Tagged: “forgiveness”

The tenth of 15 criticisms I see about forgiveness is this: When you proclaim your forgiveness, it only serves to make the one who offended you feel guilty.

To forgive offers a lot more consequences than just having the offending person feel guilty.  As we saw in our point 9, forgiving can heal you, the forgiver, psychologically.  Your forgiving can help to restore a relationship, if the other is amenable to this.  Yes, your proclamation of forgiving may make the other feel guilty and this is a very good thing if the other is guilty of injustice.  The feeling of guilt may aid the person in repenting and therefore changing unjust behavior.

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.”