Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

by Lysa TerKeurst

Forgiveness isn’t just about what’s in front of us. Sometimes, a bigger part of the journey is uncovering what is informing us from long ago.

The greatest hell a human can experience here on earth is not suffering. It’s feeling like the suffering is pointless and it will never get any better.

Toughness and roughness and joining in the mean game allowed my vulnerabilities to stay tucked underneath an increasingly hardened heart.

My counselor likes to encourage me to collect the dots, connect the dots, and then correct the dots.

We’ll do the connecting and correcting in future chapters. But right now, at this moment, let’s start at the beginning and allow your memories to leak out in liquid

pen strokes. Don’t fear how the words come out or get tangled up in any sort of timeline, or feel like you have to ensure every detail is precise and correct. It’s not about get...

The things marking us from yesterday are still part of the making of us today.

Feelings serve a purpose. Feelings inform us of issues that need to be addressed. They also help us empathize with others, bond with others, and know when we need to give and receive emotional support.

Love is a thing of depth. When forced to stay on the surface, it flounders about like a fish out of water. A fish can’t live on the surface, because it can’t breathe. It breathes oxygen but not from the surface air. Fish pull water through their gills, which dissolve the oxygen from the water and dispense it into their

bodies. If they don’t get below the surface, they will be starved of what gives them life. Love is a bit like that.

Love needs depth to live. Love needs honesty to grow. Love needs trust to survive. When starved of depth, it flounders. When deprived of honesty, it shrivels. ...

“We found love, and then we chose it over and over together.”

We have to be vulnerable to look at the realities of our life and make some of the connections we’re talking about. But we also gain even more vulnerability as a result of increased self-awareness. It becomes hard to pretend with others when we can no longer pretend with ourselves. And, sister, if that’s one of the only connections and corrections we make in these chapters, it was well worth the work.

“Just say what you need to say. I am listening. You are safe. I will remember who you are in light of how God created you. Together, we’ll fight the shame threatening to bully its way into your mind. I will not add to your shame. I will speak the truth but always with the goal of helping you and helping us to stay healthy. I will not reduce you to being a sum total of your struggles. I will speak life by reminding you who you really are in Christ.”

Grieving is often a long process that holds hands with forgiveness.

It’s a different kind of pain, but it’s still a pain that can make me not want to risk being taken from again.

Grieving is such a deep work and a long process, it feels like we might not survive it. But eventually we do.

Not everything that’s been taken from us was by the hand of God. But when I mentally place each and every loss in His hands, it can be redeemed. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into

the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24 ESV).

Here are some things to consider as you look for the connections in your story:

Whole, healthy people are capable of giving and receiving love. Giving and receiving forgiveness. Giving and receiving hope. Giving and receiving constructive feedback. Giving and receiving life lessons tucked within the harder things we’ve been through.

We have to get to the place where the pain we’ve experienced is a gateway leading toward growing,

learning, discovering, and eventually helping others. But if the pain is what I’m simply running into over and over, it’s a stop-gate preventing me from getting over or getting through this situation. It’s like running into a brick wall again and ag...

Based on the experiences we have, when we see something, our brains fill in details that we might not even realize.

In our physical sight, it’s not just what we see—it’s what we perceive we are seeing that determines how we define our current reality. This is true not just with our physical perceptions but with our emotional perceptions as well.

Processing through all of this takes time. So much time. But the secret to my own processing was threefold: pain, acceptance, and perspective. The pain was me expressing everything that happened and how it made me feel. This is what I did in collecting the dots. Acceptance was acknowledging that the permanent ink is now dry on those pages of my story. I cannot change what happened. This is what I did in connecting the dots.

When we don’t go through this process and can’t see anything but a darkened reality, it’s hard to let go and move on. This is because it’s impossible to travel through life and not collect emotional souvenirs.

We are either carrying healthy perspectives or files of proof from our past—evidence of what’s happened to us and how we’ve been wronged. Basically, files of proof left unattended turn into grudges and resentments that weigh us down and skew our perspectives. When we choose to walk down the path of correcting the dots, we aren’t changing where we’ve

been, but we’re sorting through our souvenirs to determine what stays with us from here: unhelpful pr...

I asked myself questions like:

As Romans 5:3–5 reminds us, “We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

As unhealthy feelings and thoughts would surface in my journal that looked more like proof than perspective, I would

Mark this chapter and determine to make it something you return to over and over for as long as you need.

I want you to read this next part aloud as a personal declaration:

I DON’T NEED TO RUN AWAY. What I’m looking for will never be found somewhere out there. •I DON’T NEED TO ISOLATE. Sometimes lies scream loudest when there are no other voices to help me call foul. •I DON’T NEED TO NUMB IT AWAY. I can’t numb my way to better. Never am I closer to healing than when my feelings are strong enough to motivate me to attend to them. Healing is letting the feeling point me all the way to the cause of an issue. And when it’s properly addressed, it gives way to hope, peace, and joy that will lead me on from here. •I DON’T NEED TO SILENCE MY JOURNALED WORDS. The words I’m writing are putting my heart on display. I can’t always see what’s inside my heart, but I can listen to what spills out. This is all helpful. The work will be worth it.

I can’t always see what’s inside my heart, but I can

listen to what spills out.

THERE IS A HEALED VERSION OF ME THAT IS WAITING AND WANTING TO EMERGE. I am capable of letting go of my proof. Proof only keeps me trapped in the place where the pain occurred, so I keep getting hurt over and over again. I will reject the seduction of nursing my grudges, and I will stop assuming God didn’t intervene to help me. Instead of running away I will run to God when I need help. Perspective is what I’m holding on to and what I’m carrying from here. I have collected the dots. Connected the dots. And corrected the dots. Now I am choosing to believe God’s most merciful outcome is the one I’m living. I’m not a victim. I am a healed woman walking in victory.

Today is the day that you start to let go of all the frustrations and fears and fragments of half-truths and flat-out lies the enemy worked really hard to get you to believe. Sort out what’s true from all that’s deceiving. You don’t need to tidy up your words for God. You just need to pour it all out. Open the case files and examine the proof—not to use against others but to see it all in light of God’s truth. Let Him reveal what you need to learn from all this and take the lessons with you . . . but don’t weaponize your pain against others. God is with you. He is the judge. He is your defender—the only one who can rescue and help you. Remember: resentful proof locked inside of you never exercised justice. It never made someone else change or righted a wrong. It never made someone repent for all they’d done. It only hurt you and imprisoned you behind the label of victim. It’s like sitting in the debris of a demolished building, refusing to let any of it be carried away. “No!” you cry. “I must hold on to this shattered glass and these broken bricks, the framing all twisted and toppled like sticks.” It must be seen for what it is: evidence of an ending. But once acknowledged and cleared of harmful debris, this same place is good ground for a beautiful rebuilding. That collected proof is not a treasure, nor is it a souvenir proving the hard place you’ve traveled to or your secret weapon of justice. It’s debris. Though you believe it’s protecting you and making your world bett...

time to call it what it is and start clearing it away. You can take what’s not broken from among its piles. Not everything is awful inside your memory files. You must empty enough so you can shift from griever to receiver. There’s new to be found. The new healing you discover will be wonderful, but it probably won’t give you answers for why all this hurt happened. Making peace with the past doesn’t mean that you’ll ever be able to make sense of what happened. Good thing there’s something better than answers. To get better you don’t have to know why. Why they hurt you, why they misunderstood you, why they betrayed you, why they didn’t love you, protect you, or stay like they should. Their reasons are multilayered with a mysterious mix of their own pain. They are dealing with their own heartbreak and their own soul wrestling. And in the end, I don’t think they even know all the reasons they made the choices they did. Knowing why is no gift at all if it never makes sense. Maybe they loved themselves too much or much too little. Maybe their hearts were too disconnected or hard or brittle. Soft hearts don’t break or beat or belittle, but broken hearts with unhealed pasts can often be found traveling wrong paths. They hurt, they sting, they

say

words they don’t really mean. The pain they project is just an effort to protect all that feels incredibly fragile inside of them. I know, because I’ve been there. For both the giving of hurt and the receiving of it too. I’m so sorry for how they hurt you. And I don’t know why they did what they did or left when they left. I’m guessing they thought you were better off without them or didn’t think of you at all. They couldn’t see you like you needed or love you like you pleaded. They just had to go. But answers about why are not what you need. Waiting for something from them holds you hostage to what the other person might not ever be willing to give. But if you want to move on? Heal? Lay down what hurts? It’s 100 percent your choice to make. The steps needed are yours to take. It’s what can be yours when you feel what you feel, think what you need to think, and say what needs to be said. Healing is yours for the taking and yours for the keeping. Emotional healing is not so much a level to reach as it is a new way of thinking you choose. It’s admitting you might be thinking about this wrong. Is there another way? There’s always another way. A better place to park. A healthy lesso...

Every bit of it still makes me cry sometimes. It’s so dang unfair. Even worse, it’s all so dang unchangeable. And unchangeable can absolutely feel unforgivable. I grieve over it all. Grieving is dreaming in reverse.

But when you are grieving over something or someone that was taken away, you wish you could go back in time. You dream in reverse. Instead of hoping for what will one day be, you long for a more innocent time when you lived more unaware of tragedy. But the griever knows they can’t go back in time. So healing feels impossible, because circumstances feel unchangeable. See if any of these unchangeable situations resonate with you:

When someone takes something I will never get back. •When I have to face not just the end of this relationship but the end of all the dreams and future plans that were attached to this person. •When the hurt is so great to me but the one who hurt me acts like it was no big deal. •When the pain seems never-ending. •When the outcome seems so final I can’t get my bearings for how to go on. •When they hurt not just me but my whole family. •When the reminders of the pain never end, because I still do life with the one who hurt me. •When they destroyed my character. •When they ruined an opportunity I’d worked my whole life for. •When they took the life of someone I loved.

When they hurt me so deeply and wounded me so gravely, I fear I’ll ne...

1. FORGIVENESS IS MORE SATISFYING THAN REVENGE.