Necessary for Healing

Forgiveness, Healing, Life, Relationships 0

Forgiveness can wrap up the grief, but it does not prevent the inevitable and necessary suffering.  When there is a serious injury or loss, there is no way to avoid pain.  If you want to have a satisfactory future, you will need to feel the loss and then let go of the hurt it has caused you.  You need to forgive.

Even if you decide to divorce after a betrayal, you will still need to forgive….  When you forgive, you are able to be at peace even though rejection, disloyalty, and dishonesty have been a part of your life.

Your best chance for successful future relationships and overall happiness is to forgive your former partner.  Forgiveness is not a substitute for grief, nor does it preclude the pain caused by your partner’s cheating.  But it does gently allow your grief to ebb so that you can move on and live a successful life.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 21

An Essential Skill in a Successful Marriage

Forgiveness, Marriage 0

Being able to remain calm when your wishes are unfulfilled is an essential skill in a successful marriage.  If you are honest with yourself, you will agree that not getting exactly what you want from your partner is a major challenge in even a good relationship.  One reason this happens is that we experience such minor disappointments on a regular basis.  Our partners do things against our wishes every day, and even if they do what we want sometimes, it is not exactly the way we wanted.  Learning how to cope with this successfully is essential….

Forgiving your partner does not mean you have to accept everything your lover does.  It simply means you can contentedly live with your lover without getting upset every time he or she chooses to ignore your wishes.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 16-17

New Opportunities

Core Value, Healing, Joy, Life 0

So now you have the opportunity to keep your life gaslight-free and go on to a new future.  You have the chance to rework or leave unsatisfying relationships and choose new relationships that feed your sense of self, your vitality, and your joy.  You have the chance to become a stronger, more solid person who charts her own course and lives by her own values.  Most important, you have the chance to discover what you truly want — in your work, your home life, your relationships, and yourself.  Freed from the Gaslight Effect, you can make better choices, choices that are right for you.  As you begin this exciting new portion of your life’s journey, I wish you strength and spirit and all the luck in the world.

— Dr. Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect, p. 233

Forgiveness as Acceptance

Forgiveness, Peace 0

The ability to remain at peace when you do not get what you want is forgiveness….

When you want something different from what you actually get, you are always in a position of struggle.  That struggle often shows up as anger or despair or a sense of helplessness.  The good news is that you can get over those negative emotional reactions and learn to be at peace….

Whether or not you remain at peace is mostly up to you.  Forgiveness contains the understanding that another person’s action, no matter how awful, does not compel you to be endlessly miserable, angry, or emotionally distraught.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 14-15

A Sense of Your Worth

Core Value, Relationships 0

The key to remaining gaslight-free is not to let your self-worth depend on someone else’s approval.  If there is even one little part of you that wants the approval of another person to make you feel better about yourself, boost your confidence, or bolter your sense of who you are in the world, then you are a gaslightee waiting for a gaslighter.  So developing a strong, clear sense of yourself and your worth is crucial to staying out of gaslighting relationships.

— Dr. Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect, p. 224

An Essential Ingredient

Forgiveness, Marriage 0

Think about it.  The centrality of commitment in relationships is expressed through the marriage vows, which ask us to love our partners through richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and for better and for worse until death.  That means that we promise to love them when they are not doing well, when they have failed, when life is not exactly turning out as hoped, or when we’re going through a financial reversal.  What I see in the marriage vows is a basic prescription:  if we want our relationships to last, we better be prepared to forgive.  The vows make it clear that over the life of a marriage we will experience difficulty and pain and that it is our responsibility to stay connected to our partners.  How could we possibly do this without forgiveness?  What other form of healing would clean the slate and give us fresh eyes and an open heart?

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 4

Letting Go

Letting Go, Marriage, Relationships, Truth 0

Of course my frustration was justified!  But that’s beside the point.  What kept me locked into the Gaslight Tango was my inability to accept that my husband was going to see things his own way, regardless of what I did.  If he wanted to think I was unreasonable, he would, no matter how hard I argued or how upset I got.  As soon as I understood that he — and he alone — had power over his own thoughts, no matter how right I might be, and that he wasn’t going to change, no matter what I said or did, I took a significant step toward freedom.

— Dr. Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect, p. 192

Wisdom of Women

Relationships, Trials 0

Women have a remarkable way of helping other women.  The wisdom of women can be a life raft when you are in the midst of a transition.  When you get together with them, they always tell you how fabulous you are even when you don’t feel fabulous!

— This Is Not the Life I Ordered, by Deborah Collins Stephens, Jackie Speier, Michealene Cristini Risley, and Jan Yanehiro, p. 205

Enriching the Universe

Compassion, Life, Love 0

We enrich the universe with something far more valuable than money when we contribute love.  One act of caring may have more effect, more power than we can realize; here finding entry into a lonely heart, there encouraging and giving hope to a confused mind.  The universal love story is written line by line with simple acts of loving people doing a kindness for someone who’s having a hard time.

— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love