Forgiveness

 The Lord's Prayer says we are to forgive the trespasses/debts of others.  What has troubled me for the past few years is not forgiveness, but if forgiveness means I must let a person harmful to me back into my life after forgiving them.

Richard Balkin 's What we get wrong about forgiveness – a counseling professor unpacks the difference between letting go and making up (The Conversation) offers me an answer.

I often remind people that forgiveness does not have to mean a reconciliation. At its core, forgiveness is internal: a way of laying down ill will and our emotional burden, so we can heal. It should be seen as a separate process from reconciliation, and deciding whether to renegotiate a relationship.

***

Forgiveness is also confusing, thanks to the way it is typically conflated with reconciliation.

Forgiveness researchers tie reconciliation to “interpersonal forgiveness,” in which the relationship is renegotiated or even healed. However, at times, reconciliation should not occur – perhaps due to a toxic or unsafe relationship. Other times, it simply cannot occur, such as when the offender has died, or is a stranger.

But not all forgiveness depends on whether a broken relationship has been repaired. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can still relinquish feelings of ill-will toward an offender, engaging in “intrapersonal forgiveness.”

***

With this in mind, I offer four steps to evaluate where you are on your forgiveness journey. A simple tool I developed, the Forgiveness Reconciliation Inventory, looks at each of these steps in more depth.

1. Talk to someone. You can talk to a friend, mentor, counselor, grandma – someone you trust. Talking makes the unmentionable mentionable. It can reduce pain and help you gain perspective on the person or event that left you hurt.

2. Examine if reconciliation is beneficial. Sometimes there are benefits to reconciliation. Broken relationships can be healed, and even strengthened. This is especially more likely when the offender expresses remorse and changes behavior – something the victim has no control over.

3. In some cases, however, there are no benefits, or the benefits are outweighed by the offender’s lack of remorse and change. In this case, you might have to come to terms with processing an emotional – or even tangible – debt that will not be repaid.

4. Consider your feelings toward the offender, the benefits and consequences of reconciliation, and whether they’ve shown any remorse and change. If you want to forgive them, determine whether it will be interpersonal – talking to them and trying to renegotiate the relationship – or intrapersonal, in which you reconcile your feelings and expectations within yourself.

Either way, forgiveness comes when we relinquish feelings of ill will toward another.

Okay, I see it is okay to refuse any ill will on my part towards another without inviting them over for dinner.

sch