Author Archive: doctorbobenright

Mother Forgives Her Daughter’s Attacker

Manawatu Standard, New Zealand. A partner of the Cheryl Thompson’s daughter attacked the daughter with a knife last September. She survived the attack. He was sentenced yesterday to five years and five months in jail. ??At the hearing, Mrs. Thompson said, “I’m not too sure how people feel about forgiveness, but for myself, I know it heals the heart and soothes the soul. I chose today to let [the attacker] know face to face that we forgive him.” The judge described the forgiveness as “remarkable compassion.”

A man who repeatedly stabbed his girlfriend while on a paranoid religious rampage has been forgiven by her family, which a judge described as “remarkable compassion”.

In the High Court at Palmerston North yesterday, Elim Tekotahi Emery, 21, was jailed for five years and five months on two charges of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

On September 3, at a Feilding house, he stabbed his 18-year-old partner and his uncle with a boning knife.

His girlfriend was rushed to hospital for life-saving surgery and originally Emery faced an attempted murder charge, but this was later downgraded.

Yesterday his partner’s mother, Cheryl Thompson, told the court about her feelings of forgiveness toward Emery.

“I’m sad it had to end this way for two young people who were supposed to start their lives together,” Ms Thompson said.

“I’m not too sure how people feel about forgiveness, but for myself, I know it heals the heart and soothes the soul.

“I chose today to let Elim know face to face that we forgive him …”??Read the full story.

Why Forgive?

Let us start with a different question to better frame the one above. Why be just or fair? At the very least, we obey laws so we are not punished. At higher levels, we strive for fairness because we have come to be fair people and to deny justice is to deny whom we are as persons.

When it comes to forgiveness, we cannot fall back on laws and punishments because no society ever has had a law requiring forgiveness because it is centered in mercy, not on a quest for fairness.

I would like to suggest that there are at least four good reasons to forgive:

1) As we forgive, we begin to feel better emotionally. Forgiveness is not centered in the self, but instead on goodness toward those who have injured us. A *consequence* of forgiving is emotional release from resentment. This by no means implies that a person is necessarily selfish if he or she forgives for this reason. Grasping a life preserver in a stormy sea is a wise move.

2) As in our justice example above, as we practice forgiveness over and over, we actually become forgiving persons. To forgive becomes a part of who we are as persons and to not forgive is to deny our very personhood.

3) When we practice forgiveness long enough, we begin to see that we have a choice in life regarding the legacy we will leave in this world. We can leave a legacy of woundedness and anger or a legacy of love. Forgiveness helps us to leave a legacy of love as we honor each person as having inherent worth, even those who have hurt us. We do not honor the unjust for what they have done, but in spite of that.

4) Finally, as we forgive, we are showing others how to live a life of moral goodness in the face of unjust treatment. When we forgive, we are helping to create a community of forgiveness for others, in the home, school, place of employment, place of worship, and wherever people come together for mutual support and growth.

It seems to me to be betrayal of a loved one if we forgive those who gravely hurt that loved one. My husband was unjustly fired from his job. I want to stand with him, stick up for him. To forgive the boss is to betray my husband. So, forgiveness to me is to disrespect my husband under this circumstance.

We need to keep in mind that to forgive is not to say, “What the company did to my husband is ok; it is fair.” Instead, when you forgive, you are aware that what happened to your husband was unfair and it will always be unfair. Forgiveness does not invalidate this truth. As you forgive, you offer a cessation of resentment (which can take time) and try as best you can to see those who hurt your husband as persons—possessing worth in spite of what they did. Forgiveness can help you reduce anger so that you have more energy to be with and help your husband as you both work through this.

Anonymous

It may sound kind of unusual, but after visiting your site, I decided to forgive my high school basketball coach…..and I am now an adult.

How to begin. Well, this guy was into power. I remember so clearly one time in practice, he came up to me and said, “Do you know why I did not play you very much in the last game?” I looked at him with a kind of disbelief because, it was true, he benched me without warning. So, I said (politely, actually), “…..no.” He then went on, “You are not aggressive enough. I want to see you get in there and get some fouls on defense. Get aggressive.” He had never mentioned that to me before—being aggressive on defense. OK, I can do that.

Next game, he started me. I fouled like he asked. I fouled so much that I fouled out of the game before the first half was over. I was a fouling machine! And I scored in double figures to top off what I thought was my masterful fouling performance. So far so good. I was really looking forward to the next game, and when it started, I was not in the starting lineup. He hardly put me in the game! What’s up with this, I thought. The next day, the coach comes up to me in practice and asks, “Do you know why I did not play you last game?” I was kind of shocked and answered,”……..no.” He looked at me and said, “You foul too much,” and he just walked away.

As a teenager to get this kind of yo-yo treatment really hurt. I now see that the coach had a kind of dead-end job. He was a driver’s education instructor at the school, pretty low level stuff from an academic perspective. He was frustrated and he took it out on some of us kids. As I started to forgive him, I saw his pain, the pain of the dead-end job, of not really making it in his own world of teaching. Yeah, he hurt me, but it was because he was so hurt himself.

It’s over now and I can move on. I am surprised that something like this can stay with a person and leave doubts about one’s own abilities, not just as a ballplayer, but as a person. When I forgave, I looked the injustice in the eye, owned it as unfair, owned my pain, forgave, and stood up a little taller.

Do We Have Choices or Are They Illusions?

An article on forgiveness in The Times of India appeared today. I base this blog post on the following quotation from the author of this piece:

“Everything we do, while we are identified with body and mind is the result of conditioning and the choices we make are also influenced by this. Also, we don’t choose our parents nor siblings. Or the environment you lived in as a child or teachers at school.

Yet all these elements conditioned you into the person you are today. And they impact your choices. To know this is the beginning of awareness and compassion. The paradox is that real choice happens when we realize that there is never any real choice. So forgive and let go.”

We just had a materialist bomb drop on us. A “materialist bomb” is this: A person reduces human psychology to one and only one narrow area to such an extent that it looks like we have no free will. If we take neurobiology to an extreme, we could say that our brains make us think and behave in certain ways with no flexibility built in for our own innovation, creativity, or choice.

Or, rather than looking within for a material cause of our actions (the brain is an interior material cause), we can look to social conditioning such as positive reinforcement or punishment to explain why we behave as we do. After all, if someone bops you on your head every time you say the words “free will,” for example, you will probably end up cringing whenever you hear those two little words. You have been materially conditioned to cringe at the words “free will.” It is not your choice to cringe. Something in the material world is making you do this.

All well and good until we practice reductionism and make the rather difficult-to-make claim that none of us really has any choices at all. It is our brains and social conditioning that make us who and what we are.

Is that all there is to us as persons? If so, then there is no true right and wrong, no injustices against you because, well, the person’s brain is wired in a certain way and the social conditions of his or her environment have made the person this way.

There is nothing to forgive because no one chooses to hurt you. The person could not help it. Forgiveness is rendered useless. More dramatically, forgiveness is an illusion.

But, is it true that there is nothing but brain structure and social reinforcements to explain who we are? Whoever says “yes” to this, then I have the following thought-experiment for you. It comes with a warning label because the thought is violent.

Imagine that you are a parent. Your daughter was raped in Central Park. You are fuming. At the trial, the defense lawyer says this, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. We all know that our society has perpetuated the idea that women are men’s property. This has fostered an unintended sense of aggression in my client toward women. We all know that our society reinforces men to exploit women, not that they want to do so, but they are taught that. There is nothing my client could do but rape the one woman who happened to be jogging by that day. And let us not forget testosterone. That, combined with negative norms about women and the social reinforcements all ganged up on my client. He could not help himself. Therefore, I strongly request the dismissal of all charges against him.”

A show of hands, please, from anyone who agrees with this lawyer. We all know why we disagree with the request. It is because no matter what the norms are in society and no matter what the accused man’s social conditioning or testosterone levels were on that day, he had hundreds of choices of how to act. To say that he had to act in this and only this way is to deny reality. It is to deny the raped woman justice. It is to deny her the possibility of forgiving because forgiveness is an illusion that we need to guard against, not embrace.

There are no choices? I choose not to believe it.

Forgiveness is alive and well because injustices do happen by people’s freely chosen actions, and sometimes those actions are wrong and punishable, not dismissed for the illusion of an exclusively-materialist cause to our behavior.

Forgiveness as an illusion? No. When someone harms you, he or she could have behaved in many other ways, including choosing—choosing—to be respectful and kind.