FIND FREEDOM IN FORGIVENESS

Make peace with others and yourself

CS Lewis once said that ‘everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive’. But by learning to move on from anger towards others, says Ella Dove, you will learn to make peace with yourself

Three years ago, I was abandoned on the most pivotal day of my life. It happened on a sunny spring morning, when I tripped over while out jogging with my sister on a canal path near my home in east

London. It sounds so simple, and yet this was no normal fall. My right leg stuck out at a strange angle and the pain was excruciating. I fought back tears as a passer-by called an ambulance. But then he hung up the phone. ‘I have to go,’ he told me and my sister. ‘I have a train to catch.’ And then, he disappeared.

Hours later, I found myself in hospital, rushed to theatre for the first of three emergency operations because my shattered knee had cut off the blood supply to my leg. Three days after that, I was told that the surgery hadn’t worked and the only option remaining was to amputate my right leg below the knee.

For a long time, I harboured anger towards the man who left me on the path that day. ‘What if he’d stayed?’ I asked myself over and over during the dark, lonely nights in hospital, when my thoughts swirled and the white-hot pain was too intense to bear. Tracking the phone that called the ambulance is a key way for paramedics to locate people

– when the man hung up, I had no idea whether I would be found.

I couldn’t stop wondering whether the ambulance would have reached me sooner had he stayed. And while I now realise that my blood circulation had been cut off almost instantly, meaning it’s highly unlikely the outcome would have been different, at the time, in my mind, this stranger was my lifeline.

I will never know the answers to my endless questions. But holding on to what might have been was not helping me to move on.

‘Forgiveness can be difficult because it makes us feel vulnerable,’ says Kim Lyons, a highly specialist psychological therapist who guided, and continues to guide me through the mental side of my recovery. ‘We are naturally fearful of being hurt or exposed emotionally, of opening up to pain, making mistakes or being taken advantage of. As human beings we often try to suppress, avoid or ignore these difficult emotions, but this does not make them go away.’

For me, it was negativity towards a faceless stranger that kept me stuck. But it could be anything – a family estrangement, an ex-partner who we feel has treated us badly, a rift between friends or a grudge from many years ago. ‘Distressing thoughts, feelings and images are like fighting with a ball in swimming pool,’ says Lyons. ‘You’re trying to push them out of your life by pushing that ball under that water. The ball will keep floating up again and the continuous struggle is exhausting. And while you are doing this, it is very difficult to do anything else. If you let the ball rise to the surface, you probably won’t like the initial sensation. But if you just let it float there for a while, it might eventually drift away. Even if it doesn’t, at least you will be able to enjoy your swim rather than spending your time and energy fighting with it.’ This, I realised during my early months of therapy, was what I needed to do to cherish and embrace life again. When it came to the man on the path that day, I needed to allow the ‘what ifs’ to float away. I needed to forgive him.

Letting go of grudges isn’t just good for the soul – it’s a boost for your body as well. Over the past few decades, a growing number of studies have examined the therapeutic effects of forgiveness. It turns out that it’s connected to better sleep and cardiovascular function, as well as lower rates of depression and substance abuse, says Dr Fred Luskin, author of Forgive For Good and director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project. In fact, people who are more forgiving report better health in general, less pain, and less chronic illness. Their overall mortality rates are lower, and Luskin thinks the reason is simple: ‘Hurt and anger are meant to be fleeting emotions,’ he says, ‘not permanent