During my studies in grief counselling I have learned that denial can actually serve a helpful role in the initial stages of experiencing a loss. Sometimes, our psyche literally cannot handle what has just happened and denial can work as an ally to buy some time for our whole system to be able to process the loss. However, if this coping mechanism becomes prolonged it can start to hinder and delay healing.
An essential first task for working through grief is to be able to fully accept the loss. With moving towards acceptance comes all the anger, confusion, fear of the future, loss of safety and other big emotions that can accompany processing grief. For this reason, often a protector in the form of blame can rise up in us attempting to spare us the painful process.
Our fallen human system is a system of judgement and it runs off of constantly determining what is good or bad, right or wrong. When faced with a painful loss this system goes into overdrive trying to sort out who is to blame for why this happened. Our well-meaning but miss-guided system can try to keep us looking to assign blame rather than feeling through our own pain.
The truth is we didn’t want it to happen.
We thought we had more control than that.
What are we going to do now?
In the case of some tragedies there may be very real people and circumstances to blame. Some accidents seem senseless and deliberate violent acts are cruel. Our own vulnerability comes into view and the tragically broken state of humanity stares us straight in the face. There is no where to run from this reality unless we plan to keep running all our lives. Some people do. Some losses take people beyond their coping power and without a powerful intervention they may never move past it.
One powerful intervention and healing tool comes in the form of forgiveness. If forgiveness is not an option, acceptance can not be either. The only thing that enables and completes an acceptance in an area so deep inside of us as tragic loss is the ability to let it go.
That is what forgiveness ultimately is. The words translated in the Bible for forgiveness convey the meaning, “to send away the results of”. For me that brings a lot of clarity to what the process of forgiving is meant to achieve for us.
Once we are ready and the fullness of what we are experiencing has be recognized and heard, we can utilize this powerful tool to “send away” from us the harmful results of what happened. We release ourselves, and our future from the grip of what happened to us or what someone else did. We come to a place where we forgive and accept the place we are in now.
This is an essential step in moving forward.
It can take time, sometimes loads of time. It’s important to let the truth about how we feel surface and not be too quick to try to forgive.
Our hearts do not let go until they have been held.
We can bring all the lostness and nastiness that we find within ourselves during this process to the One who understands the depths of painful loss. We can ask for help to come to a place where we can truly let it go. Here is a helpful model for forgiving.
- Hear it: The true cost of what we need to forgive can only come forward if we are willing to let it. Guided by the Holy Spirit we can go into that painful reality and memory and hear how our hearts truly feel about it.
- Say it: In order for forgiveness to be affective we must talk to the one we are forgiving. I don’t mean in person but thanks to the sophistication of our God-made internal system we can go there in our imaginations and talk directly to the other person or situation. An example would be “Dad, I forgive you for ______”. Without the threat of direct confrontation with the other person being physically there we are free to say it all.
- Accept it: Accepting that it did happen and others did do/say what we didn’t want them to is hard but will become much easier after our hearts have been heard. When we are ready we can say, “I accept that ____”.
- Let it Go: This is the final step and the releasing point of what happened. “Today I choose to forgive you for ____ and I let it go”.
This process may not be linear, nor may it be accomplished in one go. With a determination to forgive we can move through to this goal at the pace it needs to go. Father God is our example of how to forgive and the entire Godhead will be there to help us experience the freedom of forgiveness too. Forgiveness has very little to do with the other person. It is about our hearts getting free and sending away the life-sapping results of what happened.
You can let it go. You’re stronger than you know.
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