Forgive not forget

Sometimes forgiving someone has more to do with you than it does with them.

I think we all have had people in our lives who owe us apologies, big and small. Following the phrase forgive and forget can cause more damage than it heals. In my opinion anyway.

I am not talking about someone stepping on your toe, or losing your place in a book. I am talking about when someone has harmed you. The type of harm that you think about at random times, for me it's when I am not sleeping. 

Many times when someone hurts us this deeply, they don't realize the profound effect that it is having on us. No one wants to believe themselves capable of hurting another person in a way that isn't temporary. And for those of us that are hurt, bringing up what was done can cause more trauma or reopen a wound that doesn't need to be reopened. 

Forgiveness doesn't always have to be a public thing. Many of the things I have forgiven I have never mentioned to anyone else. Just kept it within me so that I can begin to heal from it. I am not saying that a big old out in the open clearing the air discussion isn't cathartic. I just know that a lot of the time it isn't realistic. Either you have cut the person out of your life so that you can survive, or you've managed to move forward within your relationship and that time has passed.

For me, forgiveness is the first step in letting go. Just because you have forgiven someone, you don't have to forget what or who wronged you. Forgiving someone isn't for them, it's for you. Forgiving them though isn't absolving them of what was done, you don't ever have to forget what they did. The control you have there is how it stays with you, and what you allow it to do to you. Moving forward isn't moving on, there are some things that cannot be moved on from. But, by forgiving you might be able to place it in a smaller box in your brain than the one it currently lives in. Maybe eventually it can become just another small memory in the back of your brain closet.