Our Forgiveness Blog
Helpful Forgiveness Hint When Forgiveness Is Difficult for You
We need to change your view of who you are as a person if you have been stuck in unforgiveness and are discouraged. The world will tell you that you are less than you should be if your loved ones reject you. Do not listen to the world. I have seen that it is all too easy to condemn yourself when others first condemn you. Fight against that, starting now.
Who are you as a person? You are someone who has inherent worth even when you struggle in life. You are someone who is special, unique, and irreplaceable even if you have unhealthy anger in your heart. You are not—-you are not—-a failure at forgiveness. Remember that forgiveness is a process and this takes time. Please do not be harsh on yourself if you are struggling with the process. How you are doing in this process today is not an indication of where you will be in this process one month from now. Who are you?
Robert
The Forgiveness Path Is Not a Straight Line
If you are like the rest of us, when you begin to forgive another person you will start and stop and start again a number of times before you arrive, safe, at the journey’s end, confident that you have forgiven. You will be making great progress and then have a dream about the person and wake up angry all over again. You will think you have conquered, only to meet the person who hurts you again, and there is the anger. Or, it is the holiday season and you reflect back on your life hoping for peace and instead get a piece of the person’s own anger, and once again you are angry. The forgiveness path is like this and so please be gentle with yourself.
Robert
What Finding Meaning in Suffering Is Not
When you find meaning in your life and in the suffering that you endured you are not doing any of the following:
You are not denying anger, grief, or disappointment because of what happened to you. It did happen and your negative response is what we all go through. To find meaning is not to put the pillow over your head and hope the pain goes away.
When you find meaning you are not playing games with yourself by say, “Oh well, I can just make the best of what happened to me.” Yes, you can make the best of what happened, but if this is your meaning in what you have suffered, you are not going after that woundedness inside of you. The “oh, well” approach is so passive. We need a more active approach to the pain.
When you find meaning you do not sugar-coat the injustice and distort reality by saying, “All things happen for good reasons and so I will try to see the good in what was done to me.” Let us be honest: Maybe there was not any good in the injustice itself. What you learn from it will have goodness, but the event itself? Maybe you will find no good in that injustice against you and that is all right.
Robert
When You Forgive, You Do Not Accept the Situation
I recently was talking with someone who said that her therapist is helping her to accept what happened to her in childhood. When we have been traumatized, we should not expect ourselves to accept the situation. No one, for example, would expect an abuse victim to accept what happened.
Forgiveness is not about accepting situations. Why? Because forgiveness as a moral virtue is centered on persons and not primarily on situations. All moral virtues, whether it is love, justice, kindness, patience, or any other, is a form of goodness for other people’s good. We are not kind to tornadoes, for example.
When we forgive, we reach out to persons, those who did wrong. We work at accepting the humanity in that person, despite what he/she did. We do not accept what he/she did.
When therapists ask traumatized persons to accept unjust situations, they may be asking the impossible, which could lead to frustration and even guilt in the client. After all, if I am supposed to accept that I was brutalized, and then cannot accomplish that, I might feel inadequate. Clients need to know that it is not their job to accept situations, but instead to work on accepting the inherent worth of all persons, even those who are unjust. Even this thought takes time and effort, but is achievable with persistence and a good will.
Robert
The Superficial Self-Help Advice to the Lovelorn: Don’t Care So Much
I was listening to a self-proclaimed self-help “expert” today. His goal was to try to help those who have lost in love to remain psychologically whole or to become whole once again. The gist of his advice was this: Break the attachment so that you care less than the partner cares. This diminishes his or her power over you. When we attach to others, it is then that we are vulnerable to suffering. Detach and then you automatically will suffer less.
But the big questions for me on this advice are these:
Is suffering so bad that we cannot love others in a deep way?
Why view relationships in terms of power and then possessing the power as a way to heal?
Finally, is a world of detachment meaningful and purposeful compared to the healthy attachment of genuine love and service to the other?
Suffering is not to be avoided at all costs. If there were no ways out of suffering and if suffering crushed all of us all the time, then this would be different. Yet, we all can grow through suffering by becoming more patient, more mature in our character, and more sensitive to the suffering in others. Suffering is not the enemy. No, suffering should not then be sought, but when it comes, there are solutions and one of them is to practice forgiveness.
Are relationships defined primarily by power? If so, then both partners are missing out on one of the richest, most beautiful experiences on this earth: to step outside of a predominant self-interest to the kind of love that serves and in the serving gives joy. All of this likely is missed by too many who view the world from a power lens because power is intent on dominating, not serving. When was the last time you saw true joy on the face of someone who dominates?
Detachment in the name of avoiding suffering is to play it safe. It is like taking your $100 and putting it in the ground so that you avoid losing it. If, instead, you are not detached in this world and take the risk of investing that $100 it could grow where you can help others. Detachment is passive and ultimately joyless.
Don’t care so much? No thanks. I’ll take risks and see love as a way to serve. In that service there may be suffering, but joy is likely eventually to grow. I will take joy over safety every day of the week.
Robert
