Tagged: “Love”
The Forgiving Heart: Cultivating Compassion
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At times, scholars who study forgiveness use a term called “decisional forgiveness.” It refers more to the mind than the heart as the person thinks about forgiveness and commits to reducing anger and increasing mercy toward those who have been unfair. While thinking about forgiveness is important, it is reductionistic to define forgiveness, which is a moral virtue (Song, Enright, & Kim, 2025), primarily as a cognitive activity. This is the case because any moral virtue is much broader than that, including thinking, behaving, and feeling toward the one who acted unjustly.
The purpose of this essay is to focus on forgiveness from the heart, from one’s feelings as a vital part of the forgiveness process. As you cultivate a more holistic view and practice of forgiveness that goes beyond decision-making, you may find a deeper and more satisfying way to respond to those who have hurt you. Consider seven exercises to strengthen the forgiving heart.
1. What Exactly Is Compassion?
In this first exercise, we will be somewhat philosophical. The point is to understand compassion deeply enough so that you can define what it is. Compassion includes the emotion of caring for others who are in need, for example, due to unfortunate decisions or unexpected life circumstances that engender suffering. Compassion is a softening of the heart toward others, including a willingness to suffer with the other. When we forgive with compassion, we move from a wounded heart to a softened heart. It is distinguished from reconciliation, which includes mutual trust and a behavioral coming together. Aristotle connected compassion to the moral virtue of kindness toward others. Compassion can stir the heart to action, or helping those in need.
2. Don’t Start with Forgiveness, but Start with a Little Compassion
In this exercise, the point is not to apply a sense of compassion toward those who have been cruel to you. Instead, let us step back from all this hurt and turn to a time when one person unconditionally showed you compassion. Maybe this happened when you were a child, fell and hurt yourself, and your mother embraced you, comforting and protecting you. This is compassion toward you. Take some time to think of one such incident and reflect upon it, letting it abide in your heart. Stay with this image until you can truly say, “Yes, this experience convinces me that I have been the recipient of others’ compassion.”
3. When Have You Been a Giver of Compassion?
The point of exercise 3 again is not to apply this directly toward those who offended you. Now, please think of a time in which you (not someone else) exercised compassion toward someone who needed your help. Maybe it was spending much time with a friend who was grieving. Maybe it was helping a neighbor or co-worker under pressure and needed someone to rely on, who was you. When did you serve another person by exercising this compassion? Let this abide in your heart. Stay with this image until you can truly say, “Yes, this experience convinces me that I can be compassionate in this way.”
4. Without Turning Yet to Compassion, Now Bring the One Who Hurt You into Your Awareness.
We start not with the heart, but with the mind. Can you think of any time in which the one who hurt you was so wounded that those wounds were passed to you? I do not ask so that you can excuse what the other person did. Instead, the point is to understand the person better, as this someone who has gone through pain. Who is this person? Is this someone who has been carrying wounds from others, even for years? What might it be like for this person, deep inside, with such a wounded heart? As you engage in this exercise, can you sense that your heart is moving, even if slowly, from an entrenched anger or a deep resentment to, perhaps, a different form of feeling? Might you be shifting from resentment to mourning about what happened to you? Might your heart be shifting from anger toward sadness toward the other for what was endured by this person?
5. Take Some Time to Put All of This Together.
Take some time to understand that: a) You understand compassion; b) you have experienced compassion from another or others; c) you see clearly that you have offered compassion to others; and d) you see the one who hurt you as hurting. Who are you as a person? Who are you, given that you have experienced the giving and receiving of compassion in your life? You are more than your wounds. Take some time to reflect on this.
6. Take the Compassion Test Before Applying It to the Offending Person.
I will give you six questions here. Please answer yes or no and defend your answers. Question 1: Is it reasonable to try to feel another’s pain and serve this person even if it is difficult for you to do so? Why or why not? Question 2: Can compassion build you up in your own humanity? Why or why not? Question 3: Can compassion refresh you, the one who was cruel to you, and others with whom you frequently interact? Why or why not? Question 4: Can compassion, practiced over time, help to heal a wounded heart? Why or why not? Question 5: Do you want to live a life with more compassion? Why or why not?
7. Now, Put the Pieces of Compassion Together, a Little at a Time, Toward the One Who Hurt You.
When you are ready, first cultivate that sense of receiving compassion and being compassionate toward others into your heart from Exercises 1 and 2 above. With that softness now in your heart, ask yourself this: Can I extend this compassion, even a little bit, toward the one who was cruel to me? How might this aid the person in growing in humanity? How might it help me and our potential renewed relationship? Take your time here. Be aware of small but important transformations in your heart. Be aware of the positive change in yourself when you ask: Who am I, truly, as a person, and what do I want to leave behind as my legacy when I leave this world?
Conclusion
In the end, you have a choice. You can forgive with a sense of being respectful toward the other and not bring compassion into the process if you are not ready. Be aware of your readiness to extend your compassion toward those who are not good to you. As you decide to include compassion in your forgiveness process, you are exercising forgiveness more deeply, perhaps than ever before. The outcome might be a surprising joy that you receive as you practice forgiveness from the heart.
Reference: Song, J., Enright, R.D., & Kim, J. (2025). Definitional drift within the science of forgiveness: The dangers of avoiding philosophical analyses. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 45(1), 3-24.
What Is the Difference Between Forgiving and Walking Away?
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I recently received a thoughtful letter from someone who has suffered gravely and extensively from others’ unjust actions. The letter was a response to an article in the Washington Post newspaper, published on Thursday, April 23, 2026 entitled, How to let go of grudges—-and why it could be good for your health.
Because the letter writer asked such an interesting question (What is the difference between forgiving and walking away?), I wanted to share my response while protecting the privacy of the person. Here is my reply:
I am sorry to hear of the terribly unjust actions that you have experienced in your life. You certainly deserve none of this.
Forgiveness is a moral virtue in which you try to be good to those who have not been good to you. Basically, it is trying to cultivate mercy toward them. Walking away is different in that people can walk away with indifference, or even annoyance or hatred in their hearts.
I find that when people are treated very cruelly by others, it is difficult to walk away with a healed heart. Forgiveness is a powerful medicine for reducing, and even curing, the resentments that can literally last for the rest of a person’s life. Some people reject the idea of forgiveness or are not ready for it. In my experience, people who reject forgiveness actually misunderstand it, equating it with excusing what others did, with automatically reconciling (which a person does not have to do when forgiving), or with throwing justice under the bus. A person can forgive and seek justice.
So, if you think you are ready, you could start with a person who was not exceptionally cruel to you. Learn the forgiveness process with this one person. If forgiveness then seems reasonable to you, try another person, again choosing someone who was not extremely cruel to you. If you want to continue, keep choosing others who have hurt you a little more than the previous person you have forgiven. Eventually, you will be at the top of the pyramid, forgiving those who were exceptionally cruel to you.
If you accomplish all of this forgiving, you will stand triumphant, with a reduced resentment that might surprise you. Those who treated you cruelly then will have no emotional power over you in that the resentments remaining in your closet will be substantially reduced or eliminated.
If you go on this journey, I wish you the very best. Please let me know if you have any other questions about forgiveness.
Announcing a New Initiative: Families for Forgiveness Education
Mary Lou Coons
In conjunction with Mary Lou Coons, who runs the Puppets for Peace Foundation, we are launching a new initiative entitled Families for Forgiveness Education. The point of this effort is to encourage interested parents (or other adults in the family) to teach children and adolescents about forgiveness at home. The website for this is being built now.
Here is an excerpt from the website explaining the necessity for forgiveness education for children and adolescents:
We need to take the learning of forgiveness very seriously in our troubled world, so that adults are already schooled in the practice of this heroic and vital moral virtue. This is why we started Families for Forgiveness Education: to assist adults in families in passing on forgiveness to their children, and to equip them with the readiness to tackle the serious injustices they might face in adulthood.
The central points of Families for Forgiveness Education are these:
1. We are interested in the development of appreciation and practice of the virtue of forgiveness within the family as a whole, as well as within each person.
2. Forgiveness needs to be established as a positive norm within the family for its members to have an appreciation for and practice of it. This means that the parents must cherish the virtue, have constructive conversations about it, and regularly show it to the family by asking for and granting forgiveness.
3. Forgiveness needs to be taught in the home using age-appropriate and engaging materials for both parents and children, for every member of the family to develop an appreciation for and practice of forgiveness. This is why we have forgiveness curriculum guides for ages 4 to 18, all free of charge for you. This is why I have written self-help books on forgiveness for adults.
4. If children are to grow up to be strong enough to pass on the moral virtue of forgiveness to their own families as adults, parents must continue to teach, practice, and appreciate forgiveness.
5. In the end, Families for Forgiveness Education may prove to be a gift of love that is passed first to the children and then down the generations for years to come. Perhaps this forgiveness might extend to one’s local communities, reducing interpersonal friction and fostering more peaceful encounters.
What about you? Is it your turn to give this gift of love to your family?
More information about Families for Forgiveness Education will become available here as we develop this idea.
Addressing the “Both/And” Approach to Family Conflict: Why This Is Insufficient for Healing
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I recently read a self-help article about family conflict. The author was advocating for what is called the “both/and” approach to healing. It means this: Acknowledge the hurts against you, but also focus on times of positive interaction. Both are truthful, and if you can live with both side by side, this will promote healing.
I write this essay to respectfully disagree with this approach to family healing. I think it can be a first step, but it is incomplete by itself. It is so incomplete that I think it could lead to future conflicts rather than deep emotional and relational healing.
Let me start with an analogy. Suppose you damaged the cartilage in your knee. It annoys you and diminishes your quality of life because you cannot work out as rigorously as before. Yet, you have strong shoulders. If you take a literal “both/and” approach here, you will live with the broken-down knee and the strong shoulders. You can still work out, such as bench pressing or bicep curls. Yet, your ability to run now is hampered. Should you simply live with all of this or try to heal the knee? I vote for healing the knee.
It seems to me that this analogy applies to the “both/and” of family conflict. Yes, you have the challenge of injustice and the happy times, but isn’t it more beneficial to go for the healing from the resentment that has built up in the heart from the injustices? As with knee surgery, resentment in the heart can be healed by forgiving those who caused the pain. Yes, you still have a memory of the injustice, but now the emotional reaction to that memory is healed. The “both/and” is not likely to eventually lead to the “and” of resentment overpowering the “and” of fond memories. After all, resentment is a formidable foe. It can last for years and grow, overpowering any positive thoughts about the other person.
So, yes, let us be aware of the “both/and” as we do with a torn knee and strong shoulders, but let us move beyond that to forgiving those who caused the damage to the heart through unjust actions. “Both/and” focuses on insight. Moving forward with forgiveness focuses on healing once the insight is understood, confronted, and the forgiveness is accomplished.
An Achilles’ Heel for Forgiveness: The Lack of Perseverance
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In his classic work Pensees, Blaise Pascal discusses a challenge many people face. It is what he calls diversion, which is a kind of distraction from one’s primary goals in life. Diversion can temporarily be a source of entertainment or comfort in a challenging world. Yet, over time, such distractions can keep us from the larger questions of life, such as: Why am I here? What virtues should be the basis of my interactions with others? What happens when I pass away from this life?
Distractions can lead us away from our primary goals as we, for example, seek pleasure rather than directly meet the challenges of life. The new norms of society, the new games, the new entertainments can slowly, or at times even suddenly, take us far from our life’s goals. This can happen subtly so that the one distracted is not even aware that this movement away from meaningful goals is occurring.
I have seen this happen very often when it comes to practicing and nurturing forgiveness in a person’s life. This is 40 years of my observing forgiveness talking to you now. I have seen an initial euphoria in people who have been introduced to forgiveness, accurately defined, only for it to fade in them. I have seen this fading away in well-meaning teachers who start forgiveness education only to shift to the next hot topic emerging in education. Forgiveness just quietly drops off the radar, and so new students are not given the opportunity to understand and practice this life-giving virtue.
I have seen this in families. A person might read a self-help book on forgiveness, discuss it with others in the family, practice it for a while, and then it fades.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle reminded us thousands of years ago that to become more efficient in any moral virtue, we need three things: practice, practice, practice. Early enthusiasm is only a beginning. Greater proficiency grows across time as the person learns to appreciate the virtue even more, becomes more proficient at it, and eventually develops a love of that virtue.
What do you think? Those of you reading this: Can you say that you have developed a love of forgiveness, properly understood and practiced? Can you say that you are persevering in forgiveness, making it a part of your life? Can you say that you now are giving forgiveness to others in your family, workplace, worship community, and the larger community? If so, my hearty congratulations to you for your perseverance.
To those of you just picking up the banner of forgiveness, please be aware that your initial enthusiasm could fade too easily because of distractions. Please be aware of this……..and don’t let it happen.
