When I first started doing forgiveness work in my recovery, I heard a lot about how liberating forgiveness would be, whether I was forgiving myself or others. That turned out to be true, and I'm thankful.
I also learned, although I never heard much about this part of it, that finding forgiveness for others can be devastatingly painful. One of the hardest things that I have worked through in my recovery is forgiving someone for not loving me.
I was eighteen when we met, and I fell in love hard for the first time. I have since come to know that he cared about me, but he couldn't give me his heart, and that broke mine.
It also sped up my descent into personal destruction, and I blamed him for a long time for that period of my addiction. I thought the work was forgiving him for hurting me, but it wasn't.
He never wanted to hurt me. Forgiving him came many decades later, when I figured out that not having his love didn't mean I wasn't lovable; I was just meant to be loved by someone else.