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

“And whatever my feelings don’t yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover. Amen.”

Each offense requires a marked moment of releasing the unforgiveness that threatens to hold us hostage and hold us back from moving forward.

I’ll then remember that the hurt they caused was most likely from hurt they carried. It doesn’t justify their actions, but it does help me have compassion for the hurt they have surely suffered.

“I forgive this person for how their actions back then are still impacting me now. And whatever my feelings don’t yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover.”

Revisiting the past can be scary. But if we want to fully heal, we need to dig into our stories to understand what’s behind the curtain.

Woven throughout our experiences is a connecting thread that pulls the beliefs we formed from our past into the very present moments of today.

If we listen carefully, woven throughout our narratives is a belief system that formed inside of us as children.

What

we experience all throughout life impacts the perceptions we carry.

The longer we carry those perceptions, the more they become the truths we believe, live by, operate under, and us...

It’s important to start making these connections between what happened in our growing-up years and the reasons we do some of the things we do, say some of the things we say, and...

Being taught to stuff feelings early in life can sometimes mean you never learn how to properly understand feelings later in life. 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 needs depth to live. Love needs honesty to grow. Love needs trust to survive.

I’ve heard it said that people fall in love. I wish the expression was more like, “We found love, and then we chose it over and over together.” I much prefer that to falling.

I never made the connection that people who are quiet are sometimes the ones in the most pain. It’s just that their screams are silent. Or, they are acting out in secret.

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.

The one who pretends will never be the one who realizes how desperately they need to be forgiven. So forgiving others will always seem more like another thing they have to do rather than a freeing process they can participate in.

Now raw honesty can spill out without the other jumping in to quickly mop it all up. Or without personalizing unfiltered emotion as an attack. Now our conversations are more like “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.”

Though I was forgiving, I was still grieving over all the hurt. I was still grieving over wrongs not yet made right. I was still grieving over choices I didn’t agree with. Grieving is often a long process that holds hands with forgiveness.

Any sacrifice placed in the hand of God, God can bring good from.

At the very same time we grieve a loss, we gain more and more awareness of an eternal perspective. Grieving is such a deep work and a long process, it feels like we might not survive it. But eventually we do.

And even though we still may never agree on this side of eternity that the trade the good God gave us is worth what we’ve lost, we hold on to hope by trusting God. Everything lost that we place in the hands of God isn’t a forever loss.

Martin Luther said, “I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God...

They don’t forget things said to them. They are always building a case to support their perceptions.

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.

The experiences I have affect the perceptions I form. The perceptions I form eventually become the beliefs I carry. The beliefs I carry determine what I see.

Again, while I cannot change what happened, I get to choose what I now believe and how what happened changes me for better or worse.

Then I had to think through the story I now tell myself because of this experience by asking several questions: •What do I now believe about the person who hurt me or people with whom I’m in a similar type relationship? •What do I now believe about myself? •What do I now believe about other people who witnessed or knew about what happened? •What do I now believe about the world at large because of this situation? •And what do I now believe about God as a result of this whole experience?

I started really focusing in on the reaction I had physically and emotionally to the mention of each person’s name. I asked myself questions like: •Do I cringe? Roll my eyes? Feel my pulse quicken? Clench my jaw? Let out a sigh? •Do I shake my head at the unfairness of good things happening to them?

Do I celebrate secretly when I hear they are having difficulties, with thoughts like, they finally got what’s coming to them? •Do I dream of the moment when I get to present all my proof and hear them finally admit what they did was wrong? •When I talk to other people about this story, am I quick to try and convince others how wronged I was, hoping to elicit a satisfyingly sympathetic reaction from them toward me and some kind of statement affirming how awful my offender’s actions really were? •If they are still a regular part of my life, am I always expecting the worst from them? •Am I easily offended, put off, aggravated, and annoyed by them or people who remind me of them?

Do I acknowledge what was hard but feel a sense of calm and peace? •Can I sincerely pray for them when they’re facing difficult things? •Can I manage my emotions when good things happen to them?

Am I eager to share a helpful perspective with others facing a similar situation, hoping to help them get to a better place? •Can I look for what is good in other people? •Do I look for life lessons and collect those instead of grudges? •What hurt might my offender have suffered that would have led them to do what they did? Can I have compassion for the offender’s brokenness? •Can I be authentically kind to this person who was unkind to me, even with the boundaries I may need to draw?

And then probably the most important questions of all were those that helped me to reframe my story and start to see it from a different vantage point: •How might I look at this differently? •Is there a redeeming part of this story I can focus on? •What good could come about if I decide to forgive and not keep dwelling on all the ways I was hurt? •Are there positive ...

Finally, I processed my suffering through the fact that God never wastes our suffering. 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.” With this in mind, I asked myself these last questions: •What would a healthy version of me be empowered to do from here? •How can this h...

be honest with the feelings I was having; •be brave enough to stop the accompanying runaway thoughts, even if I had to say that out loud; •check possible distortions with other trusted friends, my counselor, and with the Word of God; •find a Scripture verse that can speak truth to some part of the memory and apply God’s Word to my thinking; and •process through it until I could find a more healed way of looking at and telling my story.

We need to feel what we feel. We need to think through what we need to think through. We need to get it all out and sort it all out. And, most of all, we need to stay put and be present for it all.

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.

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.

Waiting for something from them holds you hostage to what the other person might not ever be willing to give.

When the hurt is so great to me but the one who hurt me acts like it was no big deal.

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.

Or you’re afraid they would then expect a restored relationship that’s not possible on your end.

You pay double when you carry that pain inside your heart and it causes you to say and do things you wouldn’t otherwise say and do. You may think getting back at them will make you feel better in the short term, but in the long term it will always cost you more emotionally and spiritually than you’d ever want to pay.

Forgiveness releases to the Lord your need for them to be punished or corrected, giving it to the only One who can do this with right measures of justice and mercy.

Forgiveness doesn’t let the other person off the hook. It actually places them in God’s hands. And then, as you walk through the forgiveness process, it softens your heart.

Sin always masquerades as fun and games.

One of the people who hurt me most appeared to have had a perfect life. There was no apparent abuse, neglect, or hardship of any kind. But what appeared to be perfect was filled with secret pain. And when I found out about it, I cried. For their pain. For my pain. For the fact that no human gets through life without being deeply, deeply hurt at some point. Grief finds all of us.