By Pattie Mihalik

I heard a thought-provoking talk this week when my friend Jane talked about forgiveness. It’s a timely topic because many of us have a hard time forgiving.

“If you’re part of the human race you’re going to be hurt plenty of times. If we held a grudge every time someone hurt our feelings we would soon be out of people with which to congregate,” Jane said.

Her advice for those times when your feelings are hurt: “Just get over it. Don’t make a big deal of every perceived slight.”

Sometimes, though, it’s not small hurts or misdeeds that we’re talking about. Sometimes, it’s a steady diet of what feels like deadly poison when we’re around someone.

If it’s someone you can walk away from, that’s an easy solution. But what if the person is an ingrained part of your life?

What if that person hurts you time and again?

That’s the kind of behavior that is hard to forgive, she said. And that’s the kind of behavior she was talking about in her talk about forgiveness.

A good person through and through with high standards and values I admire, Jane spends much of her time helping others.

So I was surprised when she talked about the person she was having a hard time forgiving — her mother.

“Not every mother is June Cleaver and not every mother is loving and supportive,” she said. I noticed some heads were nodding in agreement when she said that.

Jane told her audience she never received affection or a loving word from her mother.

“In a major way she criticized everything I did. I grew up knowing no matter how hard I tried there was nothing about me that my mother liked.”

She said she used to go to her friend’s house and see how their mothers would hug them and laugh with them.

“When my friends talked about how loving their mothers were toward them, it hurt because I wondered why I didn’t have a mother like that,” she said.

Jane grew up to be a woman of achievement. Yet nothing she did seemed to make her mother happy.

“Every time I went back to see her I would leave in tears,” she said.

Finally, she asked her mother the question she wondered about all her life. “I asked her why she never loved me … why she never hugged me or said something nice about me.”

For what seemed like a long time, Jane’s mother didn’t respond. She looked stunned.

“She said, I do love you. I’m sorry I never made you realize that,” Jane recalled.

After a lot of tears on both their parts, the channel of communications opened for them. When Jane told her mother she forgave her for her rocky childhood, it was the beginning of healing a longtime hurt.

But old habits are hard to break, and when Jane realized that she took a hardened view of so many things about her mother, she knew she was the one who needed to change, not her mother.

“Instead of holding perceived hurts in my heart, I started to make a list of all the things I admired about my mom. It was a long list,” Jane said.

Sadly, shortly after she made that list, she read it to everyone — at her mother’s funeral.

“I realized I had a special mom who endured so much.”

Now Jane tries to help others who are having a hard time forgiving someone.

“Anger and resentment will eat away at you,” she said. “We need to forgive for our sake. When we hold onto pain, resentment and anger, it harms us far more than it harms the offender.

“Forgiveness frees us and takes away the negative feelings that were weighing us down,” she said.

Experts tell us forgiveness aids our own growth and happiness.

Studies have found that the act of forgiveness can reap huge rewards for your health, lowering the risk of heart attack, improving cholesterol levels, reducing blood pressure and lowering anxiety, depression and stress.

The Mayo Clinic warns that is you don’t practice forgiveness, you might be the one that pays most dearly.

Psychologists say that if you allow negative feelings to crowd out positive feelings, you might be swallowed up by your own bitterness or sense of injustice.

You might become so wrapped up in a past wrong that you can’t enjoy the present.

Sometimes entire families can be hurt when someone holds onto hard feelings. I can’t enjoy a Christmas reunion with my siblings because of my brother’s refusal to be in the same room with someone he won’t forgive.

One of the most heroic acts of forgiveness might be that of Marietta Jaeger Lane who had to endure the kidnapping and killing of her 7-year-old daughter. Without going into gory detail, it was one of the most horrific ways for the little girl to die.

In Marietta’s mind the killer was also responsible for the death of her husband who suffered a heart attack because he couldn’t let go of the overwhelming grief.

When the killer called to taunt her, he was stunned when she said, “I forgive you.”

That freed her from him and from his control over her life, she said.

I found a perfect quote that says it all:

Forgive others not because they deserve forgiveness but because you deserve peace.

Contact Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net.