QUESTION:

Please help me. My boss warned me on Monday that if I don’t stop being so aggressive I will be disciplined. I can’t help it. I keep thinking about how much I hate my ex-husband. He hurt me very badly. I fantasise about someone phoning me with news of his death. I feel like such a failure. How can I stop?

ANSWER:

I received this email three weeks ago. I have also run several workshops since then – all of them included some communication skills. Every time I run one of these workshops I realise how many people carry pain around with them. People who are seemingly constantly aggressive, defensive, confrontational, angry, bitter or depressed probably have someone they still need to forgive for causing them pain in some way. Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves for things we have done.

When you find it impossible to forgive another, you remain energetically connected to that person. Therefore, you are allowing the pain, the abuse and the trauma to remain with you and you give your power away to the perpetrator.

Take your power back from those who have hurt you. It is your birthright to be happy and to have inner peace. You may think that you want and are justified to hate or feel intense anger toward someone who has hurt you deeply enough to create these emotions. You may believe that they deserve it and are made to suffer by your hatred of them. The truth is that you are the one who suffers, because hatred changes who you are. Hatred, anger and resentment change your heart and mind – it eats away at your soul. By holding on to these negative, disabling thoughts and feelings, you sentence yourself to life in an emotional prison. Negative energy will dominate your entire life and you will be trapped in agony and pain.

Unfortunately these emotions do not remain specific to the relationship in which you were damaged. It spills into all your other relationships. Your thoughts, feelings and beliefs go with you from one relationship to the next. Bitterness and anger are debilitating emotions that change who you really are. This means that your nearest and dearest relationships are damaged and they don’t get to be with the real you – they get to be with a bitter shell of your former self.

Anger, bitterness and hatred disfigure your perceptions, and therefore, the manner in which you engage, receive and filter the world. Your perception is altered by these awful emotions. Don’t think for one moment that you can mask who you have become, because you show your feelings on your face and through your body language. Therefore people react and respond to you in the same manner.

Dr Phil McGraw said: “You either contribute or contaminate every relationship in your life. If you’re dragging the chains of hatred, anger, and resentment into your other relationships, then clearly, you are contaminating them. If the love in your heart is contaminated, if growing within it is the cancer of hatred, anger, and resentment, then that is the heart from which all your emotions spring. That is the love and that is the heart that you have to offer to your children, to your mate, to your parents, to your brothers and sisters, and to your fellow human beings. Hatred, anger and resentment truly change who you are. They truly prevent you from being able to give to those you love that which you want them to have.”

When you forgive someone, you let them go – for your own sake, not theirs. The perpetrators don’t have to admit their wrong-doings. You also don’t have to let them know that you forgive them. Forgiveness is about you - not them. You have to be willing to let go of the shackles of hatred, resentment and anger and release the power it has over you. Do not allow it to have such hold on you for the rest of your life. Choose to live your life with love and happiness. Choose to find the inner-peace to which you are entitled.

Dr Frederic Luskin wrote the following 9 steps to forgiveness:

Reference
Dr Phillip C McGraw, Life Strategies, (London, Vermillion, 1998) pp 202 – 204
Dr Frederic Luskin, Stanford University