While all of this is true…it’s still not going to be possible for many, many people – probably a very sizeable majority – to follow this advice. It’s a lovely ideal, but, then, so is communism (everyone shares alike.) It fails the test of human nature.
We’d be a better species if more of us could do this. But, like the Communists, there are a lot of “improvements” we might make in humanity.
You’re right. You’re absolutely right. “Turn the other cheek” is a higher form of morality, and beneficial to the one being struck.
Maybe that’s the point of disagreement. I don’t see forgiveness having anything to do with resentment.
I agree that it’s generally a good idea to give up resentment. You rarely accomplish anything good by dwelling on the bad things you have experienced in your life.
But forgiveness has nothing to do with your feelings (or at least it shouldn’t). When you forgive somebody it’s to make them feel better about something bad they did to you, not to make yourself feel better. And as I’ve said, I don’t see any point in trying to make somebody feel better about something they did to you if they weren’t feeling bad about doing it in the first place.
I have never, that I can recall, told a single person that I forgave them for anything. You are externalizing forgiveness, viewing it, so it appears, as words you say to someone, vs. something you feel inside yoursel.
I think a good part of the reason that forgiveness is a natural thing for me is because I do not grok (and never have) the concept of “revenge”, even in the tiniest ways. I have rarely experienced any kind of satisfying, or potentially satisfying feeling contemplating someone else experiencing something unpleasant after they have harmed me. And The only instance I can think of, I don’t like the idea of random unpleasantness, I like the idea of them experiencing a correction of the wrong they have done me (and continue to do to others, which is all I will say specifically). I don’t get any satisfaction thinking about them getting beat up or hurt or what the hell ever.
It seems to be an almost universal “oh yeah? well, here, I’m gonna hurt you back” response people have to being hurt, and it surfaces a lot in intimate relationships where two people are angry. One says something hurtful, maybe because its really true and needs to be said, or maybe just because they are angry. Then, hurt, the other person comes up with something hurtful to say back, and depending on the people in question, it can continue to escalate and becomes a war of who can wound whom the deepest.
Not only have I never had a fight like that, it’s never even crossed my mind. It seems perfectly awful and guaranteed to make everything feel and be a thousand times worse than it is already. To the extent that I think of things that are hurtful, they are true things that I just have a mild urge to say in a more cutting manner than otherwise when I am frustrated and angry. But I never give into it, because I know it completely undermines my goal, which is understanding and resolve. What I generally want above everything is to be heard, and lashing out guarantees I won’t be.
Thats how I have alwqys been, and over my lifetime I have come to an understanding that has brought me enormous peace and prevented any possible thought of wanting to, as you put it, poleaxe somebody: whatever wound someone has dealt me, i know it wasn’t about me. I was just in the their path so I got hit with their shit. And the same goes for love, too: if someone loves me, its not really about me, its about them. So it is easy to forgive.
And of course, i know I am the same as everyone else in this regard, so when I find myself having a strong negative reaction to someone, I know its time to check in with myself to see what’s really going on inside of me that they are triggering.
I know a lot of people do not relate, but for what its worth I am a pretty light spirit at the end of the day and I’m sure that what I just described has a lot to do with it.
One thing that might help, however, a kind of compromise of the spirit, is that the emotions of resentment, bitterness, and desire for revenge, which are, as you noted, self-harmful, are tiring.
One cannot maintain them for long without exhaustion. Over time, they naturally fade, until, as years go by, even an angry person may remember old hurts and old wrongs but faintly. A kind of ennui sets in: most of us cannot forever be counting over old hurts, hoarding them, even cultivating them. Instead, most of us “let it go” by a process of discarding, almost of ennui.
The guy who cut me off in traffic a moment ago? I would wish him dead in the most horrible of ways!
The guy who cut me off in traffic a week ago? I’d love to punch him in the nose, but I don’t even remember what color his car was.
A year ago? I suppose it surely must have happened, but I can’t remember it right now.
Inanition prods us to forgiveness, where ideals might not succeed.
Definitely using the word differently, then, as I would agree with Stoid that forgiveness can be purely internal and subjective.
It can also be communicated, but I would stop short of making that a necessary part of the definition of the term.
Otherwise, for instance, it would never be possible to forgive someone who is dead, or who has moved away and out of reach. I think that personal forgiveness of the dead is an important phase of emotional healing.
Oh my god I just remembered an absolute HUGE verbal forgiveness I did… how funny that I had forgotten it.
I forgave my mother. I met with her for the specific intention, at her request, of airing my grievances, so to speak. We sat across a room for I have no idea how long, and I did just about all of the talking, which was me just letting her know that I knew what had really been happenign in our relationship, and the many ways in which it was not particularly fab. She told my sister, very proudly, apparently, that she either was not going to or had not apologized, I cna’t remember the timing. But what I do know is that I specifically said to her that I was asking absolutely nothing from her. I didn’t want an apology, an explanation, nothing other than for her to hear me tell her what I understood. And I forgave her. Very sincerely, because of all the people in the world to forgive, parents are at the top of the list… man talk about it NOT being about you!
Anyway, that’s the only time I ever remember articulating to someone that I forgave them. What she did with it was completely immaterial.
That’s fine, but can you help me understand what forgiveness actually is for you? If you can only forgive someone by saying it out loud, what if you don’t’ have a chance? Does that mean you have not forgiven them? What does it feel like for you when you fogive someone, and does that feeling only come when the words leave your mouth?
That doesn’t sound much like forgiveness either. You lectured; Cleared the air; Said things you’d kept bottled up inside. And that’s okay - perhaps it was well deserved and a long time coming. But you didn’t really forgive. I know you probably felt like that’s what you were doing but it doesn’t much sound like it according to your description of events. I think it was more of a ‘get the last word and let it go’ exercise.
I think forgiveness is a whole other thing. I’m not much good at it, myself.
Stoid, do you think forgiveness is something that a person consciously does for themselves, or it is a passive process that just kinda happens.
Because the incident you described with your mother sounds like the latter. It sounds like in the process of airing your grievances, you realized you had forgiven her.
I don’t think I’ve ever willed myself to forgive someone, even though I have forgiven them. I have broken things off with people who have wronged me or frayed my nerves. With enough time and distance, emotions fade and one can reflect on a situation with more objectivity and understanding. It seems only natural that forgiveness would come.
Forgiving someone who is actively harming you would be the kind of extraordinary feat worth talking/preaching about. But forgiving someone who wronged you a long time ago doesn’t strike me an inspiring or awesome achievement. That’s like feeling proud of yourself for growing a scab on a scraped knee. Scabs just kinda happen. I think forgiveness is the same way.
I can see why you’d see it like that , but this was the trajectory of my relationship,with my mother:
Ages 0-6 - barely remember her, my dad was my primary caregiver and she worked.
Ages 6-29 - deapite some pretty rocky periods when I was falling apart as a teenager, i loved her to pieces and basically bought her story about who she was, we were.
Ages 29-38- totally got in touch with all the shit that had actually been going on and experienced really deep rage and pain around it, mostly couldn’t stand my mother and could only see all the shit I didn’t see previously, worked through it, came out the other side with clarity about all of it, let go of all the rage and saw my mother as a whole person. Saw what SHE was formed by, got in touch with my love and appreciation for her in a very healthy, unblnkered but also unjudgmental way (this was around the time she asked me to tell her what she did wrong as a mother, and no, I don’t recall how that come up,except that it was fairly innocuous but I didn’t not rush in to reassure she was the best mom ever, and she pushed and I asked her is she really wanted to have that conversation…)
38-49, when she died: she lived in a different state with my two sisters so I didn’t see her much, but it was very loving when we did. She kind of faded away mentally, not real dimentia, just, as I say, a fading. She came to visit me dor a week two years before she died, it was hard to see how reduced she was from the robust, commanding woman I had grown up with. I knew I would never see her alive again, so I made the most of it and when she died I grieved in a very clean, untortured manner, feeling very much that our relationship had been complete, and it was. It wouldn’t have been if I had never told her the understanding I had come to about the dark side of our relationship, it would have been a lie, and thats not me. (Definitely her, though…both my parents lied a lot for different reasons about different things, and I am sure that has a lot to do with my obsession with with truth.) my forgiveness was very real, it took me a decade to get there, but when I did I got all the way there.
Well, i just finished giving the process I went through with my mother.
I don’t think it happens in just one way, I know that it hasn’t with me. In some cases forgiveness was there before there was anything to forgive it just was never an issue that they would not be forgiven of because of what I explained earlier about my understanding that it wasn’t about me. In one or two others I have forgiven, but I had to get out of the person’s path to take care of myself. (Sober junkie. 'Nuff said)
I’m not tooting my horn: I was never a person that struggled enormously with not forgiving people and overcame it. Perhaps more to the point, I haven’t perceived in my life that much that needs forgiveness, not so much because people haven’t done me wrong, but because I just don’t take things personally the way other people do. I’m very difficult to offend…I’d say almost impossible. And I struggle so much with such deep flaws of my own* that there’s no way I can scrounge up tons of energy to be pissed off at other people for their failures. Last time I checked were all human just trying to be and do our best and we all fuck up, where’s the payoff in keeping score?
Life is ridiculously short. I’m all about the love, man.
*the one person who desperately needs my forgiveness and hasn’t gotten it is ME, and it is messing with my life terribly. I am working on it daily. Hourly.
I sure hope you come back to discuss this further.
Your POV is so outside my experience it prompted me to look up forgiveness, not just in the dictionary, but as a topic for researchers, psychologists and the like. Because (since I still don’t have the answer to my other question about what forgiveness means inside of YOU) it seems very odd to me to understand forgiveness purely in the context of something you do for others, as you describe above.
Again, with citations!, forgiveness is about YOU, not THEM. What you are identifying as forgiveness itself is actually the act of sharing with the party who wronged you your decision to forgive. Or in fact, based on your description, it’s really more of an etiquette response: if someone regrets their actions and apologizes, you (tell them) that you forgive them, if they don’t, you don’t. But that leaves it open as to whether you genuinely, inside yourself, forgive them…
And while we are on the topic, here’s something to chew on for everybody who struggles with forgiveness:
As a “forgiver” I can personally testify to the truth of the above.
