We’ve all heard the advice: Forget your past hurts and move on with your life. On the surface, it sounds pretty good.

But I don’t think it works most of the time.

My guest on this week’s podcast is Mary Lou Bonham, a spiritual counselor and psychologist – and also my very wise younger sister.

Here’s what she said:
“I have a lot of concerns around short-cutting the process of forgiveness. There are a lot of things that are called forgiveness that aren’t really forgiveness and they can be toxic. And especially the more traumatized you’ve been, the more important it is to not go down the toxic paths of what may be labeled forgiveness.”

I have had valuable conversations with my sister and am learning these four ways to not damage myself by shortcutting the process of forgiving others for past wrongs:

First, boldly seek the truth.

Not short cutting the process of forgiveness means going deeply into myself to remember and name the hurts that caused my wound. I have to be able to name what those pains and hurts were. I cannot sugar coat or put them aside. Until I go to the depths of remembering what that experience was, I cannot ever truly forgive.

In Mary Lou’s words: “I would say it’s essential for me to not forget, and I’ll tell you why. It has to do with that truth-telling piece. My own inner child will never feel safe as long as I am not telling the truth about what she experienced.”

Next, accept what happened.

I’ve sometimes wished that I could rewind time and change something I said or did – or something someone else said or did. But the reality of life is that when something is done, it’s done. I cannot undo it.

I must accept my own failures. And I must accept the failures of those who’ve hurt me. This can be very difficult, especially when those who wounded me don’t see or validate what they did. If I wish to heal those wounds, I must accept the truth of what really happened. Mary Lou suggested that I’m not likely to do this on my own. I need at least one other person to witness and validate that truth in order for me to fully accept it. I’m fortunate to be married to my most truthful witness. Though it’s very uncomfortable at times, he is my faithful reality check.

Then, change the story.

For me, the healing power of forgiveness occurs not when I try to forget what happened, but rather, when I begin to remember it differently. Like most of us, I remember it first as a ‘poor me’ story. My healing begins when I rewrite it as a story of resilience, learning, and valuable growth in the face of the pain. I’ve re-written parts of my painful childhood experiences in my new book Love is Complicated, which will soon be released by Mango Publishing. But I think the re-writing of my story is a lifelong process.

Lastly, forgive myself.

Forgiveness is more about me and my healing than it is about anyone or anything else. It involves the opening of my heart, which can only happen when I begin to forgive myself for having taken in the resentful victim story the way I originally wrote it when the events occurred. Until I do the hard work of looking deep within myself, boldly seeking the truth of what happened, accepting it, and then forgiving myself, the freedom that results from forgiving others will elude me.

Oh, and as a quick side note: Even if I tried to forget the wrongs that have happened to me in the past, my brain is funny, in that the more I tell it to forget something, the more it will obsess about it. That’s the way we’re wired. Eventually, the forgetting will happen naturally, when the time is right.

Bottom line: Forgiveness is deep, lifelong work and I cannot short-circuit the process by avoiding the truth, sticking with an I’m-a-victim version of my story, or avoiding the hard work of self-forgiveness.