Dissecting "How To Forgive Anyone Who Hurt You"

[jimwell]

Leo's most recent video about forgiveness has the core principles:

1. People who hurt you in the past did so because of ignorance.

2. They hurt you because they were trying to get love (from you or somebody else) but had limited, unhealthy ways to get it.

3. They hurt you because their level of consciousness was very low.  

4.  They hurt you because of their selfishness.

5.  They hurt you for their survival agenda.

That basically means people who hurt you in the past did so because of selfishness and ignorance. And this is true. If you don't see this, it means you have not done enough introspection and have not developed enough awareness of your past pain (and anger).

He said being able to forgive is strength and not being able to is weakness. I think both are strength. His video is useful and effective to people who ordinarily got hurt or hurt as an adult. For example, the forum administrator banned you, another is, your boss unfairly fired you.     

 

But to that little 6-year-old japanese girl who was repeatedly dragged by his father by the neck from the entrance door to the bathroom and then brutally punched and kicked til blood comes out of her nose and mouth; to the child Teal Swan who was repeatedly sodomized or "analized" by an older family member, to the child me who was enormously mentally-emotionally wounded by his dumb father by being completely ignored and screamed at his entire childhood and teenage years, that forgiveness video is far from enough to heal the wounds, and even adds more harm.

If you are in the "second category". You need a deeper perspective and understanding of your pain, anger, and forgiveness.

1. Forgiveness is the letting go of anger, that is, the letting go of the desire for revenge or justice.

It is not when you say "I forgive you" to your business partner then suing him for screwing you. Forgiveness is when you say "I forgive you" to your business partner then say "And to prove that, I won't sue you or harm you in any way though you betrayed me.". It is not when you proclaim to everybody in the court  "I am a true Christian, so I forgive this psychopath who murdered my daughter and your daughters." But then celebrate when the jury decides to give the death penalty to the serial killer. Those are just empty words, not forgiveness.

2. Complete forgiveness is reconciliation. It is the letting go of anger, that is, the letting go of the desire for revenge or justice, and starting a good relationship with your abuser again.

So that means not only suing the business partner who screwed you, but to have another business deal with him again. That means to end the "no contact" situation you have with your NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) father or mother and start visiting or even living with them again.

It is obvious this is dangerous. Complete forgiveness or reconciliation should only be given to people who love you though they might have hurt you a few times. It should never be given to people who have NPD or Stage Red or to people who hate you though they might have done a few good things to you.

3. Your anger is valid and must be honored.

Don't demonize your anger. Don't believe them when they tell you you are a bad, evil person for holding anger. Anger is a valid response to harmful things done to you. It doesn't mean you should hold your anger until death. It simply means allow it to exist and understand it has an important function. 

 

And the paradox is, it is the acknowledgment and honoring of pain and anger which breaks the trans-generational wound transfer. I mean directing the anger at your parents or abusers then naturally letting it go, not forcefully. If you direct it at random innocent people because you lack awareness of it, you will transfer that pure shit to your children.  

4.  Forgiveness is a result of the healing of the mental-emotional wounds, not the other way around. 

You can't force forgiveness even if you want to. It will only lead to suppression. If you force yourself to forgive somebody who deeply broke your spirit, you might be able to do so for a few weeks. But the anger will still be deeply there. And it will be alive and kicking in your mind and body again in a few months if you become conscious of it. If not, it will run in the "background" of your mind and behavior. You will unconsciously hurt yourself and others.

5.  Unconscious or disowned pain and anger manifests as physical and mental diseases.

If that pain and anger is enormous but "unconscious", it manifests as mysterious bodily pains, cancer, anxiety, and depression. I have experienced this. My early adulthood anxiety and suicidal depression immediately disappeared after acknowledging my enormous pain and anger. Of course I did great inner work to accomplish it. It was completely difficult but it was worth it.

6. Learn the lesson of your pain and anger so you can then naturally and gradually release it.

Beneath the pain and anger is deep wisdom. If you choose to welcome it and work on it, you will have a deep understanding of yourself and the humans who caused it. Through it, you will be a more self-loving person who sets boundaries. If you have been extremely and disgustingly abused by your parents during childhood, that means you are an adult person who has low self-love, low self-esteem, and a doormat.

7. The healing of your wounds is directly proportional to your capability to be at peace with your painful, imperfect past.

This is where forgiveness can sprout from.

 

You can implement the concepts above by doing the exercise Leo described in his video. But add this step. Write the details of what exactly happened, how you felt about it, and what you should have done and said during that time.

Quote

 

For example:

When I was 7 years old, I played basketball with other kids who were around 2 years older than me from another neighborhood. My 12-year-old cousin did not join. He was just watching us from a distance. While playing, I stumbled on my opponent's foot and fell. My right knee got wounded. Then my cousin came and nastily told me "That happened to you because you are physically weak!". I felt very hurt. He was an asshole to me by unfairly judging and belittling me. 

 

At that time I should have expressed my pain and anger to my asshole cousin. I should have told him "It is you who is physically weak. Stop projecting your shit to me. And what you just said shows you are also mentally weak."

 

Say that to yourself while writing or typing it on MS-Word or OneNote. And feel the deep pain and hatred engulfing your body. You need to be alone when doing this.

The best thing is to do that for every painful or traumatic memory you have. But if it's impossible, just cover at least 70 percent of all your traumatic memories. Make sure to include your most traumatic memories.

Be patient and persevere. You will feel very bad and angry in the first few weeks or months of doing this. But just continue. And observe your anxiety, depression or physical problems gradually disappear. That exercise is very powerful. If your anger stays alive for more than a year, that's ok. Consider the other possibilities. If you don't do the inner work, you will continue to suffer (anxiety, depression, physical problems, etc,) for 20,30 or 50 years until you die. Or you murder yourself now because you can't bear the suffering anymore.

 

That was the inner work I did aside from developing self-love to accomplish great self-transformation. Before I was a young adult with very low self-esteem, low self-confidence,  low self-love, much self-hate, had pure O, BDD, agoraphobia, and crippling depression. Now, I am the exact opposite. I am 10 years older but still a young adult and with strong, unshakable self-love, high self-confidence, and slight to no anxiety and depression. And I feel good about myself. I still have some anger but greatly reduced. 

 

How did I develop self-love? I might share it in the future. I am already too tired to make another long post.

 

I don't know whether psychedelics helps in healing trauma and in forgiving your abusers. I have never tried any psychedelics. And I don't know whether the "existential" perspective of forgiveness is the ultimate solution. I can't see I am God imagining existence, I am infinite love, and I am all there is. That sounds just like an interesting, beautiful story to me.

Edited May 10, 2020 by jimwell
Changed the title

[Bazooka Jesus]

Dude, this post is amazing... thank you for sharing this.

I feel that I still carry around TONS of unresolved pain and anger - and when I say "feel", I am not talking about a bunch of vague emotions but a very tangible and precisely locatable physical sensation, like something that is literally stuck in my body - ; but so far, it seems like no matter what I do in order to unearth the pain and face it, I just keep banging my head against a wall; there is always more and more and more beneath the surface. It's like a bottomless well that never dries up!

Anyway, haven't watched Leo's video yet, but I will definitely heed your prescription, doc. Is this the only technique that you used to overcome your trauma or did you try out other things too? I'd love to hear more about your healing process - keep 'em coming!

 

PS -- Personally, I cannot say that psychedelics have helped me (yet) to resolve my pain, but they definitely have helped me to become more conscious of it and physically locate it. Even smoking weed never fails to make me super aware of what good old Eckhart Tolle refers to as the "pain body".

[Bazooka Jesus]

So I just watched - or should I say did? - the video. Very powerful exercise... I can certainly feel a sense of relief, a kind of lightness compared to how I felt when I clicked the start button.

The problem that I have with this type of exercise (I have been doing similar ones over the last few months) is that I cannot really point to any insular events that "fucked me up"; my personal childhood trauma quite simply consists in having been born as the youngest of three brothers into a shining lineage of neurotic & hysteric basket cases. Growing up, I basically experienced a constant poison dripping where I was made to feel like a weak, stupid and useless waste of space - I vividly remember feeling that my very existence was a kind of mistake and insult to all other people during pre-puberty -, so it is pretty hard for me to pick out some harrowing memory of some especially traumatizing incident, unless you want to label my entire chilhood as exactly that (and even that would obviously not be true, since I probably had a much better childhood than most folks on this planet, as twisted as it was!).

But anyway, I will definitely do this exercise again. Thanks Leo -- you the MAN!

Edited May 11, 2020 by Bazooka Jesus

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Bazooka Jesus said:

The problem that I have with this type of exercise (I have been doing similar ones over the last few months) is that I cannot really point to any insular events that "fucked me up"; my personal childhood trauma quite simply consists in having been born as the youngest of three brothers

This exercise was only for forgiving people who hurt you. It was not an exercise to removal all possible childhood trauma. That would be a much bigger project.

[Bazooka Jesus]

47 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

This exercise was only for forgiving people who hurt you.

Yes, and that is exactly what I am working on. My parents and siblings obviously did hurt me by making me feel weak and powerless - otherwise I wouldn't be carrying so much resentment against them even to this day.

In other words, I have very concrete axes to grind with very specific people (four of them, to be exact); it's just that I cannot point to a square on a calendar and say "THIS was when that basterd did me wrong!!". Instead of suffering one giant insult in one fell swoop, I received a thousand little ones gradually over the course of my entire childhood; the result however is essentially the same.

[Leo Gura]

31 minutes ago, Bazooka Jesus said:

I cannot point to a square on a calendar and say "THIS was when that basterd did me wrong!!"

That's okay. You don't need to be that specific. You can forgive the person itself more than the exact situation.

[Bazooka Jesus]

@Leo Gura Cool. Bless ya buddy!

[jimwell]

On 5/11/2020 at 5:54 PM, Bazooka Jesus said:

Dude, this post is amazing... thank you for sharing this.

I feel that I still carry around TONS of unresolved pain and anger - and when I say "feel", I am not talking about a bunch of vague emotions but a very tangible and precisely locatable physical sensation, like something that is literally stuck in my body - ; but so far, it seems like no matter what I do in order to unearth the pain and face it, I just keep banging my head against a wall; there is always more and more and more beneath the surface. It's like a bottomless well that never dries up!

Anyway, haven't watched Leo's video yet, but I will definitely heed your prescription, doc. Is this the only technique that you used to overcome your trauma or did you try out other things too? I'd love to hear more about your healing process - keep 'em coming!

Thanks!  My pleasure. I'm happy you see the value of it.

It's good you feel the physical sensation. If that trauma sensation is not being put into awareness or not taken care of,  that will eventually manifest as anxiety, depression, suicidal feelings, mysterious bodily pains,cancer, etc.

In my first few months of digging deep into my past, I was overwhelmed by the the number of painful memories flooding my consciousness. I focused on one painful memory, and in the middle of dissecting it, another painful memory came up. After one session which lasted about 2 to 3 hrs, I always got exhausted and would take a nap to recover my energy. This work of digging and dissecting your past or entire history is very serious and is naturally time, energy, and will-demanding. But it is the only way to go. What else is more sensible and rewarding than understanding yourself, your past, healing your trauma, and feeling good about yourself? 

 

It was a very long, winding road. I started with going to the psychiatrists and taking meds. It was a waste of time. I never suspected psychiatry as almost like a fraud. I just assumed every institution is legitimate and trustworthy. But as months go by, I could not ignore my perception that psychiatrists don't have a deep understanding of mental diseases and just blindly follow their protocol.

 

That realization was very horrifying to me. And I was disgusted by psychiatry. Treating mental-emotional diseases is as serious, even slightly more serious than treating physical diseases I must say. How could psychiatrists charge spiritually broken people a fortune after bullshitting them? I was lied to. And my college friend who had GAD and depression was also lied to. He murdered himself after 6 months of seeing his psychiatrist (who was also my psychiatrist) and taking meds. 

 

So I took everything in my own hands. I did much research and bought a few books about my condition to have a deep understanding of it. One of the books I read was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. His non-duality teachings did not help me. It just confused me instead. But the meditations he mentioned in the book were useful. I imagined a white light inside my head. Then I moved the white light to my neck, arms, belly, until it reached my feet. I did it for a few months. It increased my focus and made me more aware of my bodily sensations. Eckhart's "silent watcher" is powerful. It allowed me to "get out" of my feelings and observe them instead of being taken over by them. And I loved his "24/7" meditation which is to be very present all the time, in every situation. I started feeling the pressure on my feet while walking. I carefully observed the shape and color of the branches and leaves of trees and watched them swayed in the wind. It intensified my focus and concentration. I still do this form of meditation now, especially when I'm alone in nature.

 

I came across a book about self-love. I intuitionally (intuitively) knew that would be a game changer. I spent a few years generating self-love. It was very difficult because there was much resistance. I had very low self-esteem and much self-hate to love myself. But I pulled it off. Now I have deep self-love. And it's unshakeable because it is unconditional. The greatest form of love is unconditional. It is easy to love somebody or something if it's beautiful. But if it's ugly, it is very challenging or impossible. And I know self-love is what you need. Start with recognizing your positive characteristics. Acknowledge and be appreciative of the things about yourself (especially something about your personality) which you naturally approve of. When you look in the mirror, notice and admire parts of your face and body which you find beautiful. Do this long enough until you notice the general positive feeling you generate when you think about yourself. When your self-love becomes stable, it will be very clear to you. You won't even question yourself whether you have it or not. Then you can level up and try to generate Unconditional self-love. I can't give details on how to do this. I don't have enough time and energy now to cover another complex topic. I might do it in the future.

 

It is very natural to me to contemplate things. This must be one of the major reasons why I had pure O ( a form of OCD). I have always had a natural curiosity about things, especially things most humans are not interested in, since I was 4 years old. It is through deep contemplation that I understand and discover useful methods for solving things. 

 

I love being alone in nature. I regularly ride my bicycle or talk a walk in places like this. From time to time, I pick a spot and just sit there, contemplating or admiring and appreciating the beauty and mystery for 6 hrs straight. It always refreshes my soul. 

https://goo.gl/maps/ky5Xrtn79r37B3Cr7

I love beautiful women, especially if they are authentic. Being with them and enjoying them also helps in healing yourself. This might make you envious. 

Edited May 12, 2020 by jimwell
google map was not properly embedded

[jimwell]

@Matt23 @AwakenedSoul444 @SageModeAustin @Husseinisdoingfine @Joshi3 @modmyth @VerballyHazardous @WhatAWondefulWorld

I deeply understand how you feel. And I know you are doing your best. You have my compassion. I have been there. If you think there is nobody out there and there is no way out, remember, you have Yourself. Other humans like Nahm, and other things like videos and books, can help you by giving you new insights and tools to handle your suffering. But it is You who have the greatest power to heal yourself and change your situation. Why? Because it is you who has the direct access to your thoughts, feelings, desires, and suffering. If you always get the thought "I don't know how to heal myself, or where to go from here.", always say to yourself, "I don't know. But I will continue living and looking.". Just Continue. Things will be clearer as you keep continuing. Read and understand my original post. Then continue. You don't know how? It doesn't matter. Just continue.

[VerballyHazardous]

@jimwell

Thank you for your kind words

I'm basically doing the same thing too 

[Nahm]

On 5/12/2020 at 1:51 PM, jimwell said:

...psychiatrists and taking meds. It was a waste of time. I never suspected psychiatry as almost like a fraud. I just assumed every institution is legitimate and trustworthy. But as months go by, I could not ignore my perception that psychiatrists don't have a deep understanding of mental diseases and just blindly follow their protocol.

Psychiatry isn’t fraud. Belief isn’t true. Duality (psychology) is an appearance.

On 5/12/2020 at 1:51 PM, jimwell said:

What else is more sensible and rewarding than understanding yourself, your past, healing your trauma, and feeling good about yourself? 

What’ll you think the next such earth shattering breakthrough in no longer ignoring perception could be?

[SageModeAustin]

@jimwell why did u tag me? I don’t remember posting in this thread nor do I see my post 

[darktropeek]

I just forget about it. It works!

[jimwell]

@SageModeAustin

I saw your "serious emotional problem" post. And my post is relevant to your post. 

[jimwell]

11 hours ago, VerballyHazardous said:

@jimwell

Thank you for your kind words

I'm basically doing the same thing too 

 My pleasure. But you are probably not doing the "trauma MS Word or OneNote exercise" and probably not actively developing strong, unshakable self-love. Honesty, especially self-honesty is very important in self-transformation.    

[jimwell]

11 hours ago, Nahm said:

Psychiatry isn’t fraud. Belief isn’t true. Duality (psychology) is an appearance.

You mean in the "objective" sense? If there really is an "objective" truth, which is everything is one and equal, at least in the relative sense, psychiatry has more lies than truth is the truth.

 

11 hours ago, Nahm said:

What’ll you think the next such earth shattering breakthrough in no longer ignoring perception could be?

It is "Who is the deepest I?" and "What is the deepest existence?". As of now, my answer to the first question is "The deepest I is this awareness inside my head." And the answer to my second question is "The deepest that is that beautiful, mysterious star made of sub-atomic particles."

My intuition strongly suggests there are deeper answers which I have no access to. I lament the truth that I still have no access to them after searching a few years.

[SageModeAustin]

@jimwell hmm okay it’s a long post I don’t have problems with forgiveness. I forgive the people I love easily and in fact I forgive too easily probably and need to set more boundaries for myself 

[Nahm]

@jimwell

Intuition sounds on, but the feeling of lamenting is likely in regard to the belief about not having access to deeper answers. I believe you very much do, and that there can’t be said to be any shortage of access. I’d scrutinize & inspect direct experience, with the same zest applied to healing. 

??♥️

[jimwell]

On 5/19/2020 at 7:24 PM, Nahm said:

@jimwell

Intuition sounds on, but the feeling of lamenting is likely in regard to the belief about not having access to deeper answers. I believe you very much do, and that there can’t be said to be any shortage of access. I’d scrutinize & inspect direct experience, with the same zest applied to healing. 

??♥️

Of course. ? Thanks for the positive message.

[Rolo]

I find that when i go to a specific trauma and do the forgiveness techneque that trauma is linked to other related memories.

My bully is related to my aggressive father to my cruel boss to other bullies and so on... 

When i stick to one specific event will it make the other events esier to heal? 

I can feel the tension in my body and it just feels like all this rejection and hate. The tension feels like so many people... 

The tension is like the devil and there is a angel somewhere else and the angel is repressed and in fear of the pain, when i do this nondual thing it feels like they are both integrating but the fear still crops up its like the hate from my bully and his projection of my weakness is the very thing i am afraid of becoming.  

Edited May 24, 2020 by Rolo