The True Definition Of Forgiveness

The true definition of forgiveness should center on the benefits of feeling peaceful. Finding peace does not need to be complicated. Remember, all grievances begin when something in a person’s life happens that they do not want to happen. From that initial unpleasantness they take things too personally, blame the offender for how they feel, and tell a grievance story. The grievance means that too much space is rented in their minds to hurt and anger.

Remember this definition of forgiveness: It is first foremost a practical definition. Your goal is to feel peaceful. The feeling of peace comes as you heal your grievances - blaming less, taking responsibility for how you feel, and changing the story you tell. This is called peace forgiveness. As you feel more and more peace, you are progressing in your goal to heal from your grievances. You are learning to forgive.

There are three components when it comes to forgiveness. The most critical component is the story we tell. When we tell a story of victimization we have already taken something too personally and are blaming the offender for how we feel. When you tell the story of your heroic overcoming of an injustice, you will naturally blame less and take things less personally. However, it is very difficult to move directly to changing a well-rehearsed grievance story.

To avoid that problem, you should begin by taking responsibility for how you feel. We have to remember that we are responsible for our emotional experience. Our past is not responsible for our present feelings. Just because something unpleasant occurred in our past or may occur in our future does not mean that day after day should be ruined.

Difficulties, mistreatments, and unkindness do not have an extended warranty. We become helpless when we give the person who hurt us excessive power over how we feel. Our painful feelings will diminish only when we take that power back and show we are responsible for
how we feel.

There is a complementary technique that will help us reclaim responsibility for how we feel. This technique is easy to practice and available to everyone. It is to not lose sight of the good things in our life. This sounds simple but takes some effort. What this means is we spend time and energy finding the beauty and love in our life to balance the time we spend on grudges, grievances, and wounds.

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10 Occasions That Call For An Apology

Although some apologies can be made in person or over the phone, most need to be written, and written immediately. Procrastination turns writing an apology into a major task and may mean that we have to apologize twice, once for the infraction and once for the delay.

Because we all make mistakes, people are usually less bothered by your errors than you are; write your apology with dignity and self-respect. The following are occasions that call for apologies:

1. Belated response to a gift, favor, invitation, or major event in someone’s life.

2. Business errors: incorrect information given, order mix-ups, contract misunderstandings, merchandise that is defective, dangerous, ineffective, damaged, delayed, or that is missing parts, instructions, or warranties.

3. Children’s misbehavior, damage to property or pet.

4. Damage to another’s property.

5. Employee problems: rudeness, ineptness, dishonesty, poor service, unsatisfactory work.

6. Failure to keep an appointment, deadline, shipping date, payment schedule, or promise.

7. Insulting or insensitive comments.

8. Personal errors: giving someone’s name and phone number to a third party without permission, forgetting to include someone in an invitation, betraying a secret.

9. Pets that bite, bark, damage property, or are otherwise nuisances.

10. Tactless, inappropriate, rude, or drunken behavior.

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Forgiving Does Not Mean That You Will Forget

It is commonly assumed that when you forgive, your negative feelings are completely replaced by positive ones. The problem with this expectation is that it’s so categorical, that it puts forgiveness out of reach and leaves you with no alternative but to not forgive at all. When you grant “genuine forgiveness”, you make room for anger and recognize it as normal and adaptive. You don’t replace it with compassion or love and simply wipe the slate clean. This sort of magical reversal is not what happens to real people who have suffered real emotional injuries.

Even years from now, when you think about how you’ve been hurt or when something calls up the memory of your suffering, your old pain may resurface, grab hold of you, and drag you down. To expect otherwise is to deny the power of the human brain to conjure up traumatic moments and force you to re-experience them with the same clarity of detail, the same visceral intensity, as when they first occurred.

Even if you forgive an offender, even if you’re committed to a life of equanimity, there may be times when you experience spasms of hate and cannot separate what he did to you from who he is. You are still human, and to think your response can be divided into neat boxes is unrealistic. Accepting this will broaden your understanding of what it means to forgive and make room for negative spikes in emotion that are bound to arise.

What happens when you genuinely forgive is not that you necessarily empty yourself of all hostile feelings, but that you allow other emotions to co-exist with them - more tender or positive emotions, such as sadness and grief. Along with your anger comes a richer, more balanced, more complex reaction - encompassing both what the offender did wrong and what he did right, both the damage he inflicted on you and his efforts to make good.

A Real Life Example

However, be prepared because forgiving won’t wash away the injury; you may be left with a residue of bad feelings and an overwhelming sense of loss. This is what my good friend Sherri experienced. Although she forgave her husband, Bob, for having an affair, she continued to struggle with bitterness and sorrow. “I know he’s trying hard to make me feel valued and safe,” she assured me, “but I’ve lost the idealized image I had of him - forever. My feelings continue to oscillate between empathy and an unbearable sense of betrayal.”

Two years after Bob revealed his affair, Sherri sent me this note: “The affair still hurts very much, although the therapy helps. So does reading and the passing of time. We live with it and do the best we can, and we both love each other.” It could be said that Sherri hasn’t forgiven Bob yet because her positive feelings toward him are at times tainted with negative ones. It could also be said that she has partially forgiven him and may forgive him more over time. When you forgive, you don’t flip a switch.

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Forgiveness: A Path To Happiness

To be happy, you must overcome fear, and the best way to overcome fear is with love. Many people, though, cannot find their love. It exists, but it’s buried beneath a cold snowdrift of hate. It’s easy to hate. You can hate anything from death to terrorists to an unloving father, etc. but hate does terrible interior damage. It tarnishes love, hides love, and often even kills love.

People often think they can hate some people and love others fully, but it’s hard. Love and hate can’t live in the same heart. Think of the happiest people you know. They probably don’t love just their spouses and kids and hate a number of other people. I’ll bet they have a smile for everyone and something good to say about almost anyone. They probably have no enemies - and not much fear.

For the most part, hate is fear. We only hate the things we’re afraid of. When someone hurts us terribly, we often hate them for it. But we hate them mostly because we’re afraid they will hurt us again - either literally or in our minds, which replay the scene of hurt again and again. If we had the power to stop that person from hurting us ever again - even in our memories - our fear would fade, and our hate would again become just hurt, which can always heal.

We do have a way to stop people from hurting us again and again, even in our memories. It is forgiveness. Forgiveness is the blessing we bestow on not just those who have hurt us, but upon ourselves. Forgiveness knocks down the walls around love that hate can build. Forgiveness doesn’t alter what has happened. The memory remains; the hurt is unchanged. But forgiveness grants us new eyes, through the grace of love, that see the hurt in a different way.

Forgiveness isn’t forgetting. It’s just leaving behind your own hate and rising to the next level of life. It’s not about letting the other guy off the hook - it’s about letting yourself off the hook.

From a medical perspective, hate is a heavy burden, creating chronic over-stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, which contributes strongly to depressed immunity, insomnia, hypertension, muscle pain, colitis, ulcers, heart attack, stroke, memory loss, migraines, and impaired cognitive function. But the worst damage is to peace of mind. It’s impossible to hate and be happy at the same time. You don’t even need to tell someone you’ve forgiven them. In fact, you can forgive someone who’s dead. The important thing is just to get the hate out of your heart.

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The Damage That Alzheimer’s Disease Has On The Brain

Alzheimer’s disease seems to damage - and ultimately kill - many of the nerve cells in the brain. In the process of damaging or killing these nerve cells, it damages or weakens the connections between them as well. It does not damage nerve cells and connections in every region of the brain, at least not at first. For example, it does not usually first affect the basic sensory or motor pathways of the brain, nor the lower centers that control breathing, heartbeat, chewing, swallowing, eating, or walking and other basic movements. So these will not be affected in a person with Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages.

But the damage to nerve cell connections and nerve cells in Alzheimer’s disease usually does start first in the regions of the brain involved in memory, in the inner parts of the temporal lobes. As a consequence, in the typical patient with Alzheimer’s disease, it begins with memory problems. These memory problems look in some ways like those of pure amnesia. The Alzheimer’s patient often has trouble learning or remembering anything new.

Usually, the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease is almost imperceptible. But then - over the course of a few years - the memory loss becomes more severe. The person forgets his keys, not just once a day, but all the time. He cannot remember why he walked into a room every time he walks into a room. He is introduced to people and cannot remember them a few minutes later. He loses his way while trying to drive to someplace a little new and unfamiliar. There may be a tendency for memories that still are preserved - old memories - to substitute for new ones. So the person with Alzheimer’s disease may endlessly repeat conversations and events from the past, or drive to a familiar but incorrect address instead of the new one.

As the disease gets worse, old memories also suffer. The loss of nerve cells and connections begins erasing knowledge of even very well learned things, such as the names of grandchildren, or knowledge of familiar streets and routes. These erasures of old information, combined with the problems learning anything new, may cause sufferers to get lost driving in an otherwise familiar location. Damage in the language regions of the brain frequently results in problems with finding the right words.

In addition to these memory problems, damage occurs in other parts of the brain in early Alzheimer’s disease, which creates other kinds of problems. The frontal regions of the brain orchestrate our behaviors and help us regulate and prioritize mental activities and keep some behaviors in check while letting others surface. Damage in those frontal regions shows itself as alterations in behavior. As a result, the patient with Alzheimer’s disease may not be able to resist gambling or other vices. They may make inappropriate comments - ones we may normally think, but not normally say out loud.

The frontal lobes are also regions of the brain that seem important in providing motivation and direction. Damage to these areas can cause a patient with Alzheimer’s disease to become Somewhat apathetic and lose initiative. They will sit all day, uninterested and unmoving. The mind’s ability to find information and to link it together may also be damaged in Alzheimer’s disease. The Alzheimer’s patient may “not be able to put 2 and 2 together.” You may explain to them why they shouldn’t leave the gas burners on, and they may tell you they know not to leave the burners on - but they do it anyway.

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What Do You Do When The Person Who Offended You Will Not Apologize?

The following are four sensible, healthy reasons why you may decide to accept, forgive, and reconcile with the person whom has offended you, even though he or she refuses to make amends:

1. You have to interact with this person regularly and find that it takes too much energy to remain cold and distant.

2. When you act cold toward them, you feel cold inside, alienated both from him and from yourself. The rupture between you compromises the quality of your life. Having no relationship with this person feels worse than having some, no matter how limited or superficial.

3. You benefit strategically from an ongoing relationship. For example, you choose to get along with your boss to protect your job, even though you may not respect him.

4. You hope to have new, corrective experiences that might repair the relationship.

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Try Forgiving Yourself If You Are Angry At Someone Else

When we feel hurt or angry, it’s easy to fault someone else. “You’re to blame,” we insist. “You made me feel this way.” But the fact that we feel upset at someone doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is guilty.

Sometimes our rage is our own, forged in our own hearts and minds, fed by our personalities, our provocations, our exaggerated response to conflict. Yes, this other person may have done something to offend us, but perhaps not to the degree that our intense response would suggest. Our reaction may be entirely inappropriate or even dangerously misguided.

Owning up to your issues - tearing down your defenses and looking honestly at yourself—can be painful work. The process may teach you that you were more than just a victim, and that, perhaps, there is no one to forgive but yourself.

The same factors that influenced the way the offender treated you may have influenced the way you treated him. Again, some of these factors may be external. You might ask yourself, “What was going on in my world at the time of the injury that may have affected me emotionally, making me feel more vulnerable, less in control, less resilient, so that I reacted inappropriately? Did these life events throw me off-balance and lead me to act in ways that were callous or otherwise offensive?”

Internal factors may also shape your response. It helps to ask such questions as, “How did my personality affect my reaction? How did it influence the way I was treated?” If you’re innately shy, say, and the offender took this personally and assumed you didn’t like him, that was his mistake, not yours. You didn’t hurt him; his mistaken assumptions about you hurt him.

But if you’re shy and didn’t speak up and then felt offended that someone didn’t show interest in you or respect your position, you need to confront how you contributed to your own pain. It may be that your own silence - not his behavior - set a trap for you.

What about your dysfunctional ideas about yourself and the world, ideas that may have been based on damaging early life experiences? Did they play a role in your mistreatment? These fixed ideas often pre-date the offense and even your relationship with the offender, and create what what are called “channels” of psychological vulnerability. What happens is that your heightened sensitivity - to being abandoned or ridiculed, for example 0 leads you to misperceive or mis-react to events today.

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2 Reasons Why Not Forgiving People May Feel Good To You

Being the kind of person that does not like to forgive anybody may come across as an appealing option for at least two reasons.

1. It makes you feel invulnerable. Not forgiving gives you an aura of invincibility. When you refuse to forgive, you gather strength by humiliating the person you accuse of humiliating you.

The strength you feel from striking back at someone who hurt you may not be entirely illusory. You may force him to think twice about re-injuring you and reduce the frequency with which he tries. Of course, you might inflame the conflict and provoke him into attack again; but your tough, retaliatory stance may also intimidate him and show him who’s the boss.

2. It lets you blame others for your own failures. Not Forgiving lets you blame others for your own failures and transfer to them whatever it is you curse in yourself. It helps you ward off the shame and humiliation that come when someone gets too close to the unflattering truth about you.

You conveniently blame the other person for all your troubles, when the problem may be you - your inability to take the initiative, ask for help, or say no. It replaces the emptiness inside you with a surge of elation.

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3 Reasons Why Refusing To Forgive Is A Sign Of Poor Character

When you say no to forgiving, what started as a self-protective solution to pain - a way of coping with your indignation - ultimately leaves you feeling cold and bitter. What held out the promise of restoring your self-regard, creating emotional and physical safety, and providing a just resolution to the injury, doesn’t deliver - or delivers at a dear price. The presumed rewards of not forgiving, which initially seemed so attractive and healthy, turn out to be maladaptive in at least three ways:

1. Not Forgiving cuts you off from any dialog with the offender and any positive resolution of the conflict. When you exorcise the offender from your life, you deny him the opportunity to respond to your grievances and earn forgiveness. Refusing to consider what he meant to you in the past, and could still mean to you today, you also deny yourself any possibility of reconciliation. In human relationships, there are so many unintended slights and misunderstandings. If both of you could only air your differences, it might change the face of the violation and soften your response.

2. Not Forgiving may restore your pride, but it cuts you off from an opportunity for personal growth and understanding. When you refuse to forgive, you transfer all the blame to the offender and make yourself unassailable. This proud pretense of perfection, however, is likely to mask a shaky interior. Wrapped in sanctimonious anger, never questioning how you may be wrong, you cut yourself off from an opportunity to look into yourself - to learn, change, and grow.

3. Not Forgiving may make you feel less empty, but it poisons you physically and emotionally and cuts you off from life. The venom that pours into your bloodstream when you refuse to forgive may make you feel less hollow, more vital, and more energized, but it may also leave you detached from life, blind to those who deserve your gratitude, cut off from tenderness, beauty, and joy. You may seek the solace of solitary pleasures - a book, a walk - or shared moments with old friends, but rage is likely to be the only feeling that resonates inside you.

Obsessed with getting even, you fulfill your basic need for protection and self-preservation, but leave no time to gratify your “higher” needs for peace, creativity, love, and connection.

Though hating may make you feel alive, it may also make you physically sick, or more susceptible to illness.

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