Tagged: “Misconceptions”
I have been ignoring a co-worker who is harsh with me. I am wondering if this makes me a bad person. I do not hate the person and I feel sorry for him. I just can’t take the harshness.
It seems to me that your issue is one of reconciliation. You are not harboring hatred, as you say. You even “feel sorry” for him. So, there is no indication of being a “bad person” who might want to seek revenge and be hurtful. So, I recommend that you work on changing your views of yourself, seeing yourself as someone who reduces negative emotions in the face of difficult interactions coming from the other person.
I am aware of the success of forgiveness with adults in prison. I now am wondering if you have any evidence that forgiveness interventions can work in juvenile corrections.
Yes, we have two published studies, both conducted in South Korea, demonstrating the effectiveness of forgiveness interventions for adolescents. The two references are as follows:
Park, J.H., Enright, R.D., Essex, M.J., Zahn-Waxler, C., & Klatt, J.S. (2013). Forgiveness intervention for female South Korean adolescent aggressive victims. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 20, 393-402.
Ji, W. & Enright, R.D. (2024). Forgiveness in juvenile corrections: An exploratory study on Korean female youth offenders. Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody, and Child Development.https://doi.org/10.1080/26904586.2024.2436967
I have been reading a lot about the idea that “forgiveness is for you” (the injured person), not for the one who behaved badly. Do you agree?
No, I do not agree with this idea. If forgiveness is a moral virtue, then it concerns goodness toward others, particularly the one who was unjust in the case of forgiveness. In fact, I have written an essay for Psychology Today about this very issue here:
Is forgiving others basically a decision, such as a decision to be kind to the one who was unfair?
Decisions are part of forgiveness, but not the entire essence of forgiving. As a moral virtue, forgiveness includes thinking (a decision is a thought), feelings, motivation, and actions toward the one who was unjust. Here is an analogy to make it clearer. Suppose you decided to work in a soup kitchen to help people without homes. Your decision was made as you sat on our sofa watching television. If you do not follow through on that decision in your motivation to get up off the sofa at some point and behaviorally go to the soup kitchen, would you say that your decision alone was sufficient regarding assisting people without homes? Decisions need to be broadened with feelings about going forward, the motivation to do so, and the action consistent with all of this.
Isn’t forgiveness different for all who experience it? After all, we are all unique.
Your idea of complete differences for each person who forgives is a philosophy of relativism. Here is a different perspective for your consideration: Aristotle distinguishes between the Essence and the Existence of different phenomena. Essence is the objective reality of what something is. All chairs, for example, share certain commonalities that differ from those of sofas or beds. Existence is how an Essence might be experienced differently. There are many different chair designs, for example, but they all still share a common Essence. It is the same with forgiveness. There is an objective reality across time, cultures, and persons that represents reality. Forgiveness is the motivation, affect, cognition, and behavior to be merciful to those who have been unfair to us. This can be expressed differently by different people and in different cultures, but this does not diminish what forgiveness is in its Essence. If forgiveness were completely different for each person, there could be no science of forgiveness, for example, because we could not devise measures of forgiveness or correlate forgiveness with such interesting variables as hope, self-esteem, and depression. Even in the interpersonal realm, how could we talk about forgiveness with one another if we keep meaning something different from each other?
