Forgiveness isn't saying "I'm sorry." It's choosing not to make them sorry.

My only goal is to not cause additional harm.

And some days, that is the hardest job on the planet.

What's on my mind right now is the word forgiveness.

My favorite definition of forgiveness is to 'not cause additional harm.'

I've been focused on that as my intention, and let me tell you about the word intention: it means "to stretch." I'm stretching toward the man I want to become. Shedding off, more truthfully, all of the things I don't want to be.

Returning to my Giantness.

Sometimes we have to make decisions that are really hard, and they don't make sense to everybody involved, at least not right up front. Sometimes those decisions cause hurt in another person. When I broke up with Andrea, my intention wasn't to punish or hurt her in any way. It most definitely isn't to cause additional harm after the breakup, because it's already hard enough.

Why would I need to go in and make it even worse?!

Why would I want to cause additional harm?!

That's not the goal.

The goal is to recognize that this is a difficult thing and it hurts. It hurts me, and it hurts her.

My goal is not to hurt her. I was noticing things in me that were causing her to hurt, and because of misalignments, they weren't likely to change without one of us losing ourselves.

I'm not in the business of making people lose themselves.

And I'm not in the business of losing myself.

Therefore, I had to make a hard decision to separate myself from somebody I deeply love.

And yes, all the emotions come up in the Journey of Grief.

It's amazing what shows up. Some days I don't even want to get out of bed. All I can do is one thing. My work is a mess, my mind is foggy, all these things.

And one of the things that's not talked about very much is anger as part of the grieving process.

If you look at Susan Anderson's work on abandonment, she talks about SWIRL, an acronym that stands for Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalization, Rage, and Lifting. And Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talks about DABDA, which is an acronym for Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

The common word I want to focus on in both of these acronyms is anger.

Anger isn't meant to hurt other people or to burn them up in our fire; which, by the way, is how we tend to burn ourselves up in our own anger.

But I've been taught, "Please don't be angry. Don't ever be angry. Anger is never useful."

I wholeheartedly disagree. Anger is incredibly useful. I wrote a little while back about the Forge of Anger on my blog at my 12 journeys dot com.

This is what I shared:

> There is a fire they tell you to put out.

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> A heat they tell you is dangerous.

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> They tell you to be gentle. To be soft. To forgive and forget.

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> And for years I listened. I made my boundaries from half-hearted hopes and flimsy requests. They were suggestions, easily bent by guilt, easily eroded by someone else’s persistence. I was soft metal, afraid of the forge, and I paid the price. I let the poison of other people’s stories seep into my own.

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> I was wrong.

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> Your soul isn’t purified with gentle requests. It’s tempered in fire.

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> Righteous anger is the forge.

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> It is the blast furnace that gets hot enough to melt you down to your core essence and burn away the impurities. The years of self-doubt. The residue of gaslighting. The voice that whispers “maybe it was my fault.”

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> All of it turns to ash and smoke in this heat.

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> This is the holy fire where you finally learn to decide. The word itself is a weapon. It comes from the Latin de, meaning “off,” and caedere, meaning “to cut.”

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> To decide is to cut off.

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> A boundary forged in this fire is not a picket fence. It is a wall of tempered f****** steel. It doesn't need to be explained. It doesn’t need to be negotiated. It simply is.*

We misunderstand anger and its usefulness.

If the fire gets too hot, it will burn us up. It won't just purify what no longer serves us. And often, in anger, we want to find a villain to place that anger on.

That is why forgiveness is so essential, because we could very easily cause additional harm.

When I was going through my divorce with Amanda, my first wife, after a 17-year marriage, I felt anger. But I made a commitment not to cause my previous wife additional harm. Instead, I chose to put a marble in her jar. I shared the amazing story behind that, and you can read it here on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16s2H3wcrL/

...but I'm not here to talk about the marble in the jar, I mean, not directly anyway, but more about focusing on the power of forgiveness and not causing additional harm. Not to myself, and not to Andrea. She's not my enemy. Instead, I choose to lay down any weapons of war or hurt.

Everything is a creation. Every bit of it. We get to choose what we do with our energy. We can be angry and not hurt another person.

Sometimes there's no way around the hurt.

Breaking up with a person means that all of those positive experiences, all of that love, all of those journeys and moments that we had together that were very real and raw could easily get burned up in anger. That's not my goal.

I love the best parts of our relationship, and I want to use the anger to burn out what didn't serve. Not to punish her or to cause hurt to her, but to help my body be the man that I am.

To be the Giant.

That's a very intentional act.

And sometimes it's one small step in the day. If that's all I can do, I'll take one small step toward being that. After all, giants still take small steps; they're just bigger and more intentional. And one of my intentions is not to be the man who causes hurt to another human. Especially Andrea.

In anger, it could be very easy to look past all of the good that came from that relationship and go right for the throat. To cause additional harm and feel vindicated and justified in it.

But that's not who I am. My character is not that. My character is one of forgiveness. One of putting a marble in the jar. Of loving even when I have to leave. I can recognize our misalignments without making her the villain. Instead of seeking "justice" for the misalignments, I choose to internalize and look at myself, at what needs to be burned away in me.

I’d invite you to go back and follow that link and read that story, because something symbolic happened at the end. The day of the divorce, I was in tears. I drove to where there is nothing, just barren land, and I walked along a dirt road. Nobody around. I sobbed convulsively. And as I was walking, I noticed something on the ground. A marble. Sitting there as though placed by God for me as a reminder. That instead of causing additional harm, I chose to love her, even though I couldn't be with her.

And I'm choosing to do that with Andrea. To put a marble in her jar. To give her room for healing, to give myself room for healing. To honor all of the amazing things that we had together, even though we're not together now.

My son Marco, the one that just graduated special forces training, asked me one day, "Dad, do you know what sondering is?" I said no. He said that it's the realization that every person you meet has a life as complex as yours and a journey as unique as yours, and to sonder is to sit with that and see the uniqueness of each human.

Andrea and I are different. There's no right or wrong, no good or bad, no moral high ground. Just a recognition that we are two unique individuals who came to this Earth for our own unique experience and growth. Her journey is as unique as mine, like a fingerprint. And when I slow down and look at Andrea as the human she is on her journey, I recognize that I can love her and choose not to be in a relationship with her, which is incredibly difficult.

So many of us shame ourselves over our choices.

We make ourselves wrong.

That's causing additional harm to ourselves. In forgiveness, I won't even do that. I made a decision. It was difficult, and it was objectively made. Not from emotion, although my emotions were fully present. They didn't get to drive the bus.

When things happen in our world that don't go the way we thought they would, we don't have to cause ourselves or others additional harm. It's already hard enough. Forgiveness doesn't mean you forget. It doesn't mean that justice isn't served when it needs to be. It just means that we are not going to be the one that adds additional harm to the situation.

What is one small step you can take today to not cause additional harm, to yourself or another?

Follow me for more of the messy, raw, and real work.

If you’re ready to learn how to do this work in your own life, you can learn more about the tools I use in my own journey.

Link in bio.

#Forgiveness #Grief #Sonder #Character #RealTalk