One of the major cause of unhappiness in the world is not being able to forgive.

Forgiving is hard, if someone did something very bad to you, that impacted your life negatively/ wasted your time/ ruined your relationships and now there is no way to undo the impacts of their actions, forgiving seems impossible. Sometimes our own actions make us regret and we refuse forgive ourselves, for the decisions we made with the information we had at that time. For example if you invested in something which felt profitable at that time, you did your due diligence before making the decision. But your decision was wrong and you lost the money. In case of failure some people start blaming themselves as if they made the wrong decision knowingly. It gives you nothing but unhappiness.

Life is complicated and the negative experiences give us lessons to help us grow and to be able to lead a successful life. We are being unfair to ourselves when we start blaming ourselves or others for those negative experiences. We should be thankful for the lessons and the opportunity to know more about life and move on. Every stumble makes us strong, if we take lesson from it, otherwise it makes us weak and limited. Either we can learn, be prepared and careful next time or we can get scared and limit ourselves to not go in that territory again. Choice is ours.

Forgiving sets you free and is the key to inner peace. Apply law of substitution when having negative feeling about someone or yourself, by deliberately substituting the thought of anger and hurt with the thought of forgiveness. Brain Tracy said that your ability to freely forgive other people is the mark of how far you have developed as a fully functioning person.

Forgiving does not mean that you approved the action other person. Remember when you are forgive someone or even yourself, you set yourself free. Forgiving is a selfish act and has nothing to do with the other person. Forgiving or not forgiving does not have any impact on the other person, it only impact you. When you forgive, you are no longer in prison of your negative thoughts. If the other person knew, about the unhappiness caused to you, by you not forgiving him, he may be happy so most likely you are making the other person happy by not forgiving him and keeping yourself in anger and depressed. Is this what you want?