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How To Forgive Your Ex When You Can’t Forget Them
You probably won’t forget the wrongs committed against you anytime soon. But what you can do is forgive your ex. Here’s how.
In her book, Reawakening, Barbara Mangi details her journey to forgiving Patrick Ford, the murderer of her teenage daughter. Inside she describes not only the emotional and spiritual toll of this journey and what it took to reach the end, but also how she eventually cultivated a friendship with the killer and started exchanging letters while he is serving a 35-year term for first-degree murder.
It’s a pretty wild and gripping story. It blows me away how some people manage to be so forgiving. I don’t know if I would ever be capable of responding the way Barbara did. But what I do know, and what Barbara illustrates faultlessly in her book, is that forgiveness heals.
The point of this is to say that it’s beneficial for your mental health to forgive your ex. Yet… many people just can’t fucking do it.
Misconceptions About Forgiveness
Even after hearing, perhaps even internalizing, all the clichés, adages, and advice about forgiveness, many people are still pissed and can’t let their ex go. Forgiveness to them often seems like…