Tagged: “Why Forgive?”
Emily Atallah
Through my work as an existential logotherapeutic coach, I help people find meaning in everything in their life, including work, family relationships, and in situations where they face insurmountable suffering. I do this mainly by working with the power of forgiveness.
In my home country, Colombia, forgiveness seems like an impossible task for many. With a history of more than 60 years marked by war, drug trafficking and constant conflict, entire populations have now had to confront a hard question: will they forgive those who horribly hurt them even if they never asked for forgiveness?
This made me look for ways I could help those clients who had to leave their home behind, fearing for their safety, and who came to a city that in more than one occasion, receives them with a hostile environment and not much help. Many people with deep wounds derived from the conflict and a past of violence, resentment and vengeance.
As I looked for ways to help, I researched many therapies, but with time, I found them temporary or incomplete. I also looked into the initiatives of religious groups, and though they were having some admirable results, they did not appeal to non-believers.
Then I heard about the International Forgiveness Institute, and all their research on how forgiveness is a psychological matter, not only a religious one. I was personally impressed by their focus on forgiveness’ impact on psychological issues such as anxiety, depression, and others as measurable variables. For me, it meant that now we can present evidence that forgiveness works and can in fact change hearts!
Finding meaning and forgiveness in a life full of resentments is crucial to heal. To see the offender as a human being and giving them what they deserve in dignity and love, changes your life and theirs. It restores justice even without reconciliation.
Emily Atallah with her Forgiveness CE Course Certificate of Completion.
Forgiveness gives you a second chance for a meaningful and happy life, an opportunity to live a better, healthier, fulfilling life where people reach for their dreams without the weight of resentful thoughts.
As a life coach, I found particularly reassuring and helpful to learn that forgiveness has a measurable impact on the people I treat despite what the offense was. My time studying at the Forgiveness Institute gave me more tools to better treat my clients, to measure their progress and to encourage them to strive for a better and more meaningful life.
I encourage you to give yourself the opportunity to see forgiveness in a new light and learn about its healing power, by taking the online “Forgiveness Therapy” course through the International Forgiveness Institute.
Emily Atallah
Coach de Vida
e-mail: emilyatallah@gmail.com
www.emilyatallah.com
Love Never Dies
Think about the love that one person has given to you some time in your life. That love is eternal. Love never dies.
If your mother gave you love 20 years ago, that love is still here and you can appropriate it, experience it, feel it. If you think about it, the love that your deceased family members gave to you years ago is still right here with you. Even though they passed on in a physical sense, they have left something of the eternal with you, to draw upon whenever you wish.
Now think about the love you have given to others. That love is eternal. Your love never dies. Your actions have consequences for love that will be on this earth long after you are gone. If you hug a child today, that love, expressed in that hug, can be with that child 50 years from now. Something of you remains here on earth, something good.
Children should be prepared for this kind of thinking through forgiveness education, where they learn that all people have built-in or inherent worth. One expression of forgiveness, one of its highest expressions, is to love those who have not loved us. If we educate children in this way, then they may take the idea more seriously that the love given and received can continue……and continue. It may help them to take more seriously such giving and receiving of love.
We need forgiveness education……now.
Robert
Actor Kelsey Grammer Forgives Serial Killer Who Raped and Murdered His Sister
Mirror, London, United Kingdom – Actor Kelsey Grammer’s younger sister Karen was only 18-years-old when she was raped and murdered by a serial killer in 1976. Although Grammer has carried that tragic loss in his heart for more than 40 years, he says that forgiveness is the only thing that has kept the horrific crime from destroying his life.
The much-loved star, who is best known for playing Dr Frasier Crane in television sitcoms Frasier and its predecessor Cheers, was the one who had to identify Karen’s body after her death. He said that, while he will always remember the “joy” of knowing her, he would not “let it disrupt me or destroy me.”
“As long as I’m alive I will miss her, and that’s just the way it is. So you carry that,” Grammer said. “I think you always carry it, because what you miss about them, is them in your life.”
Grammer added that forgiveness was a process that didn’t happen quickly for him and that it works together with justice.
“I’ve learned to forgive. I’ve even told the guy that is still alive that killed her that I do forgive him, although I don’t advocate for his freedom, I don’t think that’s reasonable.”
The actor, now 62, is currently starring in Big Fish The Musical at The Other Palace Theatre in London’s West End. He played Dr Frasier Crane for 20 years across the two TV comedy shows for which he won four Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes as a lead actor.#
Watch outtakes or the entire production of Big Fish The Musical or listen to the Big Fish Soundtrack.
Learn to Forgive? Who, Me? Why? How?
You can now access the answers to all those questions from the comfort of your own home.
Dr. Robert Enright, dubbed “the forgiveness trailblazer” by Time magazine, has helped thousands of people improve their lives by discovering and learning how to practice forgiveness through his one-day in-person workshops. Now that same remarkable forgiveness process, presented by Dr. Enright himself, is available to you via recorded audio right in your own home.
Forgiveness: A Pathway to Emotional Healing
Based on his 33-years of peer-reviewed, empirical scientific research, Dr. Robert Enright will help you discover and learn a step-by-step pathway to forgiveness. This 6-hour audiotaped workshop will enable you to develop confidence in your forgiveness skills and learn how you can bring forgiveness to your family, school, work place and community for better emotional health.
“Forgiveness is a process, freely chosen, in which you willingly reduce resentment through some hard work and offer goodness of some kind toward the one who hurt you,” according to Dr. Enright. “This gives you a chance to live a life of love, compassion and joy.”
Dr. Enright explains during this workshop how you can learn and use that process to help yourself and others. He explains, for example that:
• Forgiveness is NOT reconciliation, forgetting, excusing or condoning.
Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute
• Forgiveness does not get rid of the injustice but the effects of the injustice.
• Forgiveness cuts across many different philosophies and religions.
• The benefits of forgiveness are significant: scientific analyses demonstrates that considerable emotional, relational, and even physical health benefits result from forgiving.
This course is offered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies which is approved as a provider of Continuing Education credits social workers, counselors, therapists, psychologists, and more. Registration fee is $95. Start anytime, complete within 1 year.
REGISTER ONLINE 
or register by phone at 608-262-2451. For additional information, contact Barbara Nehls-Lowe, UW-Madison Continuing Studies Outreach Specialist: 608-890-4653.
Does Forgiveness Victimize the Victim?
In the latest round of false criticism against the moral virtue of forgiveness, we find this: Forgiveness places an extra burden on victims because they already are burdened by injustice. Now asking them to forgive or even assisting them in forgiveness adds a new challenge, a new burden and this is unfair. Leave the victim alone, is the advice.
Let us examine this claim of a new unfair burden in forgiving. Suppose that Person A deliberately hits Person B’s knee with a baseball bat, breaking the knee. Person B has a burden: the broken knee and the resentment toward Person A.
If Person B now wishes to take seriously the responsibility for physical healing, should this person now go to the emergency room and endure the bright lights and the MRI and the surgery and the physical rehab? Or, would this be too much of an added burden for Person B. Perhaps it is unfair to encourage Person B to seek medical help……if we follow the logic of the forgiveness criticism.
Yet, this added burden of medical care, which can be a challenge, is hardly a burden relative to living with a broken knee that may not heal well with the resultant pain and limp that may last indefinitely. The “burden” of healing is not nearly as troublesome as the burden of neglect of the injury.
Now let us turn back to the argument against forgiveness. Let us even stay with the baseball bat incident. Person B not only has a broken knee, but now also a broken heart from the shocking and unexpected incident.
Is it a burden to assist this person in healing the broken heart? Should we just let the victim be? Should we just let the victim live with the broken heart…..perhaps for the rest of the person’s life?
Do you see how this latest criticism against forgiveness is false? Do you see how the major problem is the error in thinking by the critics and not in forgiveness itself?
When a person is morally injured, it seems to be charitable to offer healing. Yes, healing can be challenging, but ignoring healing can be much worse.
Robert
