Tagged: “Why Forgive?”

I have done the exercise for your Process Model and I see the stresses that the person was under. Still, this does little for my anger. Yes, I see a wounded and even a weak person, but I still want to punch him for what he did to me. What can you suggest to me so that I am not living with this resentment?

Doing the exercises is not an automatic way out of resentment. It will take time for the resentment to end. I recommend homework for you on a daily basis. Here is that homework: At least twice a day for the next two weeks, please go over the tasks in this exercise, trying to see the person more clearly at the time of the injury. Say to yourself, “I forgive (name) for hurting me at that time when this person was under stress. I will try to be merciful even though I did not receive either justice or mercy.”

Based on a response in 8 Keys to Forgiveness, Chapter 5.

Can your Forgiveness Education materials be modified for secular universities, which are looking at racial injustice, white supremacy, social justice?

Our Forgiveness Education programs are built for ages 4 through age 18. For university settings, I would recommend the following:

The video, The Power of Forgiveness, as a way to get people discussing forgiveness in the context of societal challenges.

Then you might consider small groups that read and discuss any of the following of my self-help forgiveness books:

Forgiveness Is a Choice (2001)

The Forgiving Life (2012). This is my most in-depth self-help book because it links forgiving to the moral virtue of agape love. This book is a Socratic dialogue between two women.

8 Keys to Forgiveness (2015)

Please keep in mind that some who advocate for social justice misunderstand the importance and beauty of forgiveness, thinking it is a way of caving in to injustice. This is not what forgiveness is. Yet, if a person misunderstands forgiveness in this way, it may lead to a rejection of forgiveness because of this misunderstanding of its true meaning.

It seems to me that for forgiveness to succeed, it is necessary for low self-esteem and toxic anger to disappear. What do you think?

For forgiveness to significantly raise a person’s self-esteem and to lower toxic anger, the person needs to commit, with a strong will, to the practice of forgiveness. This takes, as Aristotle says, practice, practice, and more practice.  Our Process Model of Forgiveness is an empirically-verified way of helping people to reduce in negative emotions. Yet, when we forgive, we do not necessarily leave all negative psychological issues behind. For example, we still may have some residual anger, but that anger now no longer controls us. Instead, we are in control of the anger.

We have been in this new year for almost a month now. The idea of being happy in the new year is lost on me because of how I have been treated in the past. I am angry. Can you suggest a way for me to truly have hope for a happy new year this time?

We sometimes think that those who hurt us have far more control over us than they actually do. We often measure our happiness or unhappiness by what has happened in the past. My challenge to you today is this: Consider forgiving those who have hurt you, who have hurt your happiness.  Your response of forgiveness now to the one (or ones) who hurt you can set you free from a past influence that has been toxic. Try to measure your happiness by what you will do next (not by what is past). Your next move can be this––to love regardless of what others do to you. I gently urge you to try this and see if your happiness increases.

What do you think is the highest reason to forgive? For example, is the morally highest reason to forgive to preserve my own emotional health in self-care? Is it to help the other person to live a better life?

Those are very good reasons to forgive.  I would say one of the highest reasons to forgive is this: to exercise goodness, particularly love, as an end in and of itself regardless of how others react to your offer of forgiving and whether or not you show immediate psychological improvement.  In other words, to offer love regardless of the consequences seems to me to be a special reason to forgive.