Why giving a second chance to someone who hurt you is worth it

Why should you give someone a second chance? Because it will give you a peace of mind. A long-term relationship is an investment: an investment into a life we made with another person, with a person with whom we experience the security that comes with commitment and real intimacy.

There comes a point in every relationship when you feel like you’ve been through it all: happy times, sad times, failures, pain, maybe a crisis that was hard to overcome and you know what the other person is thinking just by looking into their eyes. You know what it feels like to be strong together. You’ve built a life with this person. Would you want to start building a different life with someone new?

You failed and you got up, fixed each other’s crowns and moved on. You climbed mountains and it doesn’t matter how scary it felt at the time, you made it to the top. Yes, the journey wasn’t always easy but it was all worth it - just like enjoying the beautiful view from a mountain top makes the whole journey with it. And it’s perfectly normal to feel like you don’t want to start it all over again. Being in long-term relationship means you’ve spent quite some time with the other person and you’ve come a long way: all those years allowed you to grow together, to build each other up. And by now, you know exactly how much time you wasted by dwelling on insignificant little things that did not help you move forward.

People are capable of change. People who hurt you are capable of change. They can learn from their mistakes, use their second chance wisely to regain your trust. Rebuilding trust with someone you’ve hurt is not an easy process. Regaining broken trust is like fixing a broken mirror: it is possible but you’ll always see it’s been broken before. A piece of glass that was once perfect and without fault will bare the signs of a mistake. But it’s always worth considering giving your partner a second chance - is the relationship really beyond repair or could trust be rebuilt? If so, how do you regain broken trust?

First of all, the offending party must be extra open, trustworthy and real with the offended person for rebuilding trust is like building something from scratch. One must be mature enough to know how to ask for forgiveness and take responsibility for their actions. It can only be done honestly and wholeheartedly, with genuinely good intentions and without blaming someone else for our own mistakes; otherwise, it’s nothing more than empty words.

Why should the party who’s been hurt forgive? Why would they be willing to give the offending party a second chance? And would they be hurt again? Well, as the offended party, people often feel like forgiving the person who hurt them is like sweeping the whole thing under the rug while others are unwilling to forgive thinking guilt will make the other parson stay forever and reminding the offending party of their mistakes will make that person work extra hard for the rest of their lives. Often times people go back to certain places in life because there’s something they need to deal with or we try to relive certain situations hoping to make things right somehow. Other times fate will lead us back where we got lost in the first place to give us a second chance.

One must be mature enough to know how to ask for forgiveness and take responsibility for their actions. It can only be done honestly and wholeheartedly, with genuinely good intentions and without blaming someone else for our own mistakes; otherwise, it’s nothing more than empty words.

Giving a second chance to someone who hurt us gives us a second chance, too. Asking for forgiveness is a powerful thing as it brings people closer to each other. When someone asks for your forgiveness what they are actually communicating is that you are loved and your feelings do matter to them and they are willing to make amends. And that has the power to tear down the walls built up by hurt, anger and a thirst for revenge. Forgiving someone takes listening, understanding and empathy. Both the act of asking for forgiveness and forgiving someone are more than just words two people say out loud: there’s an emotional process behind them that functions as a detox for the soul. For reconciliation there must be a desire to forgive and to be forgiven. When two people find their way back to each other, their world becomes a better place - and that is why it’s worth giving a second chance to someone who hurt us.

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