Have you ever said to yourself, "That person hurt me and I will never trust again"? That sounds like healthy thinking. It sounds like we are solving this and all future problems. Right? 

In reality, it is faulty thinking. When we make promises like that to ourselves, we build barriers (fences) between ourselves and other people.

Let's think about fences. In old western movies large propery owners had a team whose only job was to maintain the fences. Maintaining fences required much time, energy and resources.

So it is in our lives. In order to keep others from hurting us, we must be vigilant constantly. When someone starts getting too close, we spend the emotional energy necessary to make the fence even higher. We spend so much energy protecting ourselves that we have no energy to enjoy life. We tend to live in isolation, which can make us feel even worse.

What is the Healthy Thinking solution? If we look at our own lives, we realize that we have hurt others, often unintentionally. Acknowledging that we are in relationships with less-than-perfect humans is a beginning. Accepting that  we will get hurt from time to time sets us up for healthy thinking.

When we hurt others, we do not necessarily wanted to destroy the relationship? What do we want from others? How about forgiveness? When the hurt is deep enough, people may forgive and give the offender many opportunities to gradually rebuild broken trust. Forgiveness and trust are two different issues.

Amazingly, not forgiving creates emotional ties to the other person that do not go away until we forgive. Forgiving breaks the emotional ties and frees us to build relationships with many people.

A very simplistic definition of forgiving is "giving up my right to get even." It can take a while to get there, but it is worth the effort.