Tagged: “Trust”
I have noticed that some of my friends just are angrier than others. They do not seem to show this anger only when recently treated unfairly by others. They are just angry people. Why do you think this would be?
Without knowing the person’s history, it is not possible to know for certain why one of your friends is consistently showing anger. I suspect two issues. First, the display of anger in the home, when your friend was growing up, might have been high. In other words, angry behavior was demonstrated in the home and implicitly approved as a norm. In other words, the friend learned anger by observing it being modeled in the home. Second, the friend may have been hurt by the anger displays in the home and so there is resentment from the past that is affecting the person now, in the present. If this second scenario is correct, then the friend might benefit from forgiving one of the parents who might have displaced the anger onto your friend while growing up.
Learn more at Family Forgiveness Guidelines.
I have forgiven someone who betrayed me and hurt me deeply. My attitude toward the person now is good. Yet, I have fear of this person. What else can I do to move more deeply in forgiveness?
It seems to me that the issue now is not so much forgiveness as it is reconciliation. Your fear likely is the result of a lack of trust toward the person because of the betrayal. Reconciliation has to be earned. Have you talked with the person and has this person understood the offense and now is willing to change? You need to build some confidence in this person’s behavior and this will come if the person begins to behave in a way as to earn your trust.
Learn more at What Forgiveness Is Not.
When I forgive my former boyfriend, I find that I tend to make excuses for his behavior. I don’t like it when I see that I am making excuses. How do I avoid this?
There is a big difference between what we call **reframing** a person’s actions and excusing those actions. For example, if you see that he was under pressure and displaced his anger onto you, you can forgive while at the same time acknowledging that he should not have treated you this way. An excuse is to say that displacing anger is ok, acceptable, or not morally wrong. When you forgive and start to reframe whom the other person is, try to keep in mind that the behavior still is not fair. Your separating a person and his actions may help you to avoid excusing the actions as you forgive the person.
Learn more at How to Forgive.
What Is the Difference Between Acceptance and Forgiveness?
“Why not just accept what happened to you?” is a question I have heard many times. When a person is encouraged to accept what happened, this may or may not include forgiveness. Forgiveness and acceptance are different.
When one accepts what happened, this is a kind of surrender in a positive sense. It is not a caving in to problems or acquiescing to unjust actions from others. Acceptance is knowing that the world is imperfect and that bad things can happen. To accept is to stop fighting against what already happened. To accept is to resign oneself to the fact that the past event was unpleasant, but now we are in the present, away from that event.
Forgiveness, in contrast, is to offer goodness to those who have created the past unpleasant or decidedly unjust event. Forgiveness is an active reaching out to the other in the hope that the two might reconcile, although actual reconciliation may not occur.
A forgiver still can accept what happened, but not then be passive regarding the other person. The forgiver actively struggles to get rid of resentment and to offer kindness, respect, generosity, and/or love to the other person.
While acceptance can help us adjust to adversity, it, by itself, often is not sufficient to extinguish a lingering resentment toward others. Forgiveness is the active process for this.
Forgiveness and acceptance: They can work together, but they should not be equated as synonymous.
Robert
After Near-Fatal Shooting, Woman Forgives Husband Who Hired Hitman to Kill Her
BBC (UK) World Service Website, Carrollton, Texas – When Nancy (Shore) Howard drove home from church one day in August 2012, she was confronted in her garage by an armed masked man who grabbed her around the neck and demanded her purse. As she struggled to get free, the man shot her. The bullet traveled through her head and pierced her left eye before lodging in her right lung.
When she recovered consciousness, Nancy could barely breathe and was in excruciating pain. Somehow, miraculously, she struggled into the house and was able to call emergency services.
At the hospital, police were able to contact Nancy’s husband– John Franklin Howard, known to everyone as Frank–who quickly flew home from an out-of-town trip. The three children the couple had raised during their 30-year marriage were also soon at their mother’s bedside.
While Nancy is undergoing painful repairs to her face, throat, and paralyzed right arm, detectives aggressively pursue suspects, including Frank. They first discover that Nancy’s husband has been having a three-year affair. A few days later, they uncover connections between her CPA husband and a group known as the East Texas gang. The story becomes increasingly bizarre as evidence surfaces of a murder-for-hire conspiracy initiated–to Nancy’s horror–by her husband.
Investigators eventually uncover evidence that Frank has been paying large sums to the criminal gang–apparently to kill his wife–and that gang members were exploiting him for more and more money. The money source is Frank’s rich client, from whom he has extorted over six-million dollars, some of which he has used to give his mistress extravagant gifts. Frank is arrested and charged with attempted capital murder.
At Frank’s trial, the jury took only two hours to find him guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison and will have to serve 30 years before he will be considered for parole. By then he will be about 85 years old. A year later, the shooter is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to sixty years.
“I have forgiven him,” Nancy says of her husband. “The Bible says that if we don’t forgive those who have harmed us then we are unable to be forgiven and I couldn’t afford not to forgive him because I couldn’t live with bitterness.”
She goes on to say, “It’s because I still loved him at the time, and you know I have to say I still love him, not in a romantic love, but in a love that he’s the father of my children, and there’s always going to be a love there.”
Nancy says she “vigorously” celebrates every birthday she has had since the shooting and still experiences joy singing in the church choir. Nearly six years after the horror of the attack on her doorstep, she is moving on.
“I’m able to be thankful once again for how God has saved my life and the healing that’s happening in my children’s lives, it’s awesome,” she says. “I’m excruciatingly happy.”
Read the full story on BBC World Service: “My husband hired a hitman to kill me – but I forgive him”
Listen to Nancy Shore speaking to Outlook on the BBC
Read Nancy’s story: The Shooting of Nancy Howard: A Journey Back to Shore
__________________________________________________________________________________________
