Tagged: “Anger”
I read your published article in the journal, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, in which you helped men in a maximum-security prison to forgive people who hurt them. What is your next step, to open all the jail cell doors and let out everyone who has ever been hurt?
You are confusing forgiving and abandoning justice. You can forgive a person and then seek justice. As people in correctional institutions learn to forgive those who brutalized them when they were children or adolescents, this can lower their rage, making them less dangerous. Advocating for their forgiving does not mean advocating for their release from the institution.
Doesn’t forgiving go against our biological nature of the survival of the fittest? Don’t we want to step up with courage and stop bad behavior rather than acquiescing to it?
When we forgive we do not excuse what the other person did. We can forgive, know what the other did was wrong, and take steps to exercise the moral virtue of justice. Forgiving and justice seeking can exist side by side.
How is forgetting what happened part of the forgiveness process?
In my experience working with people who forgive, they do not forget what happened to them. Instead, they remember in new ways. As they occasionally look back on what happened to them, they do so without the heightened emotions of deep anger or very deep sadness as was the case prior to forgiving.
It takes courage to say no to someone who hurt you. It is weakness to forgive.
Is it weak to strive to see the full humanity in someone who hurt you? Is it weak to stand in the pain of what happened so that you do not throw that pain back to that person or to unsuspecting others? Is it weakness to return a phone call if it is requested by someone who hurt you? To forgive is heroic because you try to be good to those who are not good to you and you do this while in pain, caused by that person.
I have been reading some of the social scientific literature on forgiveness and I am a bit confused. I see a lot of different definitions of forgiveness out there. Is forgiveness more than one thing?
To forgive another is a moral virtue of being good to those who are not good to you. I am going to give you a little philosophy here based on Aristotle. He made the distinction between what he called the Essence of any moral virtue and the Existence of that virtue. Essence asks this question: What is the objective meaning of forgiveness that is consistent across cultures and across historical time? Existence asks this question: How does the fundamental sense of forgiveness (that is fixed across cultures and historical time) have nuances for each person and within different cultures? So, there is a fixed definition of what forgiveness is (its Essence) and yet it can behaviorally vary according to each person’s ability to forgive and according to different cultural norms for expressing forgiveness (its Existence). The differences in the definition of forgiveness (its Essence) within the social scientific literature is caused by different researchers having different views of forgiveness (including misunderstandings of what forgiveness is) and not something inherent within forgiveness itself.
