Hi PearceHawk,

Allow me to offer some thoughts, which I think are oversimplified, but may be helpful:

I see two kinds of situations involved in forgiveness (again, I recognize I’m oversimplifying):

1. Someone who has hurt you, but you don’t have or don’t want to have a relationship with them. In this situation, your brain’s inability to forget is what is keeping you safe. The work of forgiveness, which may take some time, is the process of releasing the emotional energy of the incident so that although you won’t forget it, the emotional attachment to the incident is gone. This can take days to years depending on what happened.

2. Someone who has hurt you, but you DO want to have a relationship with them. This is more complicated. Your remembering brain will be scanning for signs that the person will repeat the behavior. With good reason! Your brain is protecting you. If you are wanting to stay in relationship with this person, you and s/he probably would have to share the process of forgiveness together. Why? Because your scanning brain, around this same person, won’t stop scanning until there’s lots of understanding of what happened, and until there are concrete changes in this person’s behavior so that your brain can relax again. Put differently, I don’t think it’s healthy to prioritize forgiveness in a situation where you’re allowing the person to hurt you over and over again. First, the behavior has to stop and to be understood. Then, with time, forgiveness is possible.

Just my thoughts.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Craig.