Tagged: “Anger”
Is it wrong to want to forgive someone by making the decision to help yourself to be freed from the rage and resentment? Or, is forgiveness only legitimate if you do it for the offending person?
We need to make a distinction between what forgiveness is and what are motivations for forgiving. When a person, who was treated unjustly, has the goal of reducing rage, this is a legitimate motivation. At the same time, forgiveness itself, as a moral virtue, is for the one who offended. So, as you appropriate forgiveness, you are doing your best to reach out to the other with kindness, respect, generosity, and even love. Your motivation for doing so may be to help yourself to heal emotionally. Further, this motivation eventually can change toward wanting the best for the one who offended.
If someone hasn’t harmed me directly, can I still forgive this person? As an illustration, one of my fellow employees was intentionally injured by our boss. Can I forgive the person who mistreated the co-worker whom I respect for his integrity and tenacity?
You speak of what some philosophers refer to as secondary forgiveness. Put another way, you have suffered by someone else’s wrongdoing toward a significant other and not toward you personally. You can forgive if something unfair happens to others and then this causes you pain. This can even happen if you are injured even though you don’t know the victim or victims. This is called tertiary forgiveness. Here is an illustration of this tertiary forgiveness: the head of your country starts a conflict with another nation and you believe that your leader’s actions are unjust. If you choose to forgive the leader, then you can.
I am having a hard time finding your forgiveness education study with primary grade students in Northern Ireland. Can you provide that paper for me? Thanks in advance.
The paper can be found in the Forgiveness Education section of this website. That paper can be found here:
https://internationalforgiveness.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Belfast-Northern-Ireland-II-1.pdf
How can I convince myself that I am worthy of love after letting down too many people in my life. I am having a hard time loving myself. Help!
Once we forgive others, we realize that we can offer unconditional love to ourselves, as we do not judge ourselves by our actions alone. Self-forgiveness is about finally allowing yourself to be gentle to……you. You realize that you are imperfect. You fall flat sometimes, and yet you do not have to keep yourself down. In a way, you are offering your own hand to yourself, accepting yourself as fully human in your imperfections, worthy of love because you are a person who is special, unique, and irreplaceable no matter what you have done. This is not some kind of trick you play on yourself because self-forgiveness challenges you to seek forgiveness from whomever you may have offended when you offended yourself. Self-forgiveness challenges you to be fair to those who experienced your unfairness.
I learned from a friend that self-forgiveness is a means of justifying negative behavior so that it can continue. Is she right?
Some believe that self-forgiveness is improper because it is impossible to evaluate one’s own conduct objectively—that is, we are too prejudiced and self-interested to make the right decisions. We do, however, have a conscience that helps us, even though we are unable to observe our own deeds with perfect clarity. As a result, we can judge if our words and deeds are right or wrong. Accurate self-forgiveness allows us to acknowledge our offenses toward ourselves and others and take the necessary steps to make amends. To put it another way, self-forgiveness is more than just loving oneself. It also involves making amends for the harm the self-forgiver did to other people. Therefore, when self-forgiveness is correctly understood and applied, it is not a ruse to continue engaging in conduct that our conscience tells us is wrong.
