Did you know that just simply thinking about forgiving the cheater has benefits? The researcher Frederic Luskin found that thinking about forgiving an offender improves your cardiovascular functioning.
Imagine the benefits you could experience by actually forgiving the cheater. If just the thought of forgiving them helps you, consider what happens when you follow through on those thoughts. When you quit thinking about forgiving and actually do something.
You have enough stress in your daily life without a grudge complicating things. In some of the same studies, those who focus on their grudges experienced faster heart rates and higher blood pressure.
Consider what that means. How you think about the cheater impacts your health. You make yourself sicker or healthier depending on how you think about the betrayer.
Who knew?
When you consider that the annual cost of just blood pressure medication runs from $740 to $1200 a year, it makes sense considering the option of forgiveness when it comes to the affair. That’s just the cost of the medications. If you throw in visits to the doctor to monitor and prescribe those medications, the price increases $454 for that year.
Contrary to the rumors, forgiveness doesn’t mean you’re doomed to remain the victim forever. It also doesn’t mean that you automatically forget what happened.
You may want to think of it as a gift you give yourself. By forgiving, you’re taking steps benefiting your physical and emotional health.
Who wouldn’t want a gift that improves your health, your outlook and your marriage? Surprisingly some of you choose not to forgive.
There’s plenty of reasons for not forgiving from control to fear to some other imagined payoff. Many of those reasons are valid. You’ve got good reasons for being upset. Forgiveness doesn’t invalidate them.
At times, Forgiveness takes more effort than you’re willing to give it. In my mind the perceived benefits of not forgiving are not worth the cost.
Then there’s the issue that most of you don’t know ‘how’ to forgive. You’ve been told about it, yet are unsure how it all works.
I can tell you that half-done forgiveness or inadequate forgiveness means that you really haven’t let go of things. Many people talk about forgiveness, yet fall short when it comes time for giving you the ‘how to’ of forgiveness.
When just the thought of it has benefits, to me, its’ something worth considering. Affair recovery is not for wimps. You need the best health and mental functioning you can muster in dealing with it.
My answer for forgiveness is the video “Forgiveness: Stop the Pain, Tear down the walls and remove the roadblocks”. In it, I take you step by step through the forgiveness process.
Click on the link, and download the video. You’ll be doing something rather than just thinking about .
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
