Forgiveness and Your Health

Do you suffer from high blood pressure or cholesterol? What about chronic headaches, shoulder, neck, and/or other muscle pain? Are you struggling emotionally with signs of depression, anxiety, anger management, or sleep problems? Forgiveness has the power to change all these ailments without one step to a physician’s office or any medications. Mayo Clinic has been doing research that indicates lower levels of blood pressure, muscle pains, and decreased dysfunctional emotional symptoms from finding forgiveness in their lives.
Most of us suffer from anger either towards others or ourselves about some negative event that has happened in our lifetime. Some of us hold on to that anger and resentment for decades. Imagine what all that hardened emotion is doing to you from the inside. It can develop into a chronic state of depression, an ulcer, or a tumor.
Morter Health Systems has developed a five step guide to working on forgiveness. This holistic approach with the help of a mental health counselor can get you on the road to recovery from physical and emotional ailments. The first step is to forgive you. It can be extremely challenging to forgive others if you can’t even forgive yourself. This can be difficult, depending on the severity of the wrongdoing. Some of us simply need to forgive ourselves for being angry at another and some of us struggle with issues as heavy as abortion. Seek a trained counselor if you need to talk through sensitive issues with a non-judgmental, confidential, and professional person.
The second step is to forgive others. It is not necessary for you to tell them they are forgiven. There may even be cases where a person believes they have done nothing wrong and will laugh at the idea of being forgiven, which may start the whole process over for you. The important aspect to remember is your feeling of peace and forgiveness about that person.
Third, be able to allow others to forgive you. If you have honestly done step number one, step three will not be as complicated. Knowing you deserve that forgiveness and have done so for yourself makes it easier to accept from someone else. Remember that this does not always mean they will forgive you or that you even need to ask for their forgiveness. The deeper meaning here is that you be open and free of anger and resentment.
Step number four involves wishing the other person well. This does not mean that you are condoning any behavior they may have wrongfully done to you. You use step four to help envelop a freedom from the burdens of anger and resentment you have beyond simple forgiveness. Although step number four appears to be about the other person, it is inevitably about you, your health, and happiness.
Lastly, step five is to learn the lesson. So often in life we make a mistake and become angry with ourselves but then later we are making the same mistake again. Whether that be to get involved with someone who is unhealthy for us or our own personal mistakes towards others, we need to be aware of the mistake and stop the cycle. So work the steps and learn the lesson so you are not reliving the pain over and over.
Mental health counselors, physicians, and even chiropractors like Dr. Rose Melvin of Peoria Heights are using an approach to forgiveness to help battle people’s physical and emotional problems. There is light, peace, and serenity at the end of the tunnel.