Acceptance Precedes Forgiveness

You have to accept what has happened before you can begin to forgive. That is a vital step we all too easily miss. Pressured either by ourselves or others to forgive someone for doing something we are still struggling with, still trying to accept actually happened, that the other really did this to us, we find we cannot forgive, at least not from the heart. We may say “I forgive you,” but we do so only on the surface.

I recently told this to a woman who wrote me. She was going through a messy divorce, and was concerned with the difficulty her children were experiencing in forgiving their father for leaving her for another woman.

I wrote back that she should help her children first accept what had happened, and deal with forgiveness later. The children still wanted their father to come back to their mother, not to be with the other woman; they had not accepted the way things were. When changes in reality conflict with our wills, the child in us protests, and wants either to bring back what was or deny what is. Neither alternative permits us to accept current reality.

The Serenity Prayer is helpful in this situation: “Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” You need to begin by accepting what is. That is not the same thing as liking or choosing it, but only making those adjustments necessary to live with it.

I have worked with persons unwilling to accept the death of a loved one, or the end of a marriage. Their burning issue was acceptance, not forgiveness. Granted, relationships can be mended or new ones entered, but before you can truly go back or go forward, you must first accept the way things are. Then you can learn how and why something happened, and what you can and cannot do about it.

You can accept what you have not yet forgiven, but you cannot forgive what you have not yet accepted. You can accept that someone has died, even though you have not yet forgiven this person for abandoning you. Once you let be what is, once you are learning to live without the other, once your heart is on the mend, forgiveness will come naturally as an advance stage of healing.

It is of course almost as difficult to accept certain circumstances as it is to forgive someone for bringing them about. Acceptance is more passive, a letting be; whereas forgiveness is more active, a letting go of what was, and a taking up of your life again, a moving on both counts.

To accept means to cease fighting circumstances. Life can be unfair—yet though we sometimes lose, at other times we win. Joy and sorrow are inseparable, just as the same nerve endings which transmit pleasure can also transmit pain. If you lose the one, and you must give up on experiencing the other as well.

To accept means to go with the flow of what is, and let yourself change accordingly.

To accept means not to take everything personally, as if you were the center of the universe. Acceptance arises with the humbling realization that you are only human, that you are only in charge of you, that you cannot control others or all your life events. With such acceptance, real forgiveness becomes possible.