Forgiveness for Abuse

This may seem like an odd place to mention forgiveness, but in order to know how forgiveness can clear your emotions, bring healing, and raise your vibration, you need to understand what unforgiveness or any other repressed emotion does to your energy field. Have you ever noticed how awful you feel after you’ve had an argument with someone? Regardless of who lost or won (everyone loses when anger is used to manipulate an outcome), you may continue to relive the incident and obsess over the situation instead of simply forgiving the offense and moving on. Energy attracts energy similar to itself. It does not matter what the form your anger takes—sarcasm, criticism, judgment, apathy, depression—carrying around an energetic burden of anger, fear, sadness, or vengeance lowers your vibration and attracts like energy. When you are angry with another person, you continue to send negative energy to them, and guess what? Whatever you send out, comes back to you, magnified. Even after you stuff an emotion deeply enough that you no longer feel it, it is still alive and actively destroying your aura and chakras as well as causing damage to your physical body.

When someone acts wrongly, he is actually giving you an opportunity to bless him and yourself. You need the same forgiveness you offer him. In fact, there is no way to accept forgiveness without offering it because whatever you deny others is exactly what you lack. When you deny forgiveness you will feel deprived. The only way to get rid of this kind of detrimental energy is to offer forgiveness to everyone. Here’s how according to lesson 122 in A Course in Miracles:

Begin by thinking of someone you do not like, who seems to irritate you; one you actively despise, or merely try to overlook.

Now close your eyes and see him in your mind, and look at him a while. Try to perceive some light in him somewhere; a little gleam that you have never noticed. Try to find some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture that you hold of him. Look at this picture until you see a light somewhere within it, for in that light his holiness shows you your savior, saved and saving, healed and whole. Now try to expand this light until it covers him and makes the picture beautiful and good. Then let him offer you the light you see in him.

Look at this changed perception for a while, and then turn your mind to someone you consider a friend. Try to transfer the light you learned to see around your former “enemy” to this friend. Let your “enemy” and friend unite in blessing you with what you have given them. Now are you one with them, and they with you. Now you have been forgiven by yourself.

Do not forget, throughout the day, the role forgiveness plays in bringing happiness to your mind.

I realize there are some abusive situations that are difficult to forgive—in fact, it is impossible for the ego to forgive anything or let go of an offense. Only by allowing Spirit to address the situation can forgiveness come forth. True forgiveness is not overlooking the “bad” in a person; it is about letting go of anything that keeps you from experiencing peace of mind. This means giving up “attack” thoughts and not taking things personally or projecting your expectations on to others. It means not seeing yourself as a victim, who has been attacked, abandoned, betrayed, misunderstood, etc. You have to release the personal thought system (ego) by recognizing your oneness with Spirit/Source and others. This is not something we can grasp intellectually. We must allow Spirit/Source into our awareness over and over until love becomes a real experience. When you are centered in Spirit, you can simply observe abusive behavior and recognize that this person is behaving that way because of something going on in his or her mind; it has nothing to do with you. You can then decide to be around this person/behavior or not. Remaining in an uncomfortable or dangerous situation is self-torture, not forgiveness. Your choice to no longer speak with this person is a miracle, not a failure! A miracle shifts your mind toward peace, away from conflict. Forgiveness and peace show up as a result of your choice to take care of yourself by avoiding an abusive person. You can’t expect the abusive person to change his ways. A miracle always occurs in your mind; therefore, a change of mind is all that is needed to bring you peace.

“To release the charge of an emotion is not the same as deleting the memory of the event,” writes Luis Angel Diaz on page 14 in his book, Memory in the Cells. “It involves liberating the trapped vital force in order to use it for growth and self-healing.”1

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