I let out a deep breath and told her, “Okay, here’s what you can do. Write an angry hate letter to him or to anyone that you realize you need to forgive. Get out all the pain and emotions and everything else you want to say to him. Then, write a forgiveness letter. Letting it go and telling him that you forgive him. You have to read it out loud but not to him. Never, under any circumstances, give this letter to the person it’s written to. It won’t change anything, and nine times out of ten, you won’t get what you want from them. If they were sorry, they would have said it by now, and it would be over. So, no giving it to them.” I narrowed my eyes in her direction.
That part was hard because everyone who felt wronged wanted the person who had done the wronging to make amends or to speak their feelings so that they could hear them and repent. But that wasn’t the way things worked, and it would only hurt the wronged in the end.
She nodded.
I kept going, satisfied she’d heard my warning, “After you read it out loud to either me or a trusted friend, we’ll burn them and let them drift off into space. Taking your pain with them.”
Forgiveness was an ongoing thing people did throughout their lives. It wasn’t just a one-and-done thing.
Feelings of peace filled my chest as I remembered when I’d written my own forgiveness letters to my ex and my parents. It was a freeing moment in my life, and I wished every person on earth could experience it.
“You said it was simple.” She didn’t have the pep in her voice as she had when I first walked in.
Hopefully, together we could change her feelings later, cheer her up a bit past right now.
“It is simple but not easy. Forgiving someone who’s wronged you is never easy. That’s why it’s so important to do. Right now, all that is holed up inside you, festering, holding control over your actions and thoughts, even right now.”
This step usually came closer to the end, when the client was confident and had broken past all their patterns and walls inside themselves. Their issues were almost never someone else or an outside influence. It was all from the inside. The hardest part of a human to fix.
“Okay, that’s not at all what I was expecting, but I can see how it might help.”
It really would, and I was excited for when that day came for Mia. But today was not that day.
“So, how about we do something else? Look at wedding decorations?” I suggestively waggled my eyebrows, hoping it would get her to cheer up.
While she smiled, I could tell she was taking in everything I’d said to heart, thinking over each word, even as she agreed that we should go look at the Lily Ballroom together.
