Posted by:
relievedtolearn
(
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Date: June 23, 2017 04:55PM
I just got back from a (beautiful) camping trip. With time and space to contemplate, I was thinking about the posts about waves of anger, and also the one "it's not the life I'd have chosen, but it's the one I have."
I was thinking about forgiveness. Letting go---and how hard it is, how I, at least, sometimes don't even want to, even though I know holding on to anger and justifying it with how bad what happened was is a good way to ruin the rest of my life too.
Thing is, how do you do it? So---I have a couple of books I bought by people who have been through some real stuff and figured out how to forgive, so I'll pass on the info.
The Courage to Forgive, by Joyce L. Villeneuve who was a survivor of the Rwanda genocide.
Forgiving, by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu (south Africa apartheid and all that.)
I also love The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom. She and her family in Holland participated in the underground hiding and helping Jewish people during WWII. Almost all of her family were arrested after betrayal by a collaborator; her father, her sister, and a nephew died in prison; her brother died later of complications from imprisonment. She and her sister Betsie ended up in Ravensbruck; Betsie died there; Corrie did not. She writes about forgiveness, also.
Because these are written by people who have survived the unimaginably horrible cruelty of people, and learned to forgive, they might help some of us who are still having trouble with how to let go and live life well.
There's a Jewish lady named Eva Kor, a survivor of the twin-experiments at Auschwitz. She has something called "The forgiveness project" that might be helpful too.