Ask Dr. Forgiveness

I have 5 people in my life whom I need to forgive. Where do I start?

I recommend that you ask yourself what is your current level of anger—on a 1 to 10 scale—for each person.  Order the people from the least anger you have to the greatest anger you have.  Start with the one person with whom you have the least anger.  This will allow you to get a sense of the forgiveness process and to practice that process before you get to the person who hurt you the most.

If I want to forgive someone, should I consider following your 20 steps in the exact order in which you describe them?

This process model was not constructed to be a rigid model in which you have to follow the sequence in the exact order.  Some of the units will be irrelevant for you and so you can skip them.  Sometimes, as you are near the end of the forgiveness process, your anger re-emerges.  At that point it may be best to cycle back to the earlier units to once again examine and confront your anger.

You talk in your books of a “global perspective” in which a person strives to see the common humanity between the self and the offending other. If a person were to practice the global perspective with most people whom she meets on a daily basis, would this help the person to forgive when it is time to apply this perspective to someone who was cruel?

Yes, this kind of practice on those who have done nothing wrong can be good practice for the time in which there is injustice and pain and anger.  Taking the global perspective with others who are not harmful will not lead to an automatic forgiving (toward those who are unfair to you), but it could make the starting of the process easier.  It could make the cognitive understanding of the offending other easier as well.

What implications do you see if the offender is forgiven, but refuses to change the behavior?

The person who has forgiven should not reconcile if the offender’s behavior is deeply harmful.  An unrepentant offender likely is not going to change that behavior soon.

I am not angry at the one who was unfair to me. I am in pain. You talk mostly about anger and I am wondering if maybe you have missed something here.

I agree with you that pain occurs after being treated unjustly.  I think the sequence is as follows: 1) Someone is unfair to you; 2) Next comes shock or even denial; 3)  Then comes pain, as you describe; 4)  If the pain does not lessen or if you have no effective way of reducing and eliminating the pain, then you may become angry.

That anger can be at the person for acting unfairly, or at the situation, or even at the pain itself that resulted from the unfair treatment.  It is the anger, if it abides and deepens, that can lead to health problems (fatigue, anxiety, and so forth).  So, I emphasize anger within Forgiveness Therapy because it, in the form of excessive anger or resentment, can be dangerous to health, relationships, and communities.