Human relationships are made possible by mutual understanding, respect and care. Often times, where misunderstanding arises due to what ever reason and is not well managed, could lead to serious strain in a relationship.
Also there are mistakes, deliberate acts and negligence that can lead to one offending others. These are called offences and for a relationship to mend or go smoothly at least, there is a need for the parties involved to initiate the reconciliation process whose endpoint is forgiveness and amends where necessary.
Today, we would be talking about forgiveness, factors that impedes forgiveness in relationships and what we can do to Foster forgiveness.
The forgiveness process usually involves the two parties involved I.e the offender and the offended. Its easier when the two parties are willing to communicate, understand and are willing to take initiative towards making amends.
However, and in most cases, you may not need the other party(the offender) to initiate the forgiveness process after all, forgiveness is not necessarily something you do to someone or for someone as opposed to revenge, it is something you do for yourself and to yourself(should you not forgive). The following quotes puts it more succinctly:
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. “
Lewis B. Smedes.
“Forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself…”
Suzane Thomas
“Forgive others not because they deserve it, but because you deserve peace…”
Jonathan Lockwood Huie
I think revenge and forgiveness are two ends of a spectrum and its inversely proportion to strength of character I.e, the need to revenge increases with a decreased strength of character and the need to forgive increases with an increase in strength of character…. Do you agree or disagree? Let’s hear your reasons.
There has been lots of research in this area of human relations in psychology that shows that the feeling of revenge and resentment causes so much problem for the one who feels it (the one that needs to forgive).
For this reason, forgiveness is generally defined in the psychology clime as ‘ voluntarily and consciously deciding to let go of resentment or the inclination to revenge a wrong done to you whether the party(ies) deserves forgiveness or not.
According to psychologists, unforginess leads to elevated stress level, depression, anger, anxiety and pessimism.
Having said all these, it will be unrealistic to suggest that its an easy to do thing, because it isn’t.
Forgiveness isn’t easy at all. As a matter of fact, being humans who are an emotional and social being , we are more inclined towards vengance than forgiveness.. That’s why its a matter of strength of character.
There are factors that could forestall forgiveness, and we try to list some of them below:
As primates, we have evolved to relate threat to self preservation and wellbeing to whatever causes hurt. Whether it’s physical hurt, or emotional hurt and that is registered in our memory as a no go area or we learn to avoid coming in contact with such situations as can cause us hurts.
Sometimes we just want to stay away from it, most times, we want to fight back, because that’s how we are built. Fight or flight.
If we just cannot flee and ignore, we scheme on how to return the hurt as our way of fighting and that is what unforgiveness is “feeling of resentment and vengeance”.
