Acceptance and Forgiveness

I started this blog post awhile back and have a zillion different entries ready for the writing but as my painting teacher always said, "never leave a painting unfinished, even if you have to totally paint over the top...keep going".

In working with acceptance and forgiveness I simply want to share what I have learned for myself recently about accepting people for who they are and forgiving people who have hurt us. This is a continuation of an older blog post.

First off, I have learned that acceptance and forgiveness don't necessarily equate to "gee now because I accept you for who you are and forgive you for the past I suddenly want to be in relationship to you." In my life, there have been people who have hurt me and who continue to hurt me and I was in a state of "victimy non-acceptance" that this person will change and I should just hang in there.

But I was wrong. I realized that a prerequisite for me to forgive and let go of my anger, my victim stance, my need to be right and prove them wrong was that I had to choose to have an empowered sense of self that didn't go back for more icky treatment. And the way to do this without baggage is to do so with openness to my own humanity (that I am not any better than the other person), with clarity, however, that I don't want to be treated that way any longer, with genuine (not patronizing) love and empathy for myself the other person and what we both have been thru in our own life experiences to create such a disconnect between us.

My recipe for acceptance and forgiveness=
1. anger immersion until the point that I recognize my anger is about needs
2. articulation and acceptance of my own needs and their inability to be met
3. accepting the other person's limited capacity to meet me as a whole and differentiated adult with needs
4. making a choice of what is and isn't tolerable in this relationship
5. choosing to not go back for more of the intolerable
6. remain open to the possibility things I find intolerable now may not be intolerable later

This recipe was hard won after many years of looking at how I do relationship, working the "non violent communication" protocol by Marshall Rosenberg and a Master's in Psychology. I think the most important piece is not my recipe, for we each will have our own, but that I feel at peace and loving and grateful for all my relationships and that I can now consider them teachers.