Thoughts on Forgiving

Forgiving needs the willingness to consciously deal with what has happened, to see and feel oneself as the victim and the other person as offender. This includes giving space to all the feelings around the event. As long as anger and pain come up with the memory of what has happened, forgiving is not possible. So forgiving requires a process which we cannot direct. In the course of this process, rigid feelings and thoughts resolve and open up for a broader view.

Pardoning means to get out of the entanglement of victim and perpetrator. I stop to focus on my wounds and to suffer from them. As long as I am fixated on what injustice or evil has been done to me, I am stuck – stuck in what has happened and stuck in judging the other person. There is a wrongdoer as long as there is a victim. Forgiving means also to release the perpetrator from being a perpetrator. Only by this I free myself from being victimized. I accept myself in my dignity which is inviolable and always present whatever happens or whatever is done to me.

From this dignity, true forgiving comes. And I also accept the inviolable dignity of the wrongdoer which has not been affected by the unawareness, limitation and self-oblivion which had befallen him by hurting me.

Forgiving means to see the other person who has hurt me, in his/her own history of hurts without putting myself in a superior position.

I am only able to forgive when I have realized that the other person had not treated me badly simply due to an individual deficiency of personality but because he/she could not have acted better in that situation due to patterns of behavior imprinted in the past and due to the mood in the moment.

By this I can realize that the action which has offended me was not directed against me but had happened without consideration (the other person was not present in doing what was done) or that the action came out of revenge – and was actually directed against someone in the history of the wrongdoer with whom I have been mistaken in the present situation.

So one can say that the victim arises in the perpetrator to eventually defend oneself, even though at the wrong time and at the wrong place, against the wrong person.

I can only forgive when I have understood that people are not simply evil but that they sometimes act in an evil way because they have been treated mindlessly which makes them prone to situations in which their range of action is limited as well as their view of other people.

Someone steps on my toes or makes me wet by driving by. My first impulse is to think that someone wants to harm me but the second insight is that someone has not managed to be attentive enough due to stress. When I remember my own limited ability to be attentive and aware, I manage to forgive. Also I am often careless, also I have ignored or overseen other people’s needs and perspectives.

„Also I…“ is an exercise which reminds me of my equality with other people, neither better nor worse, but equally human. What has happened has added another story to the infinite carpet of human stories. By looking closer, I might realize that this event which has been so awfully hurtful for me contains a tiny threat of humor, spun from the ineradicable imperfection of humankind. So I might be pardoned to smile at my own variation of imperfection which I tend to perform over and over again in some degree of perfection.