Forgiveness

Many people apply various kinds of salve or balm to old emotional wounds, but this simply does not work. They may self-righteously fore-go overt and physical revenge, yet "take it out" or "get even" in many subtle ways. A typical example is the wife who discovers her husband's infidelity. Upon the advice of her minister and/or psychiatrist, she agrees she should forgive him. Accordingly she does not shoot him. She does not leave him. In all overt behavior she is a dutiful wife. She keeps the house neatly; she prepares meals well; and so on. But she makes his life hell on earth in many subtle ways by the coldness of her heart and by flaunting her moral superiority. When he complains, her answer is, "Well, dear, I did forgive you-but I cannot forget." Her very "forgiveness" becomes a thorn in his side, because she is conscious of the fact that it is proof of her moral superiority. She would have been more kind to him, and been happier herself, had she refused this type of forgiveness and left him.

Forgiveness Is a Scalpel That Removes Emotional Scars

"'I can forgive, but I cannot forget,' is only another way of saying 'I will not forgive,'" said Henry Ward Beecher. "Forgiveness ought to be like a canceled note-torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one."

Forgiveness, when it is real and genuine and complete, and forgotten--:- is the scalpel which can remove the pus from old emotional wounds, heal them, and eliminate scar tissue.

Forgiveness which is partial, or half-hearted, works no better than a partially completed surgical operation on the face. Pretended forgiveness, which is entered into as a duty, is no more effective than a simulated facial surgery.

Your forgiveness should be forgotten, as well as the wrong which was forgiven. Forgiveness which is remembered, and dwelt upon, re-infects the wound you are attempting to cauterize. If you are too proud of your forgiveness, or remember it too much, you are very apt to feel that the other person owes you something for forgiving him.

You forgive him one debt, but in doing so, he incurs another, much like the operators of small loan companies who cancel one note and make out a new one every two weeks.

Forgiveness Is Not a Weapon

There are many common fallacies regarding forgiveness, and one of the reasons that its therapeutic value has not been more recognized is the fact that real forgiveness has been so seldom tried. For example, many writers have told us that we should forgive to make us "good." We have seldom been advised to forgive that we might be happy. Another fallacy is that forgiveness places us in a superior position or is a method of winning out over our enemy. This thought has appeared in many glib phrases, such as "Don't merely try to 'get even'-forgive your enemy and you 'get ahead' of him." Tillotson, the former Archbishop of Canterbury [John Tillotson (1630 – 1694) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1694], tells us, "A more glorious victory cannot be gained over another man, than this, that when the injury began on his part, the kindness should begin on ours." This is just another way of saying that forgiveness itself can be used as an effective weapon of revenge, which it can. Revengeful forgiveness, however, is not therapeutic forgiveness.

Therapeutic forgiveness cuts out, eradicates, cancels, makes the wrong as if it had never been. Therapeutic forgiveness is like surgery.

Give Up Grudges as You Would a Gangrenous Arm

First, the wrong-and particularly our own feeling of condemnation of it-must be seen as an undesirable thing rather than a desirable thing. Before anyone can agree to have an arm amputated, he must cease to see the arm as a desirable thing to be retained, but as an undesirable, damaging, and threatening thing to be given up.

You Can Forgive-If you’re willing

Therapeutic forgiveness is not difficult. The only difficulty is to secure your own willingness to give up and do without your sense of condemnation-your willingness to cancel out the debt-with no mental reservations.

We find it difficult to forgive only because we like our sense of condemnation. We get a perverse and morbid enjoyment out of nursing our wounds. As long as we can condemn others, we can feel superior to them. No one can deny that there is also a perverse sense of satisfaction in feeling sorry for yourself.

Jesus Didn't "Forgive" the Adulterous Woman

You cannot forgive others unless you have first condemned them.

Jesus never condemned the woman in the first place; so there was nothing for him to forgive. He recognized her sin or her mistake, but did not feel called on to hate her for it. He was able to see, before the fact, what you and I must see after the fact in practical therapeutic forgiveness: that we ourselves err when we hate others because of their mistakes, when we condemn them, or when we classify them as certain types, confusing the person with the behavior, or when we mentally incur a debt that others must "pay" before being restored to our good graces and our emotional acceptance.

Forgive Yourself as Well as Others

Not only do we incur emotional wounds from others; most of us inflict them on ourselves.

We need to recognize our own efforts as mistakes. Otherwise we could not correct course. "Steering" or "guidance" would be impossible. But it is futile and fatal to hate or condemn ourselves for our mistakes. A study on guilt conducted at Case Western Reserve University, reported in Reader's Digest (September 1997) found that the average person spends two hours a day feeling guilty! Much of this is even present moment guilt: the working mother who feels guilty while at work about not being at home with her children, then guilty if at home in the afternoon with her children for not pulling her weight at work; the exhausted son or daughter of an aging, infirm parent, guilty for feeling bit irritable; the traveling executive who feels guilty about missing his daughter's recital at school.

You cannot see your future with optimistic eyes if you cannot view your present and past with kind eyes.' This is not to suggest simply letting yourself off the hook at every turn. Responsibility is important. But The Critic Within is so much more powerful than other critics; we must take care not to let it run roughshod over our self-image.

You Make Mistakes-Mistakes Do Not Make "You"

In thinking of our own mistakes (or those of others) it is helpful, and realistic, to think of them in terms of what we did or did not do, rather than in terms of what the mistakes made us. .

One of the 'biggest mistakes we can make is to confuse our behavior with our self, to conclude that because we did a certain act it characterizes us as a certain sort of person. It clarifies thinking if we can see that mistakes involve something we do: They refer to actions, and to be realistic we should use verbs denoting action, rather than nouns denoting a state of being in describing them.

For example, to say "1 failed" (verb form) is but to recognize an error, and can help lead to future success.

But to say, "I am a failure" (noun form) does not describe what you did, but what you think the mistake did to you. This does not contribute to learning, but tends to fixate the mistake and make it permanent.

This has been proved over and over in clinical psychological experiments.

 Dr. Knight Dunlap, who made a twenty-year study of habits, their making, unmaking, and relation to learning, discovered that the same principle applied to virtually all "bad habits," including bad emotional habits. It was essential, he said that patients learn to stop blaming themselves, condemning themselves, and feeling remorseful over their habits-if they were to cure them. He found particularly damaging the conclusion, "I am ruined," or "I am worthless," because the patient had done, or was doing, certain acts.

So remember you make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you anything!

What you do need not define who you are or what you will do!

You Are Not Your Mistakes.

MENTAL TRAINING EXERCISE

By far, the most challenging and rewarding exercises of all suggested in this book are these involving forgiveness. Choose one or two persons for whom you've long carried resentment over past slights and find a way in your heart to truly, completely forgive them, no strings attached, and ultimately do so via your actions toward them. Also, identify some past error or situation you have been carrying a grudge against yourself for, and forgive yourself, and finally, once and for all, banish this from your thoughts. This may very well require considerable work in your imagination factory. Invest .30 minutes a day for 21 consecutive days on quiet reflection, working on this with yourself, in solitude.

Grace Notes~Forgiving Yourself and Your Biggest Grudge Of All

Examine and Reevaluate Your Beliefs

Both behavior and feeling spring from belief. To root out the belief responsible for your feeling and behavior, ask your self why?

Is there some task you would like to do, some channel in which you would like to express yourself, but you hang back feeling that "I can't"?

Ask yourself why?

"Why do I believe that I can't?"

Then ask yourself, "Is this belief based on an actual fact or on an assumption: or a false conclusion?"

Then ask yourself these four questions:

1. Is there any rational reason for such a belief?

2. Could it be that I am mistaken in this belief?

3. Would I come to the same conclusion about some other person in a similar situation?

4. Why should I continue to act and feel as if this were true if there is no good reason to believe it?

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Prepare for this each morning, remember God when you can throughout the day, ask the Holy Spirit's help when it is feasible to do so, and thank Him for His guidance at night. And your confidence will be well founded indeed. AC iM - Manual for Teachers - Section 29 - As for the Rest . . .