Author Archive: directorifi

Is There Such a Thing as Self-Forgiveness?

When you self-forgive, you are practicing the virtue of mercy toward yourself. And this next point is very important: You continually extend virtues toward yourself, such as being fair to yourself (the virtue of justice), taking care of yourself (the virtues of kindness and wisdom), and being patient with yourself when you are learning new things in life. If you can practice all of these virtues toward yourself, why would anyone want to bar you from the most important of the moral virtues: loving yourself in the face of disappointment, disapproval, and in extreme cases, self-hatred?

Robert

Enright, Robert (2015-09-28). 8 Keys to Forgiveness (8 Keys to Mental Health) (p. 181). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

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One Reason Why We Need Forgiveness Education: People Misunderstand What Forgiveness Is

Too often in society the word forgiveness is used casually: “Please forgive me for being 10 minutes late.” Forgiveness is used in place of many other words, such as excusing, distorting the intended meaning. People so often try to forgive with misperceptions; each may have a different meaning of forgiveness, unaware of any error in his or her thinking.

Freedman and Chang (2010, in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling, volume 32, pages 5-34) interviewed 49 university students on their ideas of the meaning of forgiveness and found that the most frequent understanding (by 53% of the respondents) was to “let go” of the offense.  This seems to be similar to either condoning or excusing.  Of course, one can let go of the offense and still be fuming with the offender.  The second most common understanding of forgiveness (20%) was that it is a “moving on” from the offense.  Third most common was to equate forgiveness with not blaming the offender, which could be justifying, condoning, or excusing, followed by forgetting about what happened.  Only 8% of the respondents understood forgiveness as seeing the humanity in the other, not because of what was done but in spite of it.

If we start forgiveness education early, when students are 5 or 6 years old, they will have a much firmer grasp of what forgiveness is…..and therefore likely will be successful in their forgiveness efforts, especially if these students are schooled not only in what forgiveness is but also in how to go about forgiving.

Robert

 

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I am not overly angry with anyone who has treated me unkindly. Does this mean that I should not consider forgiving? In other words, do I forgive only when angry or in pain from what a person did to me?

You are free to forgive whenever there is injustice toward you and you have pain to any degree.  In other words, you do not have to wait until you are fuming with anger to forgive.  At the same time, if you have no pain whatsoever then you need not forgive because, as the philosopher Margaret Holmgren points out, forgiveness is in the context of both unfair treatment and injury of some kind.

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Looking Forward Rather than Backward

When we have been treated deeply unfairly by others, there is a tendency to look backward far too often.  We brood, we engage in the “what ifs” of life……we begin to live with discouragement.

Forgiveness helps us to tie up the burdens of the past so that we are not continually unwrapping the package of bad memories.  Yes, we have been hurt.  Yes, we might even have been hurt by our own actions.  Yet, that is not the story of whom the other is or of whom we are as persons.  Our past does not define us and forgiveness helps us to see that because we can overcome the past so that it is not our obsession of regrets.

Forgiveness helps us look forward……to our new-found ability to love others more deeply.  Today, I will try to be of service to those I meet.  Today, I will try to ease the pains inside at least one other person because I have been in pain and know what it is like.

Forgiveness points me to a future of being able to love no matter what.  Pains of the past will not stop that.  Other people’s harsh judgments of me will not stop that.  My own past failings will not stop that.  I can love…….and I choose to do so……now……and in the future.

I will be defined now by what I can do in love rather than by what has happened to me in the past.

Robert

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Have you found that it is harder for men or women to forgive?

When we study differences between men and women on reliable and valid scales of the degree to which they forgive, we tend to find no differences between men and women.  When we do interventions to help people to forgive, we tend to find that both men and women can go through the process of forgiving.  Yet, when we hold workshops, far more women than men attend.  Women, in this kind of case, seem to be more drawn to forgiveness or at least to attend meetings about it.

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