What's Changing? - Forgiveness

 

Please see below selected recent forgiveness-related change.

 

See also: 

• What's New? - Forgiveness
• What's Changing? - Acceptance
• What's Changing? - Tolerance

 

November 2024

• Research indicates that negative emotional states can take a toll on mental and physical health. People are simply in a better place when they alleviate some of the chronic anger or similar emotions they feel through forgiveness. It takes a lot of energy to carry around emotional baggage constantly. If an offender is unwilling or unable to demonstrate remorse and change, then continuing to expect it, or to think repeatedly about why it ought to happen, will only perpetuate negative feelings. 

 

August 2024

• Felipe De Brigard, a memory researcher and philosopher received a grant to uncover what the relationship really is between forgiveness and memory. When people forgive, is it because their memories of past wrongs have faded? This would mean that unforgiven events are likely to be remembered with more clarity and detail, while wrongs that people have forgiven are less vividly recalled, if at all. De Brigard believes however that forgiveness is closer to emotional reappraisal, which involves reframing the meaning of something that’s happened in order to change its emotional impact. De Brigard says that if forgiveness is similar to reappraisal, then forgetting isn’t necessary: the memory of an event doesn’t have to get weaker for someone to forgive.

 

July 2024

• Forgiveness is not brushing something under the carpet and pretending it didn’t happen. Nor is it dismissing your feelings about what happened. It is accepting and freeing oneself from the residue of the event, events, behaviour, or transgression. Forgiveness is choosing to move on, empowered in our strong, survivor-self that is able to reform a life and sense of self, despite what has happened, according to therapist Kate Harvey.

 

February 2024

• For many people with troubled childhoods marked by trauma and distress, one of the major theoretical problems of adult life, as they struggle to find closure, is: should they forgive their parents for the past, or not? They’re likely to be pulled in two contrasting directions. At one level, a sense of inherent loyalty means that they'd like to be able to let bygones be bygones, especially as they watch their parents diminish in strength and lose status in the world, it seems unfair to them to keep directing rage towards them and to behave in ways that were anchored in quite different power dynamics and circumstances.

 

October 2023

• Our refusal to forgive ourselves for our mistakes tends to hang on a strong sense of how much these were, in the end, avoidable, argued The School of Life. We obsessively go back over our slips and errors and contrast what did happen with what could so easily have been skirted if we had not been so witless. We experience recurring jabs of pain at the disjuncture between the agonising present and its now-vanished alternative.

 

August 2023

• According to Bethel Abera, founder of Hidden Scars, a UK non-profit, forgiveness is misunderstood because people think it means that you are letting that person get away with what they’ve done, but she argues that is not what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is you personally letting go of the bitterness and the resentment that you have towards someone else because of what they’ve done. It doesn’t mean that they don’t feel responsibility, or they don’t have responsibility, to make whatever they did wrong, right. That still exists. They may still have guilt, and they might still need justice - all of those things don’t go away. The point is that you are no longer motivated by the resentment and bitterness you have towards someone else.

 

April 2023

• Nathaniel Wade, professor in psychology at Iowa State University, and his colleagues developed a process to help people work toward self-forgiveness. The Four Rs of Self-Forgiveness involves: taking responsibility for harming another person; expressing remorse (while also seeking to minimise shame); engaging in restoration, through repair-oriented behaviours and a recommitment to personal values; and achieving a renewal of self-respect, self-compassion and self-acceptance. True self-forgiveness involves both taking responsibility and moving toward self-compassion.

 

December 2022

• Further reading:
  • Art as Living Amends: Nick Cave on Creativity as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World – The Marginalian
  • Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on Anger, Forgiveness, the Emotional Machinery of Trust – The Marginalian
  • Self-Forgiveness - The School Of Life

 

October 2022

• “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her antidote to the irreversibility of life, “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven”, noted Maria Popova.

 

June 2022

• Further reading:
  • Forgiveness is key to ending the ‘shame industrial complex’ - Financial Times

 

May 2022

• To truly apologise to someone, we must paint ourselves as a "villain". We must hold our hands up and accept that we have made a mistake, that we’ve done wrong, and that we are far from perfect. A meaningful apology is the humbling of an ego, which prostrates itself before the wronged party and seeks forgiveness. It’s the recognition that the victim not only matters, but that you seek to make things better between you. Apologies reach out to bridge, repair, and strengthen a relationship.

 

December 2021

• Some four centuries after the event, the Scottish parliament moved to pardon thousands of people - mostly women - charged with being witches. Until the Witchcraft Act was repealed by Edinburgh in the mid-1700s, 3,837 were charged under the law in Scotland, more than 2,500 of whom were executed.

 

September 2021

• The urge for revenge precedes socialisation and emerges in the very early stages of life, albeit in a very primitive form. The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott found in his extensive experience with paediatric patients that a crude form of retaliation could be observed in some babies even just a few weeks old.

 

May 2021

• IMF member countries agreed to clear Sudan of the roughly $50 billion it owes to the multilateral institution. This debt forgiveness was designed to allow the transitional military-civilian government in Khartoum to gain access to the cheap international credit it needs to address Sudan's deep economic crisis following decades of isolation and sanctions under Omar al-Bashir.

 

September 2020

• A charity that is dedicated to helping people learn to forgive saw a surge in demand for its resources on forgiveness this year. The Global Forgiveness Initiative, which is based in Scotland, has seen page views and downloads rocket as the pandemic swept across the world. The charity’s website, which includes articles, worksheets and ebooks, is now visited by more than 250,000 people per month, which is 10 times more than it was in 2019. The charity's founder explained that the pandemic led many people to get back in touch with loved ones from whom they had become estranged. “It was definitely a factor. People have told me that they looked for resources on forgiveness and then made contact with a family member they hadn’t been in touch with. It was like they were anticipating needing to get rid of the water under the bridge before engaging again with those relationships.”

 

May 2020

• According to writer Adam Lowenstein, to seek forgiveness is to begin to take responsibility. It is to create space for healing and reparation, of which moving from a system of punishment to one of rehabilitation is only a small part. To seek forgiveness is to acknowledge not just the brokenness of criminal justice systems but the brokenness in each of us, and to refuse to accept a broken system that punishes some far more than others.
• Forgive Everyone exists to 'unify, empower, and activate people who have done and experienced harm to practice radical love and forgiveness; and to use our resources to empower the least loved and least forgiven people in society'. They are building a community of people that are radically reimagining a system where justice and accountability includes investment in growth, transformation, and restoration, rather than simply punishment. 20% of its proceeds are donated to help men and women coming out of prison find housing, employment, rehabilitation, and mentorship.

 

October 2019

• The Forgiveness Project collects and shares stories from both victims/survivors and perpetrators of crime and conflict who have rebuilt their lives following hurt and trauma. At the heart of The Forgiveness Project is an understanding that restorative narratives have the power to transform lives. This informs the organisation’s work across multiple platforms, including in publications and educational resources.

 

September 2019

• A group of charities and organisations in Finland launched a campaign to create an emoji for forgiveness. The ‘Forgivemoji’ campaign crowdsourced ideas for an emoji to say “I forgive you”, with the ultimate goal that it would be added to the official collection by Unicode Consortium. “We urgently need to learn better how to reconcile. These skills are needed everywhere. Different ways to encourage apologising and forgiveness are an essential part of it, and this includes the social media environment,” according to a spokesperson for the group.

 

June 2019

• The need to forgive is widely recognised by the public, but they are often at a loss for ways to accomplish it. For example, in a large representative sampling of American people on various religious topics more than 30 years ago, the Gallup Organisation found that 94% said it was important to forgive, but 85% said they needed some outside help to be able to forgive. 
• Dr. Robert Enright from the University of Wisconsin–Madison founded the International Forgiveness Institute and is considered the initiator of forgiveness studies. He developed a 20-Step Process Model of Forgiveness.[Recent work has focused on what kind of person is more likely to be forgiving. A longitudinal study showed that people who were generally more neurotic, angry, and hostile in life were less likely to forgive another person even after a long time had passed.
• Forgiveness as a tool has been extensively used in restorative justice programs, after the abolition of apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa), run for victims and perpetrators of Rwandan genocide, the violence in Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and Northern Ireland conflict, which was also documented in film, Beyond Right and Wrong: Stories of Justice and Forgiveness.
• Social and political dimensions of forgiveness involves the strictly private and religious sphere of "forgiveness". The notion of "forgiveness" is generally considered unusual in the political field. However, Hannah Arendt considers that the "faculty of forgiveness" has its place in public affairs.
• Some religious doctrines or philosophies place greater emphasis on the need for humans to find some sort of divine forgiveness for their own shortcomings, others place greater emphasis on the need for humans to practice forgiveness of one another, yet others make little or no distinction between human and divine forgiveness.