Tagged: “break free from the past”
My father abandoned our family when I was 6 years old. I am now grown, in college, and he has come around now that the pressure is off. He wants to establish a relationship with me, but I do not even know him. Does it seem kind of phony to now go ahead with this?
It is never too late to forgive. You see your father’s mistakes. I think that he sees them, too. You surely have a right to your anger. At the same time, you could give your father a huge gift of mercy and aid your own emotional healing if you have mercy on him and forgive. It will take a strong will and courage for you to do this. You will know if and when you are ready.
The fourth of 15 criticisms I see about forgiveness: To forgive is toxic. It hurts the forgiver because he now is giving in to the unfair person’s demands and this relationship, which is toxic, hurts the forgiver.
When you forgive, you need not reconcile if the other continues to abuse you. Forgiveness as a free will choice is not toxic. It can set you free of resentment even if you don’t reconcile.
The eighth of 15 criticisms I see about forgiveness is this: To forgive is to cancel the debt the other owes you and so you never get back what is due.
When you forgive, as stated several times now, you do not cancel justice. Yes, you can cancel any obligation the other person has in helping to heal your wounds, but even here your forgiving, to be more complete, involves kindness and even love (on its highest level) which goes way beyond canceling the other’s obligation to help you to heal.
The twelfth of 15 criticisms about forgiveness that I so frequently see is that it is impossible to even understand or define forgiveness because there are so many different definitions of it in the published literature.
This problem is not inherent in forgiveness itself, but instead is a problem with those who write about forgiveness without deeply understanding what it is. As the ancient Greeks, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, remind us, there is an objective essence (or an unchanging set of characteristics) which typifies each moral virtue. Forgiveness is what it is across historical time and across cultures and, yes, there can be individual and cultural variations in how this essence is expressed. Just because there is a ritual, for example, in Sierra Leone on the West Coast of Africa, in which a community gathers at night around a large bonfire as people forgive one another, does not mean that what forgiveness is there differs in essence from what forgiveness is in a one-on-one forgiveness therapy session in the United States. Those who think about and then write about forgiveness, according to Aristotle, can use their rational faculties to understand, even if imperfectly, what forgiveness is and is not. To forgive is to be good to those who are not good to the forgiver and this goodness includes the motivation to be good to the offending person, the cognitions of goodness toward the person, positive affect, and, when possible, positive behaviors toward that person.
The fourteenth of 15 criticisms I see about forgiveness is this: The more people ask you to forgive, the more fuzzy you get about what is right and wrong. For example, if parents keep asking Sally to forgive her brother Sam for continually hitting her, eventually Sally may come to think that it is perfectly all right for Sam to keep hitting.
In our experience, true forgiveness helps people see the injustice more clearly, not more opaquely. As people break denial, examine what happened, and allow for a period of anger, they begin to label the other’s behavior as “wrong” or “unfair.”
