Forgiving our abusers to heal

Life isn’t about what happens to us, but how we react to it. If we choose hatred and unforgiveness, we become a reflection of both.

I watch countless true crime docuseries and the look on most victims of abuse, or relatives of these victims, is unmistakable. They spend most of their lives enslaved by resentment, hopelessness and an unforgiving heart.

They bury themselves alive and blame their abusers for it. Yet nobody has the power to bury us alive except ourselves.

We become a reflection of the people we choose to hate by keeping ourselves connected to them through a bond of hatred.

The desire to move forward is not enough. These chains can only be broken with love and forgiveness.

Forgiveness is an undeserved grace we receive. When we know that, we are humbled and filled with the desire to extend it to others. Because we all fall short of being good.

Loving ourselves is not genuine unless we can also love our abusers. As I explained in ‘Loving people we dislike’, we can love people we dislike and still not keep them in our lives if they don’t show repentance.

We need to allow ourselves to be divinely filled with forgiveness and love for our abusers.

Only then can we truly love ourselves, and heal.

Loving people we dislike

Many of us don’t know the difference between loving and liking one another. Keeping people close that we don’t genuinely like doesn’t work and can wreak havoc in our lives.

We can love everyone spiritually. But liking anyone depends on compatibility and is for select people who, through their actions, have earned our appreciation and company.

When someone treats people (including ourselves) in hurtful ways, we are perfectly able to love them – if we genuinely have a relationship with God. But we will not be able to like them. They don’t deserve us, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

After all, not all company edifies us. We seek good company that we like: peaceful, joyful, loving, forgiving, thoughtful. And, yes, interesting and fun.

Company that makes us feel uncomfortable, judged, hurt, offended, manipulated, insulted or even just bored and disinterested is therefore not likeable. It is a blessing to love these people, but we don’t have to seek their company or force ourselves to like them.

We need to learn to gracefully handle people whose presence doesn’t edify us. They don’t need to be active participants in our lives.

Our calling is to love them. Pray for them. Help them. And wish for their hearts to be transformed so they can enjoy a love that will enable them to treat us as we expect to be treated.

We can bring them back into our lives as friends, family or partners if they demonstrate a change of attitude with actions (not words) for a significant amount of time, so we see consistency.

Remember: We are called to love one another, not to like everyone.

Anything beyond that is self-righteous and will destroy us.

Loving one another doesn’t always mean walking with one another

When we become a home to the one who’s all good, all love and all light, we start experiencing everything through the lens of this transcendental reality.

And this can be tricky. It isn’t uncommon for believers to fall into the many traps set by their ego and become pathologically good, which is not good.

As a new believer, navigating the word and applying it to this world was quite a challenge. I was going above and beyond for people who hadn’t earned my devotion. I was there for people who had severe difficulty to recognize the toxic effects of their actions in my life. I was apologizing to people who couldn’t apologize to me. I was giving my all to people for whom no good was ever good enough.

I never realized that I was making sacrifices. And even when I did realize that, I still didn’t understand that we’re called to show mercy, not to make sacrifices.

We can love our best friends, people who hate us and the Ted Bundys of this world all in one shot because loving one another is not about merit. But we are called to love one another, not to befriend or marry our abusers.

When it comes to selecting our life partner or close friends, they must earn our company. Our love. Our willingness to go above and beyond for them. Forgive and stay with them. Nobody is perfect, but having the humility to admit one’s mistakes and repenting from them is essential.

It is a simple principle in place from the one who gave us our precious lives. We deal with what we can’t avoid. But otherwise we choose what’s good.

God healed overnight what therapy couldn’t heal in years

When I was an atheist, two psychologists helped me navigate and cope with a series of life events that crushed me. But they never healed me.

To say that I was hanging by a thread would be an understatement. And although I have a lot of appreciation for deeply humane and loving psychologists like the ones who helped me, there’s only so much they can do.

I couldn’t imagine myself going one week without therapy. At that point I felt emotionally crippled. My life was a full-time burden.

That’s when I did the unimaginable. One night I surrendered and asked God for help. Being an atheist, I had no idea what I was doing. But I had a crushed, humble heart as I called him. And God listened.

God healed overnight what two different psychologists couldn’t heal in years.

For the first time in my life I knew that there was one who loved me just the way I always wanted to be loved. And his divine love set me free.

God’s love worked in me to forgive others who had been the root cause of a lot of emotional turmoil in my life. And he also taught me to forgive myself.

Without God’s love, I could never have healed.

It is his divine and eternal love in me that makes it possible to forgive everyone and the world everyday, regardless of merit. And heal.