Hey, welcome to The Young Faithful Mama Blog. My name is Justice Rodriguez and helping young mamas like you stop feeling unqualified, overwhelmed, and chaotic so you can start raising your babies with more peace and joy. By sharing some of my experiences and things that I learned through my journey so you can become a Young Faithful Mama too as you navigate through your life as a wife and mother.
The aim of this week’s blog is to how unforgiveness feeds your trauma .
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At some point in our lives, we have had someone do us wrong, disappoint or let us down in some way.
If you are seeking to have real change in your life, if you are looking to have a joyful healthy life then you probably already know you have to heal and move past some things to achieve that.
When we make the choice that someone is unworthy of our forgiveness isn’t it funny how the cause is directly linked to some form of trauma we have experienced from the person we need to forgive or a related situation we haven’t made peace with?
It’s like it’s feeding the trauma, keeping the pain we experienced going, thriving, and ultimately keeping us bound in the pain we think we are protecting ourselves from by not releasing the people of the wrongs they have done.
As I’m writing this blog, I can only think of all the unforgiveness I had towards many people in my life and how miserable, isolated and unhappy it left me.
One story I’ll share with you is the unforgiveness I had towards my mother, the first person I had a grudge towards, and how for years I used it as the fuel to my anxiety and my excuse for why I couldn’t amount to anything more.
She was young about 15 or 16. She wasn’t ready for the responsibility she had. She ended up leaving me in my bassinet and my grandmother ended up becoming my guardian. Very soon after had my sister, and met my stepfather. she had her own growing family at 17 .
4 years old is when I can remember for myself, spending some days with her, I can remember her attempts to bond with me and meeting my sister but feeling this jealousy spring up in my body because while she seemed to be having a great life without me meanwhile I lived a life she seemed to not know about. I was alone most of the time, my grandmother’s sickness left me alone and taking care of myself some days, my family trusted a family friend to look after me but he had other sick plans to harm me in ways I can’t describe in this post. So you can just imagine the resentment that built in me all those years and finally when she came back for me I was 9, traumatized and bitter.
I can say the hurt I experienced and rehearsed every day drove me into darkness for most of my tweens and after my grandmother’s death at 14 a full depression. I was angry, rebellious, and triggered.
I use to tell her how much pain she caused me, I remember how good it made me feel to even get her to feel an ounce of what I had boiling inside.
Why forgive her when my unforgiveness made her understand my pain?
And that’s really what we think when we hold that unforgiveness, why not make them pay after a lot of maturing I’m here to tell you because vengeance is the Lord’s and not ours!
You playing God and taking justice into your own hands will only lead you to a bigger mess you will have to clean up.
I remember the hurt in my mother’s eyes telling me what happened and how sorry she was. She was seeking my forgiveness but I was broken, cold, and bitter. I knew that if I let go of the pain then I thought I would have nothing left.
I was wrong, dead wrong because if I would have understood the love of Jesus and how no amount of hate, pain or suffering I experienced could compare to what he did for me. I could have had more time to make up for our lost years instead I regret not asking more questions and trying to understand her.
It wouldn’t have taken me until 25 years old to realize all the trauma and pain she had to endure too. What happened to me is not any less sad and doesn’t make it okay but when we choose to say “ hey I know what pain feels like and I can see that you are or have experienced it too, let me comfort you how I know I needed comfort in my pain let me show you grace like Jesus did that for me.
Unforgiveness is a time stealer. In the Bible, there is a verse that goes “our lives are just vapors”. Imagine our lives here are that short, we can be here one day and gone the next.
Why live a triggered life when you are called to so much more? This past few weeks I was reading the book of 1 Corinthians and I was so blessed by chapter 13 all over again.
Me remembering it from my wedding I automatically thought “ oh this is just about marriage” but No it was a principle you can take into all relationships we have.
“Love is patient and kind;
love does not envy or boast;
it is not arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.
As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.”
1 Corinthians 13:4-8 ESV
If love is this powerful if love is all of these things. Think of how weak and easy it is to stay in hate.
I was weak, in my flesh I am weak that’s why it’s so easy to choose the lowly ways to deal with pain and trauma but with Christ in the strength, he gives to us we are strong enough to face the pain, find healthier ways to deal with offense and people that are hard to forgive.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22:36-40 ESV
Why do we linger in unforgiveness we are called to love our neighbors?
We waste precious time when we hold grudges when we hold on to the offense that at the end of the day are hurting us more than the person sometimes.
Take it from my story I stayed in that cycle of unforgiveness for so long that when I was finally done with it and made peace with my mother it was too late and she ended up dying before my 21st birthday.
Now I see life and holding on to things in such a different way.
Feeding your trauma this way can lead to 3 major setbacks in your life.
- Regret – living with regret can lead to you not feeling like you are good enough because of what happened or what you have done. Regret can have you thinking you shouldn’t get a second chance at certain things because you messed up the first or second time.
- Resentment- either having resentment towards someone else or yourself can leave you bound in hate and shame. just unable to have a healthy relationship in that area ( friendship, intimate relationships, or just family relationships)
- Stuck – unable to move forward or past a certain level, I like to say bound or tied because that’s what we do when we feed our flesh and let it run us instead of us being in control.
So if you are still questioning if you should forgive that person even if you don’t get the apology you deserve. Ask yourself this:
If the person your hold on to was to die tomorrow, how would you feel? Would you have wished you talked about things and made peace?
If you could be forgiven for all that you have done, don’t you think that person is worthy enough to be released?
If you found value in this blog, please feel free to share it with a friend, family member, or anyone that you know needs to hear this! God bless you
The Young Faithful Mama 