I am wondering if time can have an influence on a person’s motivation to forgive. Here is what I mean: If a person is holding on to resentment for a long time, might all this misery, experienced for years, get a person’s attention? The person then might get fed up with feeling badly. This, then, gives people the motivation to try forgiving.
You definitely show insight into the forgiveness process. Our first phase of the forgiveness process focuses on the forgiver’s internal states of anger and unrest, which often motivate a person to move forward with forgiving. So, time and insight together can be a strong motivation to forgive. Time by itself probably does not have much of an effect because sometimes time solidifies a person’s identity, for example, as a “feisty person,” and this can be difficult to alter. So, time plus insight that the resentment is not helpful can get the person’s attention and motivate the person to try forgiving.
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