S1E5 What Forgiveness Is Not

Today’s episode, What Forgiveness Is Not, is the fourth in a four-part series called Understanding Forgiveness. In today’s episode, I discuss what forgiveness is not.

1. Forgiveness is not a one-time event we have to do it over and over and over sometimes for years before we can actually say that we have forgiven the person.
2. Forgiveness not for the offender, it is for you, to set your heart free from holding on to the emotional bonds and the memory that you have connected to the offender.
3. Forgiveness is not accountability for someone else. We may never be able to hold the offender accountable. They might not even be aware that they've done anything wrong to us, so the possibility of holding them accountable may not always be available.
4. Forgiveness also does not erase the consequences for myself or the offender. If we need to ask for forgiveness, that other person may never want to speak to us, see us, or have anything to do with us ever again. In contrast, we may never receive justice. We do have a responsibility to pursue criminal justice if we are aware that the person is still causing harm, especially to protect minors.
5. Forgiveness is not forgetting or erasing the memories of what happened to us.
6. Forgiveness is not reconciliation. We may never have the opportunity to reconcile with the other person and we may not want to reconcile. There are exceptions. We can have reconciliation with that part of us that was hurt. It can be healed and integrated into our whole being. We can also have reconciliation with God.
7. Forgiveness is also not a disempowered state. When we decide to forgive, we're taking back our power and that gives us more agency over how we are going to interact with that person and that's where boundaries come in.
8. Forgiveness is not dehumanizing the other person. When we forgive, we have to broaden our view to perceive that person in their entirety because God created that person or those people and he did not create them as a monster or an entity that doesn't have full human dignity.

This concludes our four-part series, Understanding Forgiveness. I hope you will join me next episode as we explore how who we are impacts how we forgive.

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Remember Friend, Forgiveness is for You.