This is something I have struggled with my whole life, and a large contributor to my health journey in My Body Story. In the past when someone or something upset me I would get very angry, and the situation or circumstances determined how angry. I had a temper, quite a bad one, something I am not proud of. I did not think very much of myself during these times, and I hurt a lot of people close to me.
It has taken a lot of therapy, and a lot of reading, to figure out why I would get so angry, and about a year ago it finally dawned on me. I was angry with myself, and having a victim mentality I blamed others, and took my anger out on them. When someone says or does something that upsets us there is nothing we can do about it, other than control how we react to it. Our job is to figure out why it has upset us, what is going on within ourselves that needs attention.
Now comes the interesting part, when we are angry with someone and we hold onto that anger it turns to resentment, and guess what, the other person is carrying on with their life while we create havoc in our own. And the situation, it no longer exists, other than in our mind. We give all our power to someone else, to the past.
There is tremendous power in forgiveness, it sets us free, it heals us, and the beauty of it all, we don’t even have to let the other person know we have forgiven them. Sometimes it helps, but it is not necessary. To me, forgiving is the easy part, forgetting is the tough part, and forgiving others is far easier than forgiving myself. But in order to truly forgive it has to start with ourselves, as within, so without. Our cup must overflow, or we will feel empty.
The really tough part is accessing our subconscious, because it is here that most of our anger and resentment lives. We have been angry and resentful towards someone or something for so long that we are no longer aware of it. This is when our body starts talking to us, but we don’t listen. This is when the so called ‘bad’ things start happening in our lives, and our default setting is blame.
It’s time to start taking responsibility, to reclaim our power, to practice forgiveness. What have we got to lose?