Grieving

Forgiveness, Healing, Marriage 0

There will come a time in your relationship when your lover hurts you and you have to grieve the wound.  Perhaps your spouse has an affair, or you may simply be hurt by a fundamental difference in beliefs or habits.  Experiencing such pain does not mean there is anything wrong with you or the relationship. . .  A period of pain and anger will follow as you deal with the loss.  This period is commonly called “grieving,” and it’s an important part of the process of forgiveness.

It is normal to experience emotional distress when our world is shaken.  It is also human nature to grieve losses and to suffer when we are mistreated. . . .

Every time you disagree with or are hurt by your lover, you must acknowledge the pain you are dealing with.  Most of the time the pain will last only for a moment, and then you can remember why you love your partner, come up with a benign explanation, and get over it.  In those situations, the grief response will be very quick.  Your gut will suddenly feel tight, or there will be a swear word on your lips. . . .

Not all difficulties, hoever, are ones that we can move through without an active and extended time of grieving.  The period of grief begins when we fully embrace the reality that there is a painful experience in our relationship that we do not want and we cannot change.  We accept our inability to make a change, and this acceptance allows us to then feel the sadness, anger, and fear that come with loss.

An ability to grieve appropriately is a necessary part of a successful marriage, but many couples do not realize this.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 173-174

What We Can Change

Forgiveness, Marriage 0

We generally cannot change the actions and thoughts of other people or what happened in our own past.  What we can change is ourselves.  Forgiveness is one way to change ourselves and in that way change our relationships with our lovers.  As we change, we go from anger and self-pity to understanding and goodwill.  Becoming a more forgiving person helps us to change our focus from our wounds to the present and future possibilities for happiness in our marriage.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 169

Give More Love

Forgiveness, Love, Parenting 0

If there’s bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love.  That always works, you know.  People say that we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you’re only punishing yourself.  And what’s the point of that?

— Mma Potokwane in The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith

Forgive

Forgiveness, Relationships 0

Forgive.  This is the critical antidote to break the toxic cycle of rejection, resentment, and revenge.  People who feel hurt end up hurting others.  Somewhere along the line, someone has to stand up and say “the hurting stops with me.”  Forgiveness is the essential first step.

— Tim Murphy, PhD, and Loriann Hoff Oberlin, Overcoming Passive-Aggression:  How to Stop Hidden Anger from Spoiling your Relationships, Career and Happiness, p. 101

Friendship in Marriage

Forgiveness, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

Another important reason to deepen your friendship with your lover is that you are more likely to be kind and loving toward someone you consider a friend.  Friendship is an invitation to be kind and generous to both ourselves and our partners.  When your lover is your friend, you understand that he or she was not put on earth just to make you happy.  Your lover has as much right as you do to have personal habits and quirks.  When we are truly friends with our partners, we show them goodwill and do not just expect to have goodwill shown to us.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 154

Separate People

Forgiveness, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

It is incredibly important, and critical to any thriving marriage, that spouses see each other as separate persons with unique goals and desires.  This is not easy to do.  In the first thrall of love, people tend to look for and find their similarities with each other and to ignore obvious differences.  It’s normal to see the ways a new partner thinks like us and to focus on the things that bind us together…. 

After a while a new couple realizes that for all their similarities they are still different in significant ways.  For many couples, this is a problematic stage, and it requires a good deal of forgiveness.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 151-152

The Gratitude Channel

Forgiveness, Gratitude, Healing, Life 0

I often ask people to pay attention to natural beauty instead of watching reruns of their old grudges….  The world is full of things to appreciate and find beautiful once you teach yourself to look.  The forgiveness and gratitude channels remind us that even though we have been hurt, we do not have to dwell on the hurt.  The one thing no one can take from us is what we pay attention to and focus on.  We may have a habit of watching the grievance channel or the bitterness channel, but we still control the remote.  The good news is that, with practice, any habit can be broken or changed.  The world is full of heroes who have overcome difficulty by tuning in to channels of courage or bravery.  Each of us can become a hero in our own life, to the benefit of our friends and family.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 142