Free Your Burdened Soul: Psychologists Say Forgiveness And Letting Go Are The Keys To A Healthy Outlook

Jun 28, 2018 by apost team

Life is full of hills, peaks, valleys, and sometimes, deep cavernous ravines of emotions that leave us feeling helpless and even permanently traumatized simply because someone has done wrong by us and left us to pick up the emotional pieces. There is a gamut of emotions we experience when we have completely trusted another human being who has betrayed us. It is like experiencing the death of a loved one according to medical experts, so we actually will go through the stages of grief including denial, anger, and feeling very vulnerable.

But to get to the final stage of the process which is acceptance and forgiveness, it can be a very long road and one with many emotional obstacles that many people do not know how to achieve. Part of it has to do with how our brains react to being betrayed.

When we are treated badly, our psyche kicks into what is referred to as a “fight or flight” response to the mistreatment. Whether it is a spouse cheating on you or simply someone taking credit for your hard work at the office, our brain’s memory function stores the occurrence in direct proportion to the emotional reaction we had to the moment we experienced the realization of the betrayal. So, if the body perceives someone as a threat, our reaction to them is severely heightened with the activation of the acute stress response.

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These traumatic memories, according to pyschologists, is our brain’s way of protecting us from harm by incorporating the traumatic memories into our memory bank, so that we either step up to the person and “attack” them so they will go away, or we simply become numb and try to remove the emotion from our mind in order to not be hurt by it anymore. Either way, a person is not processing the betrayal in a healthy manner and is doomed to live with it over and over again until they reach the stage of acceptance and ultimately forgiveness toward the other person.

Releasing the “fight or flight response” from your brain and ultimately your nervous system by simply working through the trauma in a mindful way, allows your brain to remove it from a “threat-mode” and stop reliving it. This neutralizes the stress hormones in your system that are released when you hold anger and even vengeful thoughts and don’t let them go.

You can work through the following steps to help yourself begin to accept what happened and ultimately forgive:

Some people, especially while in a “fight or flight” mode, don’t even accept the notion of forgiveness. They see their anger as a means by which they protect themselves from further emotional damage. Accepting that there are a means by which you can forgive is the first and most important step.

You have to tell yourself that it is ultimately your choice to forgive someone. You can’t be pressured into doing it by a professional therapist, family, or loved ones. It is your process to go through in your time frame to that you must follow through to the very end in order to come out with a newfound peace toward the person who betrayed you.

This acts as a tangible reminder to your brain of all the emotional trauma you associate with betrayal you have experienced in your life and probably are still holding onto in the present. It is something that you can look at and visualize the build-up of emotional pain you are holding onto that you need to let go, one-by-one.

As you work through your list, each one becomes a process in and of itself that you need to work through, beginning with anger. Ask yourself about each person and why you feel the anger you do toward them. Process the emotion verbally. This can include a lot of raw emotion, so work through it either with a professional or with a loved one that you trust and can be vulnerable around without judgment.

As you process the anger, feel your emotions wash over you once again and, in a sense, relive the betrayal, you are now ready to let go of the anger and start talking about forgiving each person.

This does not mean you fully accept what they did, it only means you can find sympathy in their actions towards you because you recognize that they are also human and have weaknesses that lead them to make mistakes even at your expense, but that they cannot harm you anymore.

Begin to look at the other individual as part of the same core group as you belong to, which is humanity. You both share human frailties you are working through, and ultimately are equal in your shared mortality.

This stage usually begins to occur organically once you have started to see the other person as having human weaknesses that may have pushed them into betraying you. This is when your anger toward the other person begins to dissipate and is replaced with sympathy.

Your emotional trauma now begins to really be raw as you work toward your acceptance of how you were treated. Instead of backing away from the pain, embrace it. Move through it and let wash over you one more time in order to let the unhealthy feelings finally go.

Now that you have worked through the anger, you can see the situation in a different way. This is your time to reflect on what happened including the reasons why the other person chose to do what they did. This should lead you to a moment of clarity for their actions that involves forgiving them.

If you are not quite at the point of forgiving, then go ahead and do the process all over again. This might happen over a period of weeks and even months, but make a conscious effort to go through the steps until you have let go of the negative emotions that are clouding your life and moved on to forgiving and forgetting.

How do you work through betrayal? Have you found success in letting go of your emotional trauma in other ways? Help others by showing them this article and telling them your experiences.