What is actual forgiveness and why am I expected to?
What is actual forgiveness and why am I expected to?
The things I hear a lot are that an abuser or bully was just a kid, that she isn’t a bad person and that I’m being judgemental for saying something so mean just because I’m angry, that no one can be truly bad, that I have to forgive her, et cetera.
What actually is forgiveness? Do I have to forgive her? Sure, maybe no one can be truly bad, maybe she’s not a bad person, but I am angry. I am not saying this to her face.
Also, she knows what she’s doing and intentionally hurts others for pleasure. In my opinion, maybe not yours, that does make her a bad person. If she changes and stops it, then she isn’t a bad person anymore, but she was when I knew her.
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I second what the other commenters are saying about forgiveness being for you, not to other person, but can I just rant about how useless it is to say no one can truly be bad? It denies the basic utility of words, in my opinion. If someone is an ass, violent, greedy, etc then they are bad. If they change their ways they are good. We have words to describe greedy, violent, assholes. We call them bad people. Hell, a murderer psychopath? Call them evil. It's why we have adjectives.
All too often I had people ask me find understanding and peace that way. To see how humans worked when broken.
And it helped in a similar way to if a rock fell on my leg, a geologist could tell me of how it tumbled down by erosion. But such knowledge did not help my leg to recover faster. And no self respecting geologist would tell me to empathize with the hill, much less try to convince me to take the cast off in sympathy to the moved dirt.
Yet some people tried just that with the humans who hurt me and with my emotional bruising.
It’s good to know we are all born innocent, but don’t let it get in the way
I agree!
Now that it's a couple days later, I think I might add a thought to this. It can be invalidating, to have someone ask a victim to empathize with the bully without sufficiently recognizing the victims feelings.
I used to do this sort of thing. I would try to be objective and logical. I learned that this just made my friends feel crazy, like they might be overreacting. I've learned to instead start by validating peoples feelings. I try to recognize thier pain, discomfort, and anger first. And, I never blame people for feeling that anger.