Ask Dr. Forgiveness

What are some techniques you would recommend for making a person more aware of their inner sense of anger and the depth of that anger?

First, I would not rush this, but be patient with the person.  Sometimes a person puts up the psychological defenses of suppression, repression, and/or denial for a good reason.  The person may need some time, for example, to get used to what happened before starting on the journey toward emotional healing.  When the person is ready, you first can work with him or her to make that which is unconscious (repressed or denied, for example) now conscious.  What helps is this: If the person has the safety net of forgiveness and knows that he or she can confront and eliminate that anger, then the person is less likely to fear the uncovering of that emotion.

Another technique is to make the person aware of his or her inner pain as a result of an injustice.  If the person can look within courageously and see how much pain is in there, then he or she may be motivated to get rid of that pain.  The first step is to examine the pain and label it. Are you in mourning only?  Are you angry?  Are you perhaps even furious?  The diagnosis helps the person see the amount of forgiveness work necessary now to heal.

You talk of making people aware of their negative emotions prior to starting the forgiveness process. Isn’t it the case that some people just repress their anger or what I call compartmentalize it? Can’t we just let them do this without making them be aware of their bitterness or anger?

If someone repressed their anger, then they often will not think that they have anything to forgive.  “Why should I forgive?  I am over the hurt.  The person really did not hurt me all that much.”  A person who has repressed anger is not giving herself the opportunity to get rid of that anger and if it is very deep anger it could develop eventually into anxiety and psychological depression. It is because of these consequences of holding onto repressed anger that it is better to try to bring it to the surface and deal with it through forgiveness if someone has been cruel and therefore is the cause of the anger.

In my attempts to forgive, I try to respond with empathy and compassion to the one who hurt me. Is it possible to have such deep empathy and compassion that these qualities just abide in a person and are there, to be appropriated, any time and any place for any person and for any reason?

Yes, it is possible to carefully cultivate the qualities of empathy and compassion so that they are part of who you are as a person.  I call it becoming “forgivingly fit.”  It takes practice and then even more practice over years to develop such a deep, abiding sense of these qualities.  As a motivation for you to so cultivate these, I have a chapter in the book, The Forgiving Life, in which I challenge the reader to leave a legacy of love in this world.  To do so requires conscious effort and time so that you leave more love than anger in this challenging world when you die.  If you have this legacy as a goal, it may be easier to stay at the task of practicing daily the qualities of empathy and compassion.

You talk of a “global perspective” when forgiving another person. What is the global perspective and can one still take that perspective when the other has done something horrible?

The global perspective challenges the offended person to see the genuine humanity in all people, including those who do horrible acts.  For example, is this person mortal; will he or she die some day?  If she is cut, will she bleed?  Does he need air to breath and a little plot of land to stand on…..just as you do?  It is hard to take such a perspective when calling someone “inhuman” or “a monster.”  Yet, and some people will disagree with this, isn’t that a distortion of whom the offending person is?  Are not those who act horribly still human beings?  They do not become ducks or deer or chimpanzees.  They remain…..human.  The global perspective is one of the large challenges of forgiveness, to see the humanity in the other.

Can someone forgive a tornado if it destroyed his home?

Forgiveness is toward people who have been unfair.  Can a tornado be unfair?  No, because a tornado has no intentions to do evil.  One can work on acceptance of what happened, but it would be a distortion of forgiveness if you encouraged someone to forgive an inanimate object.  A goal of forgiveness, not always possible, is to enter back into a loving or respectful relationship with that person.  One cannot ever enter into a loving relationship with a tornado.