Could you forgive someone if they have not apologised for a wrong they have done to you?

I have forgiven many times without even an attempt at apology. Forgiveness is for me, as the anger and resentment that I was holding onto was hurting me – not the person who I felt had done me wrong.

That said, it appears that your “friend” is still actively treating you in a way that you don’t appreciate or like. In this case, it’s the persons current and ongoing behavior that is causing you distress. Forgiveness in this relationship would be a perpetual affair, and it may be best to remove this toxic person from your life. Then, you can forgive if you find that you can.

Note: I also have found the genuine forgiveness is a powerful thing. Trying to forgive by forcing it can just lead to more resentment and hurtful emotions.

EDIT: Poor reading skills on my part. The “falling out” part likely means that you are no longer friends. Sorry.

@DoNotKnowMuch Yes we are no longer friends. But I still appreciate your advice and insight.

It has been said that “holding anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

I get that, and in my own mind I have forgiven some pretty hard wrongs done to me. But I haven’t expressed that forgiveness to some of the perpetrators, who seem to believe – as your former friend also seems to believe – that they’ve done nothing that needs to be apologized for, or forgiven.

So I’ve forgiven some who don’t really “deserve” that, but we haven’t spoken much, either. Or at all, in a couple of cases. If they want to start a conversation, and if they acknowledge whatever they’ve done – because I truly don’t know why they acted as they did, but I’m not about to ask that, either – then I’m certain to forgive them to their faces and resume a relationship, (it’s somewhat harder to completely write sisters out of one’s life than false friends) but I’m not holding my breath.

This is one of those situations where you just have to let go. The person is not able to see their misconduct and it is all defensive rebuttal. Itis his gig, and he does know it, he just can’t lower his ego defenses enough to admit oit,
Sooooo…his loss. He keeps his foolish pride and losses a friend.

His choice. I’ve been down this road before too. Oh well, cut your losses.

I have a hard time understanding the concept of “forgiveness” as @DoNotKnowMuch expresses it, and while there have been numerous discussions over the years on Fluther about it, I still don’t get it.

To me, forgiveness is like respect: It is a thing granted to someone who has earned it. The way others talk about forgiveness I would think of as excusing or pardoning. I do not feel any compulsion to excuse or pardon someone else’s actions when those actions have hurt me and the person who committed those slights feels no remorse and has expressed no intention to alter their behaviour.

Getting into the habit of excusing negative, unrepentant behaviour is a really good way to become a doormat and a victim, and I’m never doing that again.

Forgivenes is about forgiving the other because THEY know not what they have really done, because they are unaware and unconscious, or, they have too much pride and fear to own their misdeeds.
Forgiveness absolves YOU of carrying the burden for them. Forgiveness is never about the wrongdoer, it is about loving yourself enough to not carry some elses baggage.

So you have a resentment about this person. As has been said before, a resentment is allowing someone to live in your head rent-free.

He probably doesn’t recall the whole incident, while it is festering in your memory. Listen to @Coloma, let go of it by forgiving them.

Forgiveness is not forgetting or excusing, it is a matter of not letting it waste any more of your time.p

Great advice everyone.

I feel about forgiveness like @CWOTUS. It’s about me not hurting myself any more, about letting stuff go. It never means (to me) letting things return to the way they were.

It’s frustrating and unsatisfying to have things stay somewhat unresolved this way, I know, and hard to stop letting it get to you from time to time.

I have forgiven my mother for a HUGE wrongdoing, but I still don’t intend to ever see her again. I think of this type of forgiveness as being free of the burden of anger and resentment. I’m no longer actively angry, and I don’t wish her any ill will. In fact, I sincerely hope she’s happy! That doesn’t mean I’ll ever allow her to hurt me again.

I don’t understand forgiveness either. I don’t think of my anger at my abuser on a regular basis and it doesn’t spoil my life but after a few confrontations during which the person showed no remorse, I have no need for forgiveness. In fact, holding on to some anger helps my keep my boundaries up with them.

At some point I will forgive my Ex for leaving but that doesn’t seem to be yet.

@Seek – I can understand why my interpretation would be nonsensical to many people. And I am in no way going to attempt to convince anyone that my interpretation or practice of forgiveness is for everyone. It just works for me.

If I could attempt to try to explain it better, I suppose I would start with forgiveness of “me”. When I engage in looking back at things that “I” did or didn’t do throughout my existence, I am struck with how little I can recognize as being things that the “I” of today would do. Years ago, I could look back at my past and beat myself up about my choices. But at some point, I realized that I was playing films in my mind of someone else altogether and assigning a label of “me” to that character. My alienation with this character – and resentment about this character’s past actions – was really about feeling resentment and anger about someone that no longer exists.

Could I request an apology from this person (“me”)? And if this person did apologize, what would be the tangible benefits to my current “self”? No. So, I was in fact perpetually replaying (and manufacturing, due to memory’s fallibility) scenarios in which a person who no longer existed had done me and others harm. And that this current action of ruminating and replaying these scenes in my mind were causing me more pain, anger, and resentment – now.

Now, I could try to forget that the past has happened. But forgetting to me is simply attempting to push away and suppress the mind in replaying past events. While I could possibly do this for brief periods of time, inevitably, I would “remember” and all of my unresolved emotions related to this would come rushing back.

Instead, I started looking more closely at what “I” had done and asked myself what “I” could have done differently in the past. All alternative actions had one major flaw – they all depended on that “me” in the past having had already lived through all of these actions only to have arrived exactly where 44-year-old me is right now in order to have acted differently and in the way I would now prefer. In other words, the “I” of 20 years ago acted the only way the “I” of 20 years ago could have acted. Yes, in some major sense I am expressing a level of determinism here that is likely incompatible with any libertarian sense of free will.

That doesn’t mean that I can currently justify or condone the past actions of “me”. I can still look back at those actions and see them wrong. I don’t need to beat “myself” up over the past. In a very real sense, I have forgiven myself. I have made peace with this version of me and no longer need to suppress memories. When they arrive, I can laugh or cringe, or feel a twinge of resentment. But there is no longer any need to nourish these negative emotions or ruminate.

Now, as I look towards other people who may have done things that I consider to be wrong or harmful to me – it’s difficult for me to identify completely with any of these characters. There’s the “me” from those times, which could hardly be considered the “me” of today. Then there are the perpetrators, who I still see as young (and in some cases, children). These are all beings that in a very real sense no longer exist.

In the way that I can look back and resent my past actions, shocked as to how I could have done x or y, I am sure that we all have this experience. I can’t imagine that the kids who tortured me in school would be able to fathom how they could have said and done such horrible things to me.

But there are more difficult matters – and I can say with certainty that I have never had to live with some of the awful things that some people have had to go through. So, I am only speaking for myself. It’s taken me many years, but I have been able to forgive my father for having left the house when I was 12 years old in order to live with a younger woman he had been having an affair with for the previous year. His leaving left me feeling abandoned, confused, and financially poor, and absent a father who was there during some really important years. I don’t have to accept his actions as being right, and don’t have to respect his actions. But I have grown to understand his actions more. While for many years I had wished he could be more a father that I had wanted, I have learned to appreciate him for the father that he is – the only father he could have been, and the only father he is today.

So, my father and I have moved on past all of the resentment. But I don’t excuse any of his past wrong behavior. I have simply forgiven him. The result just happens to allow my father and I to have some sense of a relationship. Also, age and illness (he has quickly-progressing Parkinson’s disease) has played a role in our coming together again and building a new relationship. But it’s not just about building this relationship. I have been able to completely drop all of the time and effort I used to spend on resentment and being angry. His past actions are causing me far less pain today than they did years ago. So, forgiving him has been for me.

But there are people who have had truly horrible things done to them. I can’t imagine finding the strength to forgive someone for some of these things. But it does happen. There are extreme cases, such as this story from Radiolab. I can believe that these stories of radical forgiveness are genuine, because I have felt the power in my own life.

Shit, I rambled and you’re probably still thinking, “What they hell is he talking about?”. :)

I know of several people who could apologize for accusing me of something I didn’t do years ago, but it wasn’t their fault so no apologies required. They were mislead and now know who the real culprit was.

I get it, @DoNotKnowMuch. That is a fine response.

If I could distill what I’ve learned from that into four words: Let go; let flow.

Here ya go. Everybody sing now. :-D

www.youtube. com/watch?v=087g9sdVf9U

and don’t forget, forgiving does not mean you have to keep that person in your life either.