Becoming a Forgiving Person

A Pastoral Perspective

Richard L Dayringer, Henry Close

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135792312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Don't let hurt feelings cause undue harm—learn to make use of the healing power of forgiveness! Charting different paths through feelings of betrayal, oppression, and humiliation, this compassionate book will help you understand forgiveness, find it within yourself, and pass this important knowledge to others. The poignant stories in Becoming a Forgiving Person show how anyone can manage feelings of victimization and quench the lust for vengeance. You'll gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of being hurt, the inner struggles needed to truly forgive, and methods and skills for practicing forgiveness. Combining religious and psychological insight, Becoming a Forgiving Person examines how forgiveness can enhance feelings of self-esteem, freedom, and intimacy. The personal stories in these pages illuminate the futility of revenge and show why apologies don't always help. You'll be inspired by these lessons on how to forgive yourself and other people by tapping into levels of spirituality that are deeper than the grievances you need to forgive. With its fascinating new perspectives on betrayal, revenge, apology, and reconciliation, Becoming a Forgiving Person will show you:

• how to forgive without waiting for apologies
• ways to find personal power and increase self-esteem
• strategies for cultivating networks of supportive people to help you—or anyone—through difficult times
• tactics for getting on with your life and finding inner peace
• how and where to find opportunities to practice forgiveness

This book also contains an appendix that lists various types of offenses and another that explores how to respond to one of the most hurtful situations imaginable—the accusation of incest—in a way that bypasses denial and power struggles and works toward reconciliation. Becoming a Forgiving Person is a book that can help anyone who needs to learn to forgive—or who endeavors to help others accomplish that daunting task.

---

PART I: INTRODUCTION—
WHY I AM INTERESTED
IN FORGIVENESS

---

 

 

It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.

(Chinese proverb)

I have been interested in forgiveness all my professional life. As an imperfect human being living in an imperfect world, I face challenges every day to accept and to practice forgiveness. As a marriage and family therapist, I see the importance of forgiveness for personal growth and for healing in relationships. It has certainly been a recurring theme in my own family.

As a pastoral counselor, I recognize forgiveness as one of the foundations of my spiritual tradition, reflecting the nature of God, as I understand God. If I can forgive, I can lay aside the burden of resentment, and direct my energies toward the future. When I forgive, I feel my own spirituality more deeply.

As one concerned for social justice, I know the central place of forgiveness—and its power—in the work of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. More recently, Desmond Tutu's program of truth and reconciliation has sought to bring forgiveness and healing to South Africa. It is significant that nonviolent protest has been effective only in cultures that emphasize fair play. Jews were nonviolent in Nazi Germany, and were engulfed in the Holocaust.

This is not primarily a book about technique, the quick fix, promising that if you do such and such, you will be able to forgive easily. Technical answers do not call for fundamental changes in the inner self, but forgiveness often does. No matter how much we would like to be able to forgive another and then go on with life as usual, serious forgiveness often requires fundamental changes in our lives. It does not easily fall within the framework of technique.

Instead, this is a book about becoming a forgiving person, cultivating a style of life that is conducive to forgiveness. It is about basing our lives on deeper levels of the psyche, where there are alternatives to guilt and blame. As forgiving persons, we can refrain from taking offense at trivia and can even survive catastrophic injury.

I don't think it is necessary to be religious to forgive someone, but I do think of forgiveness as being deeply spiritual.

The world in which we live is oriented in many ways to blaming. An obvious example is the radio talk show. Typically, the host angrily proclaims that all of life's problems are “out there,” somebody else's fault. For Utopia to arrive, these other people (institutions, political parties, and so forth) need to change and be like the host.

Similar themes run through many movies and TV shows. An innocent saintly victim is cruelly oppressed by the evil villain. As we witness the injustice of this, we become indignant or enraged. We easily identify with the victim. When finally the hero avenges the victim's suffering, we feel an inner satisfaction, elation, at the revenge. We gloat at the villain's humiliation and/or suffering. This is a dominant theme of many movies—especially the action movies. Contrast this with shows that meaningfully portray forgiveness. They are few and far between.

Revenge sells better than forgiveness.

We often approach relationships—even with spouses and children—from an adversarial, competitive stance. We tend to think the proper way to influence someone is by intimidation—sometimes physical, sometimes emotional or rational. Many people can simply out-argue others. Even religion is sometimes used to intimidate or shame other people.

An adversarial attitude toward life is oriented to winning, not forgiving. When we forgive, we seek peace and healing in a relationship. Forgiveness is oriented to the future. When we blame, we focus on the past. We are more concerned about justifying our anger than about forgiving. There is therefore much cursing of the darkness.

When we are in a blaming mood, we are not very interested in being forgiven either. We want to be exonerated, not forgiven. We rationalize our faults, and want others to recognize that whatever we did was justified.

Because forgiveness represents complex realities, you may leave this book with as many questions as answers, but I hope you will also have a deeper sense of peace. I hope you will find it easier to live with other people, and they will find it easier to live with you.

Chapter 1
The Dilemma: How Could I Forgive
a Friend Who Betrayed Me?

 

 

Don't get mad; get even.

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute use you.

Jesus (Matthew 5:44)

Some years ago, a colleague and friend was injured in an auto accident and unable to work for several months. When he was ready to resume his practice, he asked me if I would lend him money for a new car.

I had no problem with that. Alexander was a good friend, and I had recently inherited some assets as part of my father's estate. I borrowed against these assets to lend the money to my friend. He signed a note, agreeing to repay me with the same interest I was paying on my loan.

Six months later, Alexander declared bankruptcy. I was not concerned. Our transaction was based on friendship, not business.

Two years later, his practice was thriving and he was making more money than I was. I asked him to begin repaying the loan. I was aghast when he said that the bankruptcy had annulled that obligation. Today, he has more assets than I do, yet feels no responsibility for honoring his commitments to me.

How could I ever forgive such a betrayal? How could I ever get past my hurt and anger, and see him as anything other than an enemy?

As time went by, my resentment grew, but it also became more and more of a burden. I wanted to be free of it. I wanted to be able to look at this person casually, without constantly thinking of his betrayal. I wanted to be able to lie down at night and not have my thoughts and feelings drawn to it. I wanted to be able to go to sleep feeling something other than resentment. As long as I was obsessed, I was still the victim. I wanted to be free.

I remembered a client whose husband had had a brief affair with his secretary. When my client, Mary, accidentally found out about it, she was at first devastated and then irate. Nothing her husband said or did made the slightest difference. She was determined to punish him for what he had done to her.

They started marriage therapy with me shortly after Mary learned about the affair, and I saw them for several weeks. I was as ineffective as the husband in tapping into anything but her indignation. This woman, although a bit touchy, had once been relatively cheerful and altruistic. She had now become cold and cruel. She isolated herself from her friends. She was always tired and began to develop physical problems that I am sure were stress related.

Mary had to have revenge, but had no idea what that entailed or how to achieve it—or what it would accomplish. The betrayal was always in her mind, no matter what distractions she sought. The obsession was taking a terrible toll on her and her family emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

This is not an unusual reaction to a serious offense. The movie Dead Man Walking is about a man who kidnapped, raped, and terrorized a young woman, Debbie Morris. He had also killed another young woman.

When Debbie met the parents of the other young woman, she was disturbed by the bitterness that consumed them.

Seeing the effects of their abiding anger and hatred had helped convince me I needed to let go of those feelings myself. As weird as this may seem, I doubted I would have ever tried to forgive Robert Willie if it hadn't been for my unsettling exposure to such an all-consuming bitterness. (Morris, 1998, pp. 179–180)

I did not want to become like Mary, or like the parents of the murder victim. The truth is that I wasn't sure I was all that different.

I thought back on some of the offenses against me that I have resented. I vividly remember a girl in my high school class teasing me about being skinny. It was years before I could think of that without cringing. A classmate in college threatened to beat me up over some minor offense that I don't even remember. A colleague ridiculed a very personal article I had written about my reaction to a friend's suicide. By any objective standard, these were trivial offenses, yet I reacted with some of the same resentment as I had to my friend's betrayal.

When I realized my hurt and angry feelings were not going to dissipate by themselves, I began to wonder what steps I could take to find healing. I wanted to move on, and that meant I would have to forgive him. But what would that entail, and how would I do it?

I thought of people who have suffered catastrophic injury. Wars are often scenes of unthinkable brutality: children are forced to kill their parents; mothers are forced to watch as their babies are murdered; little girls have their hands chopped off.

Compared to events such as those, losing a friend and a few thousand dollars was utterly trivial. That understanding, however, did not enable me to forgive.

I have read of people who actually have forgiven terrible offenses. One woman's daughter was raped and killed. The mother went to the prison to offer her forgiveness to the killer (Bristol, 1982). Another woman was so filled with rage and contempt for the man who had killed her daughter that she had asked to witness his execution. Then one night she wrote to him. The words seemed to flow from her pen. She told him that she forgave him and was willing to visit him. “The instant the letter was in the mailbox, all the anger, all the rage, all the lust for revenge disappeared” (van Biema, 1999, p. 58).

Still, the possibility of my writing Alexander to say that I forgave him was utterly unthinkable to me.

During a war in Armenia, a young nurse's family was murdered and she was abducted to serve as a sex slave for a brutal army officer. After months of abuse she escaped, and eventually worked as a nurse in a field hospital. One day, this officer was admitted for injuries sustained in battle. The nurse provided the intensive care he needed to recover (Augsburger, 1996).

Somehow these acts of forgiveness did not seem relevant to me.

I remembered times when people have forgiven me, sometimes for serious offenses, yet that was not enough to enable me to forgive. At times in the past I have been able to forgive other people. Whatever enabled me to do it then did not seem applicable here, or was not available to me.

I like to think of myself as a forgiving person. It is one of the values I try to live by. It is also central to my work as a therapist. I frequently tell clients it is in their best interests to forgive. So I sincerely wanted to put this principle into practice in my own life. I wanted to be able to forgive Alexander, but the situation made that extremely difficult. He acted as though there was nothing to forgive, as though something was wrong with me for making an issue of it. That attitude was itself an offense.

It was clear that he would never apologize to me. He would never change. So if I were to forgive him and get on with my life, I would have to find the resources within my own psyche. I would have to be the one who changed.

How could I do that? How could I begin the journey of forgiveness?

---

PART II: OFFENSES—THE WAYS
IN WHICH WE ARE HURT

---

After I got past the initial hurt and shock of Alexander's betrayal, I tried to reflect on the situation, and in particular on the ways I had been hurt. I realized that I had been abused in at least three different areas. First, Alexander offended against my freedom. I could have made good use of the money he took. I felt blocked, constricted. Second, he offended against my self-esteem. He treated me with contempt, implying that I was unworthy of being treated decently. I felt humiliated. Finally, he offended against my capacity for intimacy. He violated my trust, my closeness to him as a friend. For a while, I was hesitant to trust anyone. I felt betrayed (see Appendix B for an elaboration of this framework). Perhaps all offenses are like this. They primarily offend us in one area, but other areas are also involved.

A father promises to meet his young daughter for an evening, but does not come. First, he has caused her the inconvenience of getting ready and then having nowhere to go (an offense against freedom). Second, he has told her by his behavior that she is not worthy of his time and attention (an offense against self-esteem). Third, he has violated her trust and left her desolate (an offense against intimacy).

If this is an isolated act, it is a minor offense. When it happens repeatedly, it becomes catastrophic. An act of indifference is trivial; a stance of indifference can be devastating. No matter how benign the father's intentions, or how justified his reasons, his behavior is a betrayal. He injures his child.

Chapter 2
Offenses Against Freedom:
My Choices Are Limited

If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Jesus (Matthew 5:39)

It had been a long hot day. The air conditioner in my car was not worki...