Practicing Forgiveness
What comes to your mind when you think about healthy living? Like many people, you may imagine eating a nutritious diet, exercising, sleeping well, or getting regular physical check-ups. These behaviors are important, but an often overlooked health behavior is practicing forgiveness.
The mind exerts a powerful influence on the body. Our emotional states release hormones that affect the function and well-being of crucial organs. Unforgiveness fosters feelings of anger, bitterness, and resentment that can adversely affect our health. This principle holds true no matter how unforgiveness manifests, whether as explosive rage or a silent grudge.
We can better understand the relationship between the mind and body through the body’s classic “fight-or-flight” response. Anger provokes this response, preparing us for action. Its physical effects include increased heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, body temperature, perspiration, and even higher levels of blood sugar and fat in the bloodstream. The body can experience the fight-or-flight response whether the stressor is real or imagined, and regardless of whether the stressor is occurring in the present or happened long ago. Simply perceiving or thinking about a difficult event is enough to produce the body’s stress response.
Getting angry is not the problem so much as staying angry. The fight-or-flight response serves a useful purpose for stressful events that are quickly resolved. For example, think about driving a car during a violent storm. Our fight-or-flight response kicks in to help us drive carefully. Once we have arrived safely at our destination, that response subsides. Other circumstances, however, such as hurt resulting in unforgiveness, produce a prolonged stress response. Persistent anger shortchanges our bodies of recovery time. Researchers have linked unresolved anger to numerous health conditions, including insomnia, depression, high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke. Central to reversing persistent anger and its consequences is forgiveness.
“Getting angry is not the problem so much as staying angry.”
The major challenge is learning how to forgive. Sometimes the hurt is profound, and forgiveness is understandably difficult. In order to strengthen our ability to forgive, let’s first look at what forgiveness is not:
1. Forgiveness does not mean glossing over the offense. It does not require us to condone or excuse the wrong act, nor does it necessarily mean trust will be restored.
2. Forgiveness is not instantaneous. It is a process that requires time. We may have to cycle through our emotions several times before resolving our anger.
3. Despite the “forgive and forget” cliché, forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting the event ever happened. Instead we can learn from it.
With that understanding in mind, let’s now consider what forgiveness is:
1. Forgiveness is a choice. The longer we choose not to forgive, the more the negative response ingrains itself in our minds. We must make the conscious choice to stop blaming another for our unhappiness, and instead move forward with our lives.
2. Forgiveness is about setting us free. The offender may not even feel any remorse at all, and burrowing ourselves in our anger isn’t going to change that fact. As long as we refuse to forgive, we are essentially handcuffing ourselves to that person. We must decide if we want the offender to keep controlling us, or if we’re ready to take back control of our well-being.
3. Forgiveness means reframing the painful event. In other words, we enlarge our focus so that we’re not thinking strictly about the facts that reinforce our existing point of view, and ignoring those that challenge it. We must consider the facts from both perspectives. It is helpful to develop at least some understanding of the offender’s circumstances when the event occurred. It may also help us to recollect our own offenses. When we remember that we can inadvertently cause pain too, we can extend more grace when others hurt us.
Sometimes we grapple with forgiving ourselves as well. This struggle is evident not only in relationships but when people are working on health behavior change. Remember that challenges and setbacks are normal and part of the process. We can acknowledge that the setback occurred, consider what we can learn from it, and move forward with a renewed commitment to our goal.
Learning to forgive others and ourselves is a powerful way to boost our mental, physical, and emotional health, and to experience a lifetime of wellness.
References:
Brown, N. (Ed.). (2015). Learn more. Lifestyle Medicine Institute LLC.