Ask Dr. Forgiveness
I think that forgiveness is a fad, a passing fad, kind of like the mindfulness popularity. Why should I think that forgiveness will last a long time in Western culture?
Forgiveness is likely to continue because it has been discussed for thousands of years. It is sad that forgiveness has yet to be taken seriously on the societal level. By that I mean this: There never has been, from what I can find, a thorough-going discussion in any secular community on the importance of applying both justice and mercy/forgiveness together in the larger community. Justice has been paramount and forgiveness virtually ignored. So, forgiveness likely will continue to last within individual human hearts, primarily because that has been the case, as I mention above, for thousands of years. It is my hope that societies will awaken to the importance of letting justice and mercy/forgiveness be part of the dialogue of how we should interact with one another.
What happens when you forgive a person who refuses to forgive you in return? Suppose after you forgive, the other refuses to talk with you. How do you come to a peace when you know the other hates you?
There are no guarantees that your forgiveness will change the other person. Part of forgiving is knowing that you have done your best to offer compassion and even love to the other. You can go in peace knowing that you have done your best.
In Chapter 2 of your book, Forgiveness Is a Choice, you make the claim that if I try to forget offenses against me, then this is unhealthy. Why do you say that? Isn’t it healthy to put the past behind?
Yes, it is healthy to put the past behind if one does not deny the anger inside of oneself. My point in saying that trying to forget is unhealthy is this: So often we still remember the deep injustices against us. It often is unrealistic to completely forget what happened. We do not develop a kind of moral amnesia when we forgive. Instead, we remember in new ways, without the build-up of strong anger. We need to be gentle with ourselves when we remember details of cruelty against us. Such remembering does not mean that we have failed to forgive.
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.
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.
