How to forgive... even when you don't want to - part 2 of 2

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Finally—and this is the big one—realize that lack of forgiveness is rooted in a lack of boundaries.
This goes back to the fear that if forgiveness were granted, “it” might happen again because the person thought that they could “get away with” it.
The person you know you need to forgive in your life might not even be alive, anymore, but if they’re alive and real in your head, that’s enough.
This is the moment of choice: Are you going to decide that you won’t tolerate XYZ behaviour, dynamics, and beliefs in your life?
The moment that you decide that you won’t tolerate the behaviours that lead you not to forgive is the moment that things shift.
Caution: In movies, the hero or heroine “gets back” at someone and then walks off into a happy ending.
That’s not what we’re talking about, here. If your boss routinely puts you down, you don’t tell her off and that’s your “power.”
Rather, you decide that you won’t tolerate the put downs, you come up with a plan for how you’re going to handle it when they arise, and then you actually assert that boundary,  while looking at her with pure love because you know that her put downs are causing her immense suffering (even if you can’t see the suffering).
What happens in moments like these is that the put downs become about as believable as a drunk, homeless man who is shouting obscenities on the street. He’s clearly not altogether there, and you can have compassion for him because his suffering is so visible and his words so illogical.

Set firm boundaries

Here’s the big secret: When humans are unkind to one another, they’re not so very different than that guy. Many of us are just using different language and wearing nicer clothes.
When you decide what boundaries to put in to place, and what you will and won’t stand for, you release the fear that “it” will happen again. What “it” can touch you when you’ve already decided that you aren’t going to let it penetrate?
The moment came—and it was a completely innocuous moment for me, sitting in six lanes of backed up traffic, my thoughts discursive—when I realized that when it concerned forgiving my mother, I get to decide who I am.
My life was what I said it was, and a painful relationship with her need not be a part of it any longer—if I decided that it was so. I knew that all I wanted to do was simply love this woman, who had given me life and who had taught me so much about who I wanted to be.
There was nothing but gratitude in my heart.
Before my own experience of deep forgiveness, as I waded through years bouncing from one therapist’s couch to the next trying to “figure out” how to forgive, I would have thought this moment impossible. I would have doubted the elegance of its simplicity.
But it really is true: “Freedom is what we do with what’s been done to us.”

It is not the circumstances of our lives that matter. It is what we choose to do with them.

Full article:
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-forgive-when-you-dont-really-want-to/