Forgiving What You Can't Forget

Forgiving What You Can’t Forget teaches you how to heal from past traumas that still haunt you today, like childhood abuse or an unfaithful spouse, and how to find peace by forgiving those who have wronged you.

People who experience pain will often do things that numb it rather than face it. Some people might choose drugs, alcohol, or casual sex. Other people try to cover up the pain by being overly positive, so they can convince themselves they are okay.

The author chose the latter. She would keep telling herself everything was okay and that she forgave her unfaithful husband. Her therapist saw through this. He told her that she was using positivity and hyper-spiritualization to cover up her real feelings. She wasn’t dealing with the pain.

Coping strategies only help temporarily. We can’t live in a state of denying our feelings forever. To heal, we need to face reality. If we look at the pain head-on, we can decide how to move forward and heal.

The author says having a counsellor helped her finally start the healing process. Saying things like, “God will eventually make everything all right,” allowed her to continue living life without really forgiving, for example.

In avoiding forgiving her husband, she wasn’t allowing herself to move on. Only once she started looking at the past and understanding the traumas that were there, she finally started to heal.

To start your learning process, forgive, and let go; first, you need to do what the author’s therapist called collecting the dots. This means looking back at the things in your past that shape your views now. TerKeurst revisited memories such as living with a single mom and having an absent father. At one point, she was repeatedly abused by a babysitter who warned her never to tell anyone, so she kept the abuse a secret. Eventually, she had trouble trusting anyone, especially men. After collecting these dots, she realized forgiveness isn’t just about the present. It’s often uncovering the things that happened long ago that affect us even now. After doing this, she next learned to connect the dots. This is when we reevaluate our beliefs. The author’s past left her with a distrust of men, and the man she finally trusted, her ex-husband Art, betrayed her. She realized that if she forgave Art, she would have to forgive all the other men who had hurt her. Lastly, she began to Correct the Dots. This means examining all of your beliefs that come from your past experiences and making sure they are positive. When a specific person from her past brought out negative emotions, TerKeurst reframed them more positively and imagined what good would come from…