Forgiveness

I work a lot of stuff out on Medium. My current dilemma is forgiveness.

Should you forgive people?

I don’t know the answer to this. For me the topic of forgiveness started early in my life when I probably did not know what forgiveness even a thing. Now that I’m an adult and I’ve been asked to forgive a few times it has forced me to think about it.

I’m not sure forgiveness is a good thing. I understand the idea of releasing the energy that you might carry around through “forgiveness” but I’m not sure I believe that means you forgive in the traditional sense. I’ve read a million things on how you should turn the other cheek, love people regardless of how they behave, do unto others as you would want done to yourself, blah, blah, blah.

If someone takes your idea of security away from you, should you really forgive them? I don’t know. Clearly security is a construct and doesn’t really exist, so they are just informing you of that fact by their own behavior.

The only reason I can think that you would forgive them is to release yourself, but does that really release you? Or do you just create internal conflict that will refuse to go away because of your forgiveness?

We think that by forgiving someone that makes us somehow the better person but I think we are fooling ourselves. If people are constantly forgiven for their appalling behavior how do they ever get the message that it won’t be tolerated?

I get not carrying around anger. Anger is destructive so being angry doesn’t really solve anything. You can be angry at your past or peoples past behavior but it doesn’t change anything. I get not carrying around hurt. Hurt is destructive to the person that was hurt and it’s not a great way to go either.

You can’t re-write the past. It happened, you accept it.

I have been asked recently, very recently actually to forgive a couple of people that have done things to me in my recent past. Both people came to me repentant for their behavior and asked me for forgiveness. I do believe that their feelings are genuine. They felt bad for how they treated me, they felt loss that I had severed the relationship and wanted to reconnect. But what was I going to do with the forgiveness, pretend it never happened? Not likely.

So it brought the topic up of forgiveness for me again. It’s like God is giving me another opportunity to look at the topic. Truth is I have “forgiven” people in my life, although I would say that forgiveness is a relative term. I’m not sure that I would do it again.

The inner conflict for the forgiver is significant as is the damage you can do to yourself in the process. You may already have a lifetime of damage to work through and by putting pressure on yourself to “forgive” it may actually be harmful. It takes time to forgive and when you are also busy still trying to repair yourself overall forgiveness may not be the right thing or the right thing right now. I don’t understand why people can’t just behave right to start out with. We need to ask ourselves why we allow people to get away with unacceptable behavior. That is the real tragedy…not if we are strong enough or a big enough person to forgive.