I need some help in understanding your views on one aspect of the forgiveness process. You ask the forgiver to look into the offending person’s past to see if he was wounded by others, for example, when he was a child. This sounds like a phony rationalization exercise for just excusing what he did. After all, if I look into his past and see that his father gave him a hard time I might reason this way: “Oh, the poor dear suffered as a child.  I, therefore, can just let it go that he abused me.” Can you help me with this?

There is a large difference between understanding another person’s emotional wounds from other people and excusing the hurtful behavior because of this. The point of this thinking exercise is to better understand the offending person, not to find excuses for his unjust behavior toward you. As you forgive, you need to keep in mind that what he did to you was wrong, is wrong, and always will be wrong. Yet, part of forgiveness is to at least slowly begin to see that this person is human, with built-in worth, even though he behaved very badly toward you. Without excusing the behavior, we try to separate the person and the actions so that you see a genuine human being rather than defining him exclusively by his unjust behavior.

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