Tagged: “hurtful event”
Healing Hearts Hero Award Presented to Rosemary Kite
Rosemary Kite, founder and president of Forgive4Peace (2008-2018), has been selected to receive the International Forgiveness Institute’s (IFI’s) Healing Hearts Hero award. The award recognizes individuals who have developed collaborative partnerships with the IFI and its co-founder Dr. Robert Enright in order to promote the virtue of forgiveness on an international basis.
Formerly called Possumus International, the organization was created in 2008 with what Rosemary calls “the desire to overcome evil through a superabundance of good. And what better good could be provided to the world than instruction on how to exercise mercy towards one another, bridging the way to peace by teaching the importance and value of forgiveness at home, at school, and at work.”
Rosemary Kite, founder of Forgive4Peace, has received the IFI’s “Healing Hearts Hero” award.
Shortly after its founding, Possumus International (Latin for the words “we can”) became a 2009 Charter Member of the National September 11th Memorial and Museum. Then Rosemary and her colleagues initiated an annual “Family, Friends and Forgiveness” essay competition for girls 10-14 years old with the winners awarded camp scholarships.
In 2013, after learning about and wanting to be a part of the empowering work of the IFI, Rosemary established a “Families and Forgiveness” program that incorporated lessons from Dr. Enright’s A Family Guide to Forgiveness Education into private home settings.
Since then, Rosemary and Dr. Enright have collaborated on school Forgiveness Education projects around the world including those in: 1) Inner City Milwaukee, Wisconsin; 2) Belfast, Northern Ireland; 3) Liberia, West Africa; and, 4) the West Bank, Israel.
Forgive4Peace provided financial support for two IFI-hosted events—the Jerusalem Conference on Forgiveness (2017) and the Rome Conference on Forgiveness (2018). In July, Rosemary was an active participant at the International Educational Conference on Agape Love and Forgiveness in Madison, WI, that was hosted by the IFI and attended by 160 educators from the US, Northern Ireland, Taiwan, Israel, Spain, and the Philippines.
“Rosemary is a fabulous ambassador for forgiveness who has continually impressed me from the first day I met her,” according to Dr. Enright. “She is constantly trying to raise awareness of the importance and value of forgiveness in one’s everyday life. She definitely knows how to heal hearts through forgiveness.”
In her 2019 guest blog for this website, The Art and Science of Forgiveness, Rosemary wrote:
“The art and science of forgiveness suggests that the best medicine we can possibly take to improve our physical, psychological, social, and spiritual health, is forgiveness. Forgiveness is like the pill that offers the deepest healing of the wounds that fester in the human heart.”
Elsewhere she says: “As everyone who has ever had to forgive knows, every act of forgiveness begins with an injustice. We have wounded hearts all around us, everywhere we go. Why not try to be a healing heart to those we come across in our paths daily?”
Rosemary, who has a BA from California State University in San Francisco, has devoted her professional career to educational endeavors in the non-profit sector, primarily through the education of women and girls.
How do I know, with some degree of confidence, that I am ready to reconcile with the other person?
Reconciliation is different from forgiveness. When we reconcile, this is a process of two or more people coming together again in mutual trust. Reconciliation is conditional on the other person’s willingness to change, if he or she was the one who acted unfairly. Forgiveness, in contrast, can be offered unconditionally to the other as a form of respect, understanding, compassion, and even love, even if there is no reconciliation. So, you can forgive without reconciling.
With all of this as background, here are four questions which might help you decide if you are ready to reconcile (and I am presuming that the other is the one who has hurt you):
1) Has the other shown an inner sorrow about what he or she did? We call this remorse;
2) Has the person verbally expressed this sorrow to you. We call this repentance;
3) Has the person made amends for what happened (and we have to ask if he or she has done so within reason because sometimes we cannot make full amends. For example, if someone stole $1,000 from you but truly cannot repay it all, then you cannot expect that he or she can make amends in any perfect way). We call this recompense;
4) If the person has shown what I call the “three R’s” of remorse, repentance, and recompense, then do you have even a little trust in your heart toward the person? If so, then perhaps you can begin a slow reconciliation, taking small steps in rebuilding the relationship. Your answer to these four questions may help you with your question: How do I know that I now am ready to reconcile?
How can I forgive a God I no longer believe in? I have a lot of anger toward this non-existent deity.
It seems to me that you do, in fact, believe in God and this is hidden from you right now. Why do I say this? You cannot have anger toward a person who does not exist. How can a person who does not exist be unfair to you and therefore hurt you? It is similar with God. How can you have “a lot of anger” for a deity when you claim the deity does not exist? Your emotions suggest to me that you do see God as real. If this is true, then you need to ask questions such as this: Is God perfect, all holy? If so, then God cannot be unjust to you. Perhaps it is people who have hurt you and you are passing this now to God (“God should have prevented this,” as one example). If this is your mode of thinking, then I recommend a deeper dive into theology so that you can address the issue of why God allows suffering in this world; why God allows others to be unfair to you. In other words, it may be the rigors of this world and hurtful people at whom you are angry.
To what extent do you think a person should revisit the injustice, feel the emotions from that time, and relive the event in order to gain insight into how to confront all of this now? I am concerned that such revisiting could induce re-traumatization.
The process of forgiveness does not require that the other revisit the event of the injustice. Instead, the big question from that past time is this: Was I truly treated unjustly? If the answer is “yes,” then the goal is to examine, not the actual past event, but instead the current effects of that event on the person now. So, re-traumatization is not likely to occur because the person definitely is not asked to revisit in detail that past event. We have to realize that some degree of trauma exists now, if the injustice is deep. So, it is not that the potential forgiver is revisiting negative feelings. Instead, it is the case that the person is examining current negative feelings that now can be changed to more adaptive emotions and reactions.
What are some key reasons why people will not let go of their anger when treated unfairly by others?
While there are many reasons for holding onto anger, here are a few of these for your consideration:
Sometimes, people feel a sense of power by holding on to the anger. They feel as if no one will be able to treat them badly if they have a deeply assertive attitude. Of course, one can be assertive without being angry, but at times people link these two (being powerful and being angry) together.
At times, people are unaware of the damage being done to one’s inner world by holding on to the anger. It is as if there will be no negative consequences for keeping such deep and abiding anger inside. Therefore, the person clings to the anger thinking that no harm can be done by doing this.
At other times, people are denying the depth of their anger, thinking that a little anger will not hurt them when, in fact, they have much more of this emotion than they realize. At such times, it is important to uncover the depth of the anger for the sake of the offended person’s well-being and for the well-being of those with whom there is frequent interactions.
