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The idea that forgiveness is something you do for someone else results from the perception of power as the ability to manipulate and control. The unconscious intention behind not forgiving is to cause pain in someone you feel caused pain in you, and thereby alter his or her behavior. This never works because the origins of your emotional pain are inside you. When you choose not to forgive, you inflict pain upon yourself. Not forgiving is like trying to cause someone else pain by breaking your fingers. You are the one who is hurting when you do not forgive. There is nothing healing, nurturing, or even slightly positive about not forgiving.
Not forgiving is holding someone else responsible for your experiences. The emotional pains that you feel can be created only by parts of your own personality, not parts of someone else’s personality. Other people can activate these parts of your personality, such as the part that will not forgive. They can treat you cruelly, abuse you, even torture you, but only parts of your own personality can create your emotional experiences, including your painful emotional experiences. The longer you blame others or circumstances for these experiences, the longer you experience them.
Forgiving is something that you do for yourself. When you forgive, you stop holding others responsible for your emotional experiences. You step into a position of power because you cannot control others, but you can choose within yourself between the parts of your personality that create emotional pain and the parts that create experiences of gratitude, appreciation, contentment, and joy. Sometimes the pain is so great that an individual cannot find the strength to forgive. In these times, it is enough that she or he pray for the elevated perception, the Light, the Grace, to forgive. It will come.
In all cases, the healing dynamic of forgiveness requires you to look inside yourself instead of outside yourself for the causes of your emotional pain, and challenge them by not acting on their justified anger and righteous rigidity and acting instead from the most healthy and wholesome parts of your personality that you can access in that moment. Forgiving requires you to change yourself for the better instead of blaming. It requires you to heal. Forgiving is consciously choosing to leave behind the prisons and torments of your fears. It is also the creation of authentic power.