I was just listening to a random YouTuber talking about how sometimes, we just don’t want to forgive other people for the sh*t they have done to us.
Believe me, I get that.
At my lowest point, I had to forgive my ex for having cheated on me every which way you can think of. I had found out he’d had been with countless other women, not to mention other men.
He basically lived to cheat. I would ask him where he’d been and what he’d been doing,because I would suspect him, and he would deny it. (Why he didn’t just split up with me remains a mystery to this day.)
One his finest moments was that time we went on an overseas holiday together, and on the one night that we were apart on that trip, he slept with someone else.
For months and months in our relationship, he would say he was going to babysit his child at his ex’s house every week. He said he was doing it to give his ex some time to herself so she could go and do yoga.
I later found out (surprise!) that his poor ex wasn’t going to yoga or going anywhere else – they were having a date night and a weekly shag. She was under the illusion he was single and that they were trying again. For all I know, they were having couples’ therapy while he was actually living with me!
The cheating was off the scale and verging on psychotic, if you ask me. This was a man who presented as normal – a bit charmingly eccentric perhaps, but overall normal. But this was not normal behaviour, obviously.
When I finally found out about it all – thanks to the bravery of one single friend who blew his cover – I was everything from shattered to angry to completely in breakdown.
Did I want to forgive him on the spot?
Of course I didn’t!
The Full Moon forgiveness I recommend we all do once a month at least works because it avoids spiritual bypassing. In other words, taking the time out at least once a month to forgive yourself or anyone else means you have to feel all your feelings and that helps us to process them.
It’s the only way to deal.
But can you necessarily forgive straight away? Unlikely!
I had weeks and weeks (ok, months) of recovering from it all. There were months and months of lying in bed crying as my brain struggled to piece it all together so I could read all the clues about where and when and how all the cheating had taken place.
Could I forgive as I lay there thinking about “ah, so that time he said xx and did xx would have been when he was actually doing xx”.
No!
I had to deal with it. Forgiveness came later.
It took many months, and a lot of water under the bridge, before I was ready to forgive.
It took a long time for me to forgive myself as well. Because, I mean, on SOME level, of course I knew he was cheating on me. I remember one time when he came home and I could literally smell the scent of another woman on him. It wasn’t perfume. It wasn’t even bodily fluids. It was just her presence and it made me feel sick. Not because of her, but because of the deception.
So yes, it took a while before I was ready to forgive … but finally I was.
That time coincided when when I was ready to love again.
Because you can’t open up in life to new experiences if you’re still stuck in the past. We create the future in our present but while we are stuck in the past, we are treading water and getting no where.
As long as I couldn’t forgive, I was still stuck in it.
For as long as I held onto my anger, I was still attached to him.
For as long as I was furious, every time I imagined his face as my target when I did boxing, every time I told the story of what a complete sh*t he was, I was stuck, stuck and stuck.
He might as well have been living in my house, sticking pins in me.
In some ways, holding on to my anger was a way of holding onto him. I wasn’t instantly ready to let go.
And then finally there came a day when I was ready to let go and move on, and that started with being ready to forgive.
And that was the day when the healing process started.
So do you have to forgive?
No, of course not!
But will it do you good, when you’re ready and you start to forgive?
Yes it will!
The Full Moon is the time when all your feelings come to the surface, all the better for you to deal with them. That’s why there is NO time like the coming Full Moon to practise forgiveness, as soon as you’re ready to give it a try. It was because of my own experiences with forgiveness that I created this free Full Moon Forgiveness kit. Give it a try!
