Yesterday I wrote about the word forgive as the most powerful word in the english language. Yet, I believe it is also the most misaligned, misused and misunderstood word. It is an action, not a feeling. We often hear that forgiveness is a process, yet I know for me I didn’t understand why. I thought that if I had that moment where I forgave a person in my family for abusing me, it should just stick. That should be it. I should be able to move forward without bringing the past pain in to the present. That the anger should subside and I should be free. When that didn’t work, I was confused. Until I understood what that process truly means.
Forgiveness is most effective when done at the event level. Meaning that we articulate what happened, what we felt and then that we forgive. Again, I am not suggesting that this be done with the person who hurt you. Most likely, they are not safe enough to hear you.
There is a brilliant woman by the name of Dr. Carolyn Leaf. She has studied the brain for nearly 30 years and has deep wells of information. Her website is drleaf.com. My favorite is her DVD series called “Who Switched Off My Brain”. The information is so intense that I had to watch it a few times to catch everything.
A microscopic view of memory in our brain shows that it looks like tree branches woven together. This is how memory forms. However, when we go through an event that is painful or traumatic it looks different. You can see a dark patch and a closer look shows those memory branches with what looks like little thorns on them. Here’s the part that will blow your mind. Scientifically in the lab they have observed this. When you go through the process of forgiveness for that event, those little thorns fall off and a healthy memory grows over the top. The result is that you don’t lose the memory of the event, it just isn’t toxic anymore.
You see, those dark patches in the memory of your brain can be triggered by anything that reminds you of the event (could be a smell, the way someone speaks, and so on). So every time that happens it literally sets off a chemical reaction in your body that is harmful to you. You know those moments when you have an interaction and all of a sudden your heart is racing and you feel clammy. Or perhaps you find yourself reacting in a way that you didn’t expect. Sometimes there’s a person and for whatever reason we find it hard to be around them and we don’t know why. Those are all signs that we are being triggered.
I went through a lot of abuse as a child. No amount of curbing my behavior as an adult was effective. Neither was a blanket “I forgive”. It was a step, yet it didn’t reflect in the way I felt in my spirit. It wasn’t until I started using the tools that I learned in Grief Recovery to articulate at the event level that I started to see things change significantly. I was also fortunate to have a wonderful therapist who did deep prayer work by bringing Jesus in to those events. She is the one who originally showed me the DVDs from Dr. Leaf.
Sometimes I drive my husband crazy with my quest to understand why. It is both a blessing and a curse. For this purpose though, it helped me to understand why forgiveness is so important. It effects not only our relationships, work, and ability to make money, it also greatly effects our health. And there is science to prove it.
Are there things that you are having a hard time letting go of?
