This resource is provided to help you to sniff out what might be some unhealthy perceptions and beliefs keeping you from forgiveness and the path of healing, but to also help you better interpret what you see in front of you right now. 

The truth is we can believe awful things about ourselves, other people, the world around us, and even God, when we filter things through the unresolved pain and unhealed hurts from our past. If we don't sniff out thoughts so damaging to our emotional health they will stunt us at best and prevent us from moving on as whole, healthy persons. 

We want to become whole, healthy people who are capable of giving and receiving hope. Giving and receiving constructive feedback. Giving and receiving life lessons tucked within the harder things we've been through. We have to get to the place where the pain we've experienced becomes a gateway leading toward growing, learning, discovering, and eventually helping others. 

Forgiveness is not nearly as hard when we have healthier systems of processing our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions and beliefs about our circumstances, people, myself, and God. But when we've been deeply hurt, it's hard to have any thoughts about what happened other than the most obvious. We can easily assume bad things are caused by bad people causing bad realities that will never be anything but bad. This is the bad trap of thinking we can be stuck in for years. 

The experiences I have affect the perceptions I form. The perceptions I form eventually become the beliefs I carry. The beliefs I carry determine what I see. My eyes can only see what's really there—unless the perceptions informing my vision change what I believe I see. 

Based on the experiences we have, when we see something, our brains fill in details that we might not even realize. In our physical sight, it's not just what we see—it's what we perceive we are seeing that determines how we define our current reality. This is true not just with our physical perceptions but with our emotional perceptions as well. Some perceptions we've had have caused tainted interpretations, harming some of our relationships. 

The Secret To Deep Processing Is Threefold:   PAIN > ACCEPTANCE > PERSPECTIVE

1. The Pain is me expressing everything that happened and how it made me feel. (Collecting the Dots)

2. Acceptance is me acknowledging that the permanent ink is now dry on the pages of my story. I cannot change what happened.  (Connecting the Dots)

3. And from those connections, is me starting to see a new Perspective, which helps me correct  my interpretations of those experiences. (Correcting the Dots)

There are still new pages to be written in the story of my life, and my perceptions moving forward will determine how I carry the past into my future. Again, while I cannot change what happened, I get to choose what I now believe and how what happened changes me for the better or worse. 

Self-Reflection Questions For Processing Through My Pain:

It is crucial in my processing to acknowledge the deep, deep pain in all its forms with all the specific examples I can recall. I have to name which form of pain I am feeling. Identify who caused the pain. Tell the story of what happened—how the pain came to be. Then I have to think through the story I now tell myself because of this experience by asking several questions:

• What do I now believe about the person who hurt me (past) or people with whom I'm in a similar type of relationship (present)?

• What do I now believe about myself?

• What do I now believe about other people who witnessed or knew about what happened?

• What do I now believe about the world at large because of this situation?

• What do I now believe about God as a result of this whole experience? 

Self-Reflection Questions On The People In Each Of The Stories From My Life To Reveal What I May Still Be Carrying In Relation To Them (Positive or Negative):

• Do I cringe? Roll my eyes? Feel my pulse quicken? Clench my jaw? Let out a sigh?

• Do I shake my head at the unfairness of good things happening to them?

• Do I celebrate secretly when I hear they are having difficulties, with thoughts like, "They finally got what's coming to them"?

• Do I dream of the moment when I get to present all my proof and hear them finally admit what they did was wrong?

• When I talk to other people about this story, am I quick to try and convince others how wronged I was, hoping to elicit a satisfyingly sympathetic reaction from them toward me and some kind of statement affirming how awful my offender's actions really were?

• If they are still a regular part of my life, am I always expecting the worst from them?

• Am I easily offended, put off, aggravated, and annoyed by them or people who remind me of them?

OR 

•   Do I acknowledge what was hard but feel a sense of calm and peace?

• Can I sincerely pray for them when they're facing difficult things?

• Can I manage my emotions when good things happen to them?

• Am I eager to share a helpful perspective with others facing a similar situation, hoping to help them get to a better place?

• Can I look for what is good in other people?

• Do I look for life lessons and collect those instead of grudges?

• What hurt might my offender have suffered that would have led them to do what they did? Can I have compassion for the offender's brokenness?

• Can I be authentically kind to this person who was unkind to me, even with the boundaries I may need to draw?

Self-Reflection Questions To Help Me Reframe My Story And Start To See It From A Different Vantage Point:

• How might I look at this differently?

• Is there a redeeming part of this story I can focus on?

• What good would come about if I decide to forgive and not keep dwelling on all the ways I was hurt?

• Are there positive qualities about myself that can emerge if I choose to move forward without holding on to grudges? 

Self-Reflection Questions To Process My Suffering From A Romans 5:3-5 Perspective:

• What would a healthy version of me be empowered to do from here?

• How can this hurt make me better, not worse?

• What might God be giving or revealing to me through this that I couldn't have received before?