just like that? It is a tough demand. Still, you have to do it. Remember it is for you, not another.

Considering the peculiarities of each person's nature, I always advise that you take it at your own pace. Walk yourself through it and be gentle with yourself throughout. If you are finding it difficult to come to the place of forgiveness, go back to step two above. Feel all the emotions. How do they make you feel? Do you like how you feel? Will you like to keep feeling that way? If your answer is no, then you know that the only way forward is to release those emotions. Like I already stated, forgiveness is a process of releasing the negative emotions so that you can be positively productive.

4. Forgive

Yes, you have been writing stuff down - the hurtful experience and how you are feeling. You have also clutched these negative feelings tightly to your heart. They are doing you no good, therefore it is time to let them go.

Okay, maybe not as easy as it sounds, but this is the ultimate step and it will make all the difference. After all, the whole point of going through steps one to three is so that you can release all the hurt and pain.

We are back to journaling. For this step, follow the directions below.

• Express some gratitude. Hurts aren't bad in and of themselves. It is what you do with them that puts them in either a good or bad class. Your experiences are meant to help you grow in life whereas your mind processes and allows you to feel the pain from hurtful experiences in order to help you avoid or prevent a future recurrence. This is why you need to express some gratitude - to your mind - for being aware enough to catch that experience, because now, you will learn from it and be alert to avoid a repeat case.

• Forgive yourself. This is the first step in the forgiveness process. It may sound off, I know. However, there is a common philosophy that we are the creators of our own experiences. With that knowledge in place, it therefore behoves that you identify the role(s) you played in each experience that you have.

Once you have identified the specific things you did - and they do not necessarily have to be negative actions. It could be that you went against your instincts and participated in an activity that has now caused you pain. Or the fact that you were not sensitive to pick up the signals. For instance, you dated someone who broke your heart badly. Although you noticed signs of misbehaviour, you continued to linger in the relationship until your partner eventually broke your heart. These are the things you would be writing down.

For this to work, you have to be one hundred percent honest with yourself. I am not asking you to bash, berate or beat up yourself. Just be honest. It is essential for your emotional and mental freedom. Always remember that it is you against you and not anyone else. After you have done this, proceed to the forgiveness exercise. Declare forgiveness for yourself for all the roles you played leading to the experience, listing the roles one by one.

• Forgive your offender. This one right here is difficult. Take it from someone who has had to do this several times. However, the good news is that it gets easier with time. You warm up to the process and whilst the pain may be deeper than the one from previous experiences, it would be easier to release the hurts. This is where your activity in step 1 above comes to play. You will be declaring forgiveness for each one of the hurtful things that your offender did to you as you did in sub-step (b) above.

• Release and let go. This is the final step after you must have gone through the entire forgiveness process. Declare that you release all the hurts and pain and that you let them go.

5. Write how you are feeling

You should feel differently from when you first embarked on this exercise. Document however you are feeling. Again, there are no right or wrong answers, only honest ones. Here, you should also know that it is possible for this process to take days, weeks or even months. The key is to be patient with yourself and be committed to the process.

6. Write, or say, some words of positive affirmation to re-energise yourself.

In addition to this, write down your resolution - lessons learned from the experience and what you will do to prevent a repeat experience in the future.

Hurts are inevitable due to the imperfection of human beings and seeing that interaction with other people is inevitable, there is a likelihood that we will experience hurt from time to time. These five steps are proven ways to get over the hurt and forge ahead.

Download the forgiveness guide here.