How to forgive someone under any circumstances

If unconditional love required but only one skill, it would unequivocally be knowing how to forgive someone. No matter how large our capacity for love, no matter how consciously we approach relationships, we will need the ability to forgive if we desire to sustain our connections. Inevitably someone we love will show up in a way that causes us pain and requires us to forgive. We will, without a doubt, do the same.  

Unfortunately this essential ingredient of all healthy relationships fails to show up in the lesson plans offered to us as we grow up. No one teaches us the art of forgiveness – why it matters and how to do it, even under the most difficult circumstances. Beyond sustaining our relationships, if we do not learn how to forgive someone, over time we will find feeling happy, peaceful, connected, passionate, and alive increasingly difficult. When we can’t forgive we carry a heavier and heavier burden of the past with us year after year.

Here we’ll begin by defining forgiveness and how that informs our approach to how to forgive someone who has hurt you. We’ll continue with looking at circumstances when forgiveness feels especially difficult, including when you are still angry. Finally we’ll look at the gifts of forgiveness and how it can deepen and strengthen our relationships, especially our intimate romantic ones. 

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How to forgive someone – the prerequisites and benefits

To begin with, learning how to forgive someone requires us to have a direct connection with our heart. We cannot successfully or effectively forgive from an intellectual standpoint. Forgiveness without the heart turns into a mental exercise that leaves the weight of the hurt still lingering, just buried deeper. That means that true forgiveness requires that we let ourselves feel the hurt, the pain before we can let it go. You might have resistance to that idea. Many do. Too often we want to get to forgiveness so we don’t have to feel the hurt, but it doesn’t work that way. Feeling the hurt comes before letting it go. 

Taking a deep breath now might support you. 

Before we go further, let’s get clearer about our goal when it comes to learning how to forgive. When we forgive, the resulting experience offers us a mixture of relief, freedom, peace, and in most cases, but not all, reconnection. Forgiveness, at its essence, allows us to free ourselves from the hurt and pain. Again, if we don’t forgive, we must carry that pain with us. Forgiveness allows us to leave it behind. 

In case you have any concern about the expectation to forgive someone for their benefit, we want to address that right away. Your ability to forgive is generous to you. Forgiveness is an act of self care. It is for you, not for the other person. 

“Forgiveness is an act of self care. It is for you, not for the other person.”

~Joanna Shakti

Notwithstanding the self care element, we will still often want to express and share our forgiveness with the one we’re forgiving. While the other person certainly does not need to be present, nor even know we’ve chosen to forgive, if the two people have an ongoing relationship that they’d like to sustain, then a shared experience of forgiveness can facilitate true repair and reconnection in the relationship. The sharing of our forgiveness with the other person, may help them in the process of forgiving themselves, as it allows us to let go of our pain. However, we don’t recommend forgiving for the purpose of making the other person feel better. Forgive for you and allow the other person to benefit, if that is the case.

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How to forgive someone – the steps

Now that you understand the benefits of forgiveness, what it requires and who it’s for, let’s go deeper and consider the practical steps of forgiving someone. Please note that if what you want to forgive someone for includes traumatic experiences, it is recommended that you move through the steps of forgiveness slowly, and ideally with a skilled professional or therapist. Similarly, if you have struggled to forgive anyone or anything, having someone hold space and guide you through the process can be truly helpful.

The practical steps to forgiving… 

1. Acknowledge that something hurts. Many don’t recognize the need for forgiveness because they never admit they actually feel hurt. Keeping a stiff upper lip and not letting them get to you can feel like great ideas, but they’re rarely supportive. We’re human. We feel. We get hurt. The sooner we admit that, the faster we heal, the faster we return to ourselves and our capacity for joy. 

2. Feel the hurt. As we admit that we felt pain as a result of another’s actions or inactions, we have opened the door to allowing that hurt to come and go. Emotions, when we allow ourselves to feel them, will, to the surprise of many, actually take their leave. We cannot release what we have not allowed ourselves to feel. Sometimes, we can benefit greatly if the other person is willing to witness our hurt in order to facilitate our process of forgiveness, however this is not required.  

3. Say what you need to say. We need to have a chance to express our hurt, our feelings, our perspectives. If the other person is willing to listen and receive our words, that’s great and again it’s not necessary. We simply need to get the words, the energy out of our system. You can speak any and all of the words you need to speak in the presence of the other person, a friend, a coach, a therapist or anyone willing to hold space for your process. You can also simply speak your words to the Universe or Life itself. Know that speaking matters. Saying the words silently inside your head will not be nearly as effective. Experiencing the vibration of the words in our bodies benefits us greatly. It is recommended that you speak in ‘I statements’ about your experience and not in ‘you statements’ that lay blame. If you have to say ‘you’ to get the energy out, by all means do it, and as quickly as possible return to speaking about yourself and your experience. That will accelerate the healing process. 

4. See what they were feeling / going through. (Do not do this step if your experience in any way felt traumatic.) While we don’t always need this step, if we’re struggling to forgive, it can be supportive if we can energetically step into the other person’s shoes, so to speak, at the time they did what they did. If we can do that, we often get a sense of the challenges they were facing or the pain they were in at the time that may have caused their painful behavior. This can help us soften and find compassion, which often makes figuring out how to forgive someone easier. 

5. Ask yourself if you’re willing to forgive. The next step in learning how to forgive someone involves genuinely asking yourself if you’re ready. This step makes all the difference between a mental exercise and a true experience of forgiveness accompanied by the somatic physical release that will always happen with genuine forgiveness. Once you have allowed yourself to feel all that you feel, and express all that needs to be said, then ask yourself, particularly ask your heart, ‘Are you willing to completely forgive?’ If you genuinely answer yes, and you feel it, then proceed to the next step. If you get a ‘no’ in response to your question, it simply means you have more to acknowledge and release first. Repeat the previous steps until you hear a ‘yes’. If you repeat them several times and your answer is still no, we suggest getting help from a professional.

6. Speak your forgiveness out loud. Once your body and being feels ready, and you have answered yes that you feel willing to forgive, then speak your words of forgiveness outloud. Again, speaking it rather than saying it in your head matters. Saying it directly to the other person directly can feel great and, once again, it is not necessary. Again, you can speak it out to the Universe or to any person sitting with you. If, as you start to speak, the words don’t flow out naturally, then you may not actually be ready yet. In that case, you can go back and walk through the earlier steps until the words of forgiveness do arise naturally. Know that many people cry tears of relief as they genuinely forgive. Forgiveness definitely doesn’t require tears but when they show up know that to be normal. 

When you have fully forgiven you will inherently feel your body relaxing. You will have gone through a process of releasing the old so that you can stay fully open and free in the here and now. This is why knowing how to forgive someone matters so much to both our personal wellbeing and our relationship. 

Your body may want to rest at this point or you may feel full of energy. No matter your experience, be kind to you. 

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How to forgive when you are still angry

People commonly ask, how do I forgive when I’m still angry? It’s an understandable and great question and the simple answer is, you don’t. Genuine forgiveness is impossible when you’re still angry or when you’re still feeling any strong emotion, whether that be sadness, grief, betrayal, jealousy, anger or any other emotion. 

Anger stuck or lodged in our cells will always prevent us from being in our heart, which as you know is a precursor to actual forgiveness. With that being said, anger, like other strong emotions, plays an important role in both our healing and our protection. Therefore we must relate to it consciously. 

Steps two and three above can guide you through the process of acknowledging, allowing, and expressing the anger so that you can release it, paving the way for forgiveness. While the emotion of anger can scare many of us, whether we’re the one feeling the anger or we’re the one witnessing it in another, its strong vibration and energy, again, serves an important purpose. 

In many cases our anger reveals a need for a boundary that we haven’t set or acknowledged. Knowing that we can, and in many cases should, set boundaries on future interactions, can assist in the forgiveness process. Anger can say, “This is not ok.” It can say, “I won’t tolerate this any longer.” At the same time, anger can arise as a coverup for our fear and underlying vulnerability. When this is the case, before we can see how to forgive someone, we have to find the willingness and courage to let ourselves move beyond the anger. This allows us to feel and release the fear and vulnerability hidden under the anger. 

In short, in order to genuinely and fully forgive we need to let ourselves feel all the layers of emotion until we are freed from them. If we allow the feelings to flow, rest assured they will go. If we continue to tell ourselves stories as to why we should feel the way we feel, our arguments for and justification of our feelings will surely make them stay, blocking the forgiveness we seek. 

Genuine forgiveness simply requires releasing the emotion first. 

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Conflict becomes communion and empowerment 

Individuals and couples who consciously walk the path of soul love come to realize several important things about relationships quite quickly. First, conflict is normal and healthy. We can’t avoid it and those who have known themselves as conflict avoiders or peacemakers begin to recognize how much damage that approach actually causes. Trying to keep the pace, avoiding upsetting your partner, or allowing resentment to build does much more harm, and causes much more discomfort, than actually addressing the conflict ever could. 

Surprising to many, when two people learn how to engage in conscious conflict their relationship actually gets healthier and their shared bond strengthens. When a couple, or anyone in an important relationship, takes the time to attend to hurts, upsets, misunderstandings, and disagreements while also committing to always finding forgiveness, they discover that their challenges and conflicts turn into deeper connection and even communion. 

As we said in the beginning, no skill could serve you better than knowing how to handle the inevitable upsets and the necessary forgiveness you will inevitably need to share as you navigate life and love.  

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As we close our exploration of how to forgive someone, we must add a few final considerations into the conversation. 

First, if you remain in a relationship with the person you desire to forgive and the behavior you want to forgive continues to happen, this ongoing dynamic will likely make complete forgiveness challenging. You may need to make some decisions about what boundaries you need to set or whether maintaining the relationship actually serves you. Many find these difficult considerations and, again, you may benefit from professional support from a relationship coach or therapist.

Second, when it comes to forgiving others, we must remember that it always takes two to Tango, or in other words to maintain a relationship. If we’re honest, most of the time, we play a role in what has happened between us and, often but certainly not always, we may need to forgive ourselves as well as the other person. Every once in a while, we actually need to forgive ourselves before we can forgive the other person. So as you explore these steps to forgiveness, remember that self forgiveness may be a necessary ingredient. 

Finally, many couples find themselves needing to forgive over and over because they actually hold unrealistic expectations for their partner and their relationship. Other times we blame our partners for the harm that self abandonment causes in relationships. You are invited to take a moment to consider whether you and your partner, or your past partners, have related consciously with one another. If not, discovering what conscious love looks and feels like may serve you well. 

Any long term relationship will call for forgiveness, many times. Hurts and upsets are normal and when you know how to navigate them well your relationship, as you know, will be healthier and stronger for it. 

May you become masterful at how to forgive someone.  

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Since 2006, highly conscious men and women, with a commitment to extraordinary relationships, have chosen Ecstatic Intimacy to find and cultivate Soul Partnerships from their bedrooms to their boardrooms. Ecstatic Intimacy believes in coveted relationships, for all. 

You too, are invited…