You Can Forgive Someone Without Allowing Them Back Into Your World

You Can Forgive Someone Without Allowing Them Back Into Your World

Forgiveness and reconciliation don’t have to go hand in hand. You’re allowed to forgive someone for the mistakes they made in the past without wanting anything to do with them in the future.

You might have reached a point where you are able to see the situation from the other person’s point of view and understand what caused them to behave so inappropriately. Or maybe the anger you’ve been holding onto for all these years has been eating away at you and you cannot take the stress it brings you anymore.

Either way, you can forgive someone without allowing them back into your world. You can accept what happened without giving them the opportunity to repeat their mistakes a second time.

Don’t let anyone pressure you into reuniting because you have absolutely no obligation to spend time with someone who hurt you, someone who made you feel like you were worthless, someone who brought you unimaginable pain.

Being selective about who you associate with isn’t immature. It takes wisdom and maturity to recognize what type of people are healthy for you and what type of people are better off at a distance.

Having a history with someone doesn’t mean you’re required to have a future with them.

Even if they apologize to you for everything they’ve done and seem like they’ve made genuine changes to their behavior, it doesn’t take away from what they did to you. It doesn’t mean they get to be part of your world again.

You get to decide whether or not you want to forgive someone. And you get to decide whether or not you want to give them a second chance. Just remember, you can do one without the other. You don’t have to do both, no matter what your guilt tries to tell you.

You shouldn’t feel like you have to open your heart to them again, simply because they decided to grow up and alter their toxic habits. You shouldn’t let someone turn the situation around and make you feel like the bad guy for wanting nothing to do with them after they’ve done so much work to better themselves.

Cutting someone out of your world wasn’t a decision you made out of the blue. It was a reaction to their behavior. It was a self-preservation technique. It was what you had to do for your own mental health. They had their chance to be a part of your world and they blew it. It’s not your fault you felt the need to put as much distance between yourselves as possible. It’s their own, whether they want to take responsibility for it or not.

Even if you’ve found it in your heart to forgive someone who has wronged you in the past, remember your next step doesn’t have to be getting in contact with them and living happily ever after. You can forgive them from afar. You can accept what happened between the two of you without wanting to build anymore memories moving forward. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Holly is the author of Severe(d): A Creepy Poetry Collection.

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