Forgiving doesn’t mean having to live

You can forgive and choose to let the person go. You can forgive and choose to walk away. You can forgive and still choose not to be a part of that person’s life and not allow them to be a part of yours. But one thing is certain: you can forgive, but you cannot forget.

Forgiving doesn’t mean that everything has to go back to the way it was before. To forgive is to free yourself from all feelings of resentment. It’s abandoning the idea of ​​getting revenge on someone or giving change in kind.

It’s about not wishing anything bad on another person. It’s about genuinely and truly letting go of any negative feelings you hold against another person.

Forgiving is letting go of self-destructive thoughts and emotions that you may still be holding inside. Forgiveness isn’t just about the other person, it’s more about you.

Forgiving doesn’t mean you have to stay. It doesn’t mean you have to come back and it doesn’t mean you have to let the other person back into your life.

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It doesn’t mean you have to reconcile all your past feelings, because sometimes that’s just impossible. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, things go wrong between people, and no matter what you do, you will never be able to fix it. All you can do is leave it as is.

Forgiving doesn’t mean you have to love the other person back in exactly the same way as before. Sometimes it means having neutral feelings towards her.

Forgiveness is not some magical thing that will suddenly happen and erase everything that has happened to you and miraculously make things go back to exactly the way they used to be.

We need to understand forgiveness before we begin to practice it. You can forgive and still vividly remember what the other person did to you.

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Forgiveness is not a memory eraser. What happened to you and caused you so much damage and took so long to get over will always be there.

But forgiveness is really about how you’re going to feel about what happened and whoever did it to you. It’s how you choose to respond to that person’s action. It’s how you think about the things that happened to you and those who did that to you.

Forgiving means living in peace.