- It's hard to forgive and forget, but many people choose to try.
- You shouldn't rush to forget, because you need to work through the feelings first.
- It will be uncomfortable to face your emotions, but it's the only way you'll really be able to forgive someone.
- Otherwise, you're suppressing how you really feel, and it'll manifest itself in other ways like pain, stress, and anxiety.
- Here are three steps you need to follow to start forgiving and really forget.
When Tibet was invaded by the People's Liberation Army of China in the 1950s, one monk was in jail for 15 years, and was tortured nearly the entire time. When he was released, he went to the Dalai Lama and said of his experience, "my Holiness, I was very afraid."
The Dalai Lama asked him what he was scared of, and the monk responded: "I was really afraid I wouldn't feel compassion for my captors anymore."
In a world where revenge and justice are served, this might seem incomprehensible.
Psychologist Carolin Müller, who has studied Buddhist psychotherapy, told INSIDER: "Can you imagine that, you're tortured for many years then you feel compassion for the one who tortured you?
"After all they've been through, all this stuff that happened to them... because they put themselves in the shoes of the other."
Choosing to forgive and forget when someone hurts you is a big decision, but it can be done. One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to jump right to forgetting, without going through the process of truly forgiving, Müller said.
Trying to ignore what happened is like trying to keep a ball under the water in a pool, she said. You use all your strength to push it down and push it down, but sooner or later it will shoot up like a rocket. If we don't face our emotions, sooner or later, that pain is going to boil over, manifesting as problems like body pain, anxiety, stress, or insomnia.
"You can't force yourself to forget because forgetting is a natural process," said Müller.
"Say my husband cheated on me, we're going to get a divorce, but I just forget all of this happened. I will go to the apartment, burn all the pictures, throw all the gifts he ever gave me in the garbage, and I'm not going to think about him at all anymore. But do you really forget? I don't think that you do."
She said that instead, we have as if we've forgotten, "because if you did think about it, it would still hurt you."
To get to a place where you can truly forget, Müller said you must forgive. It's a much healthier process, because it puts distance between you and the thing that happened. But it's a long journey with three main steps.
1. Put yourself in the other person's shoes.
When someone hurts you, it feels reassuring to play the victim. You think of yourself as the good and the other as the bad, said Müller, because it's good for your ego.
"But in the end, forgiving is to understand this other person is not much different from me," she said. "We are all the same, and we all have our problems. This person is not evil, neither am I the good one."
Everyone is struggling in life and has their own problems. So even though the person who hurt you behaved badly, Müller said it's important to be introspective and realise you're not perfect either.
You can also consider how much of a bad place they must be in themselves to have hurt you. Like with the Buddhist monk who had compassion for his torturers — he was able to put himself in their shoes, and feel pity for their pain that caused them to treat him so badly.
"How painful is your life, if you can torture somebody, if you can hurt somebody, if you can cheat on somebody, if you can cause them misery?" said Müller. "How much suffering do you feel in your life? Are you connected to your heart? ... If you are able to put yourself in the position of the other I think you're always more likely to find a way to forgive."
2. Face your emotions.
In Western cultures we have this tendency to suppress emotions because we are scared of them, Müller said. But your feelings aren't going to kill you.
"I'm not asking you to put a knife in your heart, I'm just asking you to feel," she said. "Listen to what your soul, your body, and your brain has to tell you. Because if you don't feel an emotion, it gets stuck in your body."
It'll be scary at the beginning to allow yourself to feel, but it will get better. Once you've accepted the emotion, you know it can't hunt you down again. Then, you can start to let go.
"There's an emotion in me, but it's not the one who's the captain of the ship," Müller said. "I'm in control."
3. Forgive yourself.
The third step is giving yourself enough time to heal, without beating yourself up about what happened.
"Sometimes we say 'I should have seen that coming,' or 'I should have known better,'" said Müller. "You need a lot of love and forgiveness towards yourself. You did the best that you could in that situation. And I think in every situation there is something to learn."
Even if the lesson you learn is that life is precious, or that people can be cruel, you've still grown. And through that you become stronger, Müller said.
"Once you forgive, then you will be able to forget," she said. "You will see the memory gets blurry and it doesn't really matter if he accused me of not giving him enough love, or he accused me of not being pretty enough — it's not really important what he did to me."
Müller has seen many people struggle with their past because they haven't learned to forgive, and so they can never move on from what other people have done or said to them.
"If you always live in the past, you will always live where something has happened to you," she said. "Our life is so short, but if you live only in the past you can never enjoy your present. It's as simple as that."