Dr. Frederic Luskin is the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, one of the largest and most important studies on forgiveness ever conducted. In one of his talks online, Dr. Luskin explains how forgiveness is living the life you didn’t choose. He sees forgiveness as the resolution of our objection to life and making peace when we didn’t get what we wanted.

In other words, someone offended you, someone trespassed against you, someone violated you or hurt you in some way…

You didn’t choose it.

You didn’t choose that defilement to your life.

Someone else did that to you.

That violation invaded your world and became a part of your reality.

How are you going to deal with this desecration you didn’t choose?

When people do evil against you, it plants a seed in your heart: a seed of bitterness, a seed of anger, a seed of resentment, and if you don’t root that seed out, over time, you will fertilize it and wallow in it, and you will grow angrier and fantasize about exacting revenge. Over time, if you dwell on your resentment, you will become like the person who did the evil to you.

The act of forgiving does not change the person who hurt you.

The act of forgiveness changes and heals you.

Forgiveness heals the person who has been wronged!

Let me make this crystal clear, forgiveness does not mean condoning the behavior of those who have hurt us. Too often we get this false impression of forgiveness because when someone says, “I’m sorry I hurt you,” we tend to reply, “Oh, it’s okay.” Or “It’s all right.”

No. It’s not all right.

We should say, “I forgive you.”

Forgiveness does not mean that when someone hurt you, what they did was in any way right. No, never. It’s not all right!

Evil is not okay; evil will NEVER be acceptable!

Forgiveness is a choice that we make to release our past and heal our present.

It’s giving up believing your past will change. Your past happened, and no amount of wishing it away, or resenting it, or holding onto the pain and letting it control you will ever make it better.

So, let me say it again: Forgiveness is the only mechanism for rooting out the bitterness, the resentment, and the anger within you. Forgiveness is deciding, with divine help, to be at peace in the present rather than at war within your head, no matter what happened 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago.

When my mother dropped me off at the orphanage at the age of 3, I cried. I was inconsolable, and I was afraid. From the age of 3 to 16, I lived at that orphanage in Saskatchewan, and after 13 years, I was a bitter teenager, anesthetizing my pain with booze and other substances.

What I want to share with you on It Is Written Canada this month is a bit about my journey of forgiveness—the forgiveness of my mom, my dad, my forgiveness towards God, towards myself, and towards others who hurt me. It will be a deep dive into how I was personally able to make the choice to live the life I didn’t choose; I am hoping this part of my story may help others who are struggling to forgive those who hurt them.

If you miss my story on CTV, you may go to iiw.ca or It Is Written Canada’s YouTube videos and click on the program entitled: “Living the Life You Didn’t Choose.”