Tagged: “Forgiving”
Which do you think is more effective as a treatment for anger: relaxation training or forgiveness and why?
Forgiveness is appropriate if the person is angry because of injustices suffered from those who have treated the person unjustly. If this is the case, then I would choose forgiveness over relaxation, if I had to choose only one of these. I would do so for this reason: If we are deeply angry or frustrated or sad inside because of another person’s unfairness, these emotions are not easily eliminated by relaxation because relaxation treats the symptoms and not the underlying cause of the challenging emotions. Once a person stops relaxing, the challenging emotions likely will re-emerge. In contrast, forgiveness focuses on the cause of these emotions—the unjust treatment by a person—and the forgiveness process helps the emotionally wounded person to have a new response toward that person which tends to reduce these emotions to more manageable levels over time. In other words, as the forgiver thinks about the one who offended, the challenging emotions will have been reduced toward the offending person and so healing occurs. With relaxation training, there is no attempt to directly alter one’s emotions toward an offending other person.
How can a person go about finding out how angry he is? What does this process look like?
There are at least two steps to uncovering anger. The first is to look within and to rate what you see for now as your level of anger. This can be done either by filling out a valid anger scale or more simply by using the 1 to 10 scale of pain that you typically see in a doctor’s office. That 1 to 10 scale ranges from no anger inside at all (rated 1), to a medium amount of anger (rated 5), to an extreme amount of anger that is very painful (rated 10).
Once a person makes a judgement about the anger, a next step is to discuss how forgiving those who have hurt you can lessen anger. Once you are convinced that forgiveness can help you, this becomes a kind of safety net for you. This safety net then can help you to let down your psychological defenses about how angry you really are. At this point, you can re-take the valid anger scale or again go through the 1 to 10 scale exercise. At this point, people tend to admit even more anger than they did the first time because they now are not afraid of that anger, afraid that there is no solution to that anger. From here, the process of forgiveness begins.
How do I overcome a sense of self-loathing? I do not like myself for my past behaviors.
I would recommend that you begin to practice self-forgiveness, which should reduce that sense of self-condemnation or self-loathing. I actually have an essay at the Psychology Today website with a title that includes those exact words, self-loathing. The essay gives you advice on beginning the self-forgiveness process. Here is a link to that essay:
The Cure to Self-Loathing? Self-Forgiveness
I have forgiven someone, but I still feel like a victim. I want to grow beyond this view of myself as a victim. What is the next view of myself that you see as usually happening for people?
To see yourself as a victim means that you know you have been wronged. As you are seeing, if you keep this as your identity, then you are seeing yourself in a one-down position in that someone is keeping you down, keeping you under that person’s power. The next step is to see that you are a survivor. You have survived the attempt by others to keep you in a one-down position. The step after that is to see yourself not only as a survivor but also as a thriver. In other words, in your surviving the injustices, you have grown in your humanity, and you are now even better than before. I wish you the best in this journey of growth.
Please tell me why it is so important to forgive.
You are given the wonderful opportunity to get rid of bitterness and put love in its place for the one who hurt you and then, if you so choose, more widely for others, as you are freed to love more deeply and more broadly.
