Did We Choose the People Who Hurt Us Before We Were Born?
This uncomfortable NDE insight changed how I understand forgiveness
Of all the insights I’ve gathered from listening to hundreds of near-death experiences, there was one idea I received more backlash for than almost any other:
The possibility that some people may, on a soul level, choose difficult experiences and who they experience them with before incarnating. Even abuse.
I completely understand why there is so much resistance to this idea.
I don’t believe every traumatic experience is chosen. I don’t believe abuse is somehow justified because someone can find meaning in it. And I certainly don’t believe victims are responsible for what was done to them.
But after everything I’ve learned about consciousness, death, forgiveness, and near-death experiences, I started wondering whether there might be another way to understand some of the most painful relationships of our lives.
What if some of us do come here to experience the tremendous power of forgiveness firsthand?
And what if, for some of us, the experience isn’t simply learning how to survive what someone did to us — but discovering that we can still love a soul without approving of what that person did?
How Forgiving a Dead Man Changed My Life
One of the most painful experiences of my life was learning the truth about my father: he had left my mother before I was born and never came back for me. I spent my whole life looking for him, wanting to look into his face and ask him personally why he had left. I was 30 years old when I found out that he had died, when I was a young child.
It was then and there that I realised I would never get to have that conversation.
I would never introduce myself to him. Never ask him why he left. Never ask for an apology. Never find out whether he would have liked me at all.
But the most painful part was realizing that I could never love him.
Because how could I love him, with the absolute absence of care he had shown me? How could I love him without forgiving him? And how could I forgive him without hearing his reasoning?
I wanted to be indifferent toward him, the way he had seemed to be toward me. But I couldn’t. It simply wasn’t who I am. What I eventually realised was that I loved him anyway.
So I stopped fighting it. I found myself loving a ghost. And strangely enough, this willingness to keep loving him eventually opened a completely unexpected door in my life: mediumship.
Now, would I give anything to change that story and just be with him? Of course, from the perspective of inside my own life, I would. But I can’t. My own story made me wonder whether a soul’s choice might sometimes look less like choosing something pleasant and more like accepting a difficult experience in service of something greater.
Who knows why exactly I would’ve chosen to live with a ghost dad. But if it meant I would be born with an inherent desire to explore mediumship and meditation, I might as well embrace it — and reap whatever gifts came from the experience.
Forgiveness as a Lesson of Freedom
There’s one comment on my article that stayed with me more than any other. Because it opened a new perspective on forgiveness.
Sometimes we might find certain dynamics with certain people that feel like they have been going on for lifetimes. Sometimes that might be because they have.
The idea stayed with me. What if revenge itself can become a cycle?
What if carrying the desire to hurt someone back doesn’t actually end the story — but keeps us psychologically and spiritually tied to it?
As someone who has been wronged, it’s hard to see ourselves in the position of an abuser, because we know how it feels. But how many of us still wish the worst on those who hurt us in hopes that it will bring peace to our soul?
But living in a world free of hurt means creating it by breaking the cycles. It means acknowledging that the world doesn’t become a less hurtful place by hurting everyone back. It means realising that cycles of pain can only be broken by forgiving without revenge. And they can only be broken by those who experience the pain and decide to let it go, instead of creating another storyline of pain.
And when it comes to the fate of those who hurt others, my NDE studies introduced me to something that made me reconsider the burden they might carry with them.
Some people report experiencing hell during their NDEs. And hell might not be what you think it is.
Or it might be exactly what you think it is.
What NDEs Taught Me About the People Who Hurt Us
Hellish NDEs are discussed far less often than peaceful ones, which can make them seem exceptionally rare. But during my research, I kept encountering accounts that shared surprisingly similar themes.
What I found was that some people reported dying, leaving their bodies, descending into what they experienced as hell — often through a fall or by being dragged into an abyss — and then being confronted with the things they had done to others.
Many described reliving moments of their own cruelty in an endless loop — as though they were forced to experience what they did from the other side.
Hearing those stories made me realise how heavy hurting another person might be on the soul. And then I realised something else: I didn’t actually need my father to suffer forever for what he had done to me. His punishment wouldn’t give me back the childhood I lost. It wouldn’t erase the pain. And it wouldn’t make me free.
And even the NDEs that weren’t hellish, but peaceful, carried the experience of having to face moments in which they hurt others and were unaware of the pain they’ve caused.
I think the most healing part of either experience is coming to an honest understanding of how our actions affected the people we touched — and realizing that their perspective becomes part of our own story.
That is growth. And growth helps all of us.
Why We Can’t Run From the Hurt We Caused In Others
I began to imagine that, from his perspective in spirit, he might have had a front-row seat to the pain his actions had caused me — during my childhood and long after his death. And I felt compassion for him.
We don’t forgive because what happened didn’t matter. We forgive because it mattered enough that we don’t want it to keep hurting us.
We can protect ourselves. We can leave. We can hold people accountable. We can say, what you did to me was not okay. And still refuse to let hatred become the final thing connecting our souls.
Perhaps forgiveness isn’t saying: “I forgive you because you didn’t hurt me.”
Perhaps it is saying: “You hurt me. And I refuse to let that pain become the rest of my life.”
Maybe that is what it means to set the soul free.
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