Forgiveness Heals

I know this is long, and most probably will not read it in its entirety, but I am praying it reaches the one that needs it tonight.

The subject of forgiveness kept coming up in our women’s Bible study group last night, and it quickly became apparent that there are many needing support in this area. With this in mind, I wanted to share something from my heart this evening..

I think sometimes people struggle with forgiveness because we are taught from an early age that we have to “forgive and forget.” If we believe we have to forget as soon as we forgive, we may feel defeated when the hurt and offense that person caused us comes back to our memory and we feel hurt or offended all over again. If you’ve ever had to forgive someone who really hurt you, especially if you had to forgive them without an apology, you know exactly what I’m talking about..

But I would like to encourage someone today who may feel that they’re struggling to forgive. When you decided to forgive them, you didn’t suddenly develop amnesia. It’s natural that when you are reminded of what they did to you, you’re going to feel that hurt all over again. Let me break down the science for you..

Our brains naturally store painful memories, especially when an experience is emotionally or physically traumatic to us. Our brains were created by God to do this to help us avoid similar situations in the future. It’s a protective mechanism. It’s how we learn to survive.

I’ll explain further.. The main area of your brain that’s involved in processing strong emotions is called the amygdala. When the amygdala is “activated” it creates a strong and powerful imprint of that memory. This means that emotionally painful memories are more likely to be remembered quite vividly. The reason for this is because the amygdala stores these images of trauma as actual sensory fragments, meaning the trauma isn’t stored in our brains to be remembered like a story, but by how our 5 senses experienced the trauma at the time that it occurred. So these memories are stored in our brains through fragments of not only visual images, but also as smells, sounds, tastes, or touch. This is why after a perceived trauma, we can be “triggered” by a simple sensory input in our surroundings such as smelling a scent that reminds us of the perfume that person wore, for example. When this happens, adrenaline rushes through our body, and we can go into “fight or flight mode” which causes us to feel as if we are in that same situation all over again. In these moments, another part of our brains, known as the prefrontal cortex, shuts down. The problem is that the prefrontal cortex is the rational part of our brain. This is the area responsible for our consciousness, our processing and reasoning skills, and our ability to understand language. The result of this shut down is a profound stress response.

In other words, we are literally WIRED to remember! Now why do you think God would ask us to do something that is literally physiologically impossible for us to do in these instances? He wouldn’t. Let me tell you what I believe God does expect us to do in these situations - He expects us to forgive them over.. and over.. and over.. and over again, because He knows we’ll have to.

I explained it to my children like this..

When someone has truly hurt me, and I choose to forgive them, it doesn’t make the pain go away. On the contrary, as I just described above, the memory that pain has been imprinted on my brain. This translates to situations inevitably arising again and again where I will be reminded, and possibly even triggered, by what happened to me at the hands of this person in the past.

So, what do we do with this?

What does God expect us to do with this?

What we do is we forgive them all over again..

When we wake up in the morning, we forgive them again.

When we hear that song that reminds us of them, we forgive them again.

When we go to a place we’d been together in the past, we forgive them again.

When we smell that scent that reminds us of them, we forgive them again.

When someone tells us something awful they said about us, we forgive them again.

When they make a post alluding to it on their social media, we forgive them again.

When they lie about what happened, we forgive them again.

When we lose mutual friends, we forgive them again.

When they play the victim, we forgive them again.

When they try to destroy what we’ve built, we forgive them again.

When they continue slandering us, we continue forgiving them.

Every. Single. Time. They. Even. Come. To. Mind..

WE FORGIVE THEM AGAIN.

You will find that eventually the hurt will fade..

The tendency to react will shrink smaller and smaller..

The way it seems to eat away at you inside will go away..

Before you know it, you’ll be free.

And no matter what they say, or how they choose to live, moving forward, they won’t be able to take that freedom from you.

And the best part? God will give YOU more grace when YOU mess up because you chose to forgive them, and HE will handle them in the process.

So be encouraged today, and keep forgiving them, whoever they are.. whatever they’ve done.. just keep forgiving them.

As a result, you will have unlimited peace and live in total victory over the enemy.

In Christ’s love,

Just a Girl Who Loves Jesus