Have you ever been betrayed by someone you love?  Perhaps you are no longer with that person but the hurt is still raw and you feel anger and hatred at the injustice. 

 Your friends collude with you in a pity party.  Possibly they don’t know what else to say or do.  Maybe they feel that their tea and sympathy is serving you and helping you move forward.

 They couldn’t be more wrong.

 You are so caught up in pain and hurt and it feels awful.  You feel physical pain at any reference to that person or to places of significance.   So much of your energy is focused on what happened in the past, and you struggle to come to terms with what happened let alone forgive. 

 You believe that by forgiving you are condoning the betrayal.

 You are living in and operating from a place of pain, anger and vengeance.  When you do live in that way, as Dr Wayne Dyer says, “it is like you have drunk the poison and then are waiting for the other person to die”. 

 The poison of pain and anger and hurt is coursing through your blood stream, nobody else’s. It is destroying your bodily cells, and your capacity for joy and happiness, it is destroying your self-esteem.

 When you feel physical pain at the references to that person or to the places of significance, the pain is with the memories and thoughts that you are holding on to.  Nobody is appearing each time and stabbing you with a knife to cause you the pain.  It is your memory and the thoughts that you are associating with those words that are causing you the pain.  You can choose to live this awful way or you can choose not to.  You can choose to let the memories and thoughts infect you or you can choose to let them go.  

 What good is revenge? What use are the thoughts of vengeance? Nothing would alter a single aspect of the past. The past has happened and we can choose what we do with it.  Choose to stay stuck in it, or accept it and forge ahead to create new memories.

 Where your focus goes, your energy flows.

 I know what I am talking about.  A year ago I had collapsed and was off work for almost 3 months with depression, anxiety akin to post traumatic stress from all the pain and hurt that I had experienced. 

 I did the work on myself with the right books and I sought the right interventions and surrounded myself with the right support.

 Coaching and NLP helped me to tap in to my deepest emotional intelligence and develop my self- awareness and sense of responsibility. 

 I learned to accept that people are fallible; people get it wrong; people make mistakes.  Forgiveness is one of my highest values because it brings about peace to the person doing the forgiving. 

 Is it time you found peace through forgiveness?