7 steps towards forgiveness. Part two

Until you suffer from your offender –it is impossible to step on the way of forgiveness. But how to solve this unpleasant situation? The first step you can do is – to make a conscious decision on stopping your sufferings, to stop feeling pain, to end with offend or injustice. Often in these cases you need to split your relations or drift apart from each other for sometime. Because near offender (whether is Mum that was indifferent to the life of her child, or a Man that broke his word) a person feels weak. Suffering just paralyzes all body.

In some very peculiar cases, when your physical or psychic health is under danger or you are in peril of your life - then you can sue in the Court. The offender must bear responsibility for said words or done actions. Court has the right to specify guilt and fix a punishment. But only aggrieved person can forgive offender if the first will want it.

2. Admit that they treated you badly.

Your past does not disappear. Useless to forget your offend. Due to the mechanisms of psychological defence suffering, hate and bitterness are displaced into the unconscious, where they keep on ruining you with even more destructive power. We need to admit the fault of the person who did us harm. We do need this to live further. This gives us a possibility “to give the fault back to the offender and consequently to re-establish relations with yourself”. Also it will help to avoid psychosomatic diseases or behaviour models that lead to the constant fails in relations as well as work.

Forgiving, we first of all are taking care of our health.

3. Forgiveness brings relief to our soul. Plus, due to the scientist’s opinion – it is a healing for our body.

Forgiving an offender, we get spiritual and emotional power as well as physical one. A study was made by Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet, American professor in psychology. More than 70 men and women were plunged into 4 states- an active emotional experience of offend, thoughts about vengeance, sympathy to the offender and forgiveness. During this experiment being tested took the temperature, blood pressure, perspiration and muscular tonus.

Psychologists discovered steady physiological differences between states of forgiveness and not forgiveness. Only if offender was mentioned- all being tested had blood system failure. These changes became very important when they thought about vengeance. “If you are ready to make an effort to forgive- by all means you will see what benefit it will bring to your psychic and physical health”, - according to Charlotte van Oyen Witvliet words.