Abuse and forgiveness
Summary: In relationships forgiveness is essential but when is it too much, and what are the conditions to forgiveness?
It is known that, the stronger person, the supporter of the relationship, recognizes his or her wrongdoing, forgives, apologizes, and always moves off their self-righteousness. The weaker person needs to hold on to their point continuing to prove they are right. Those who choose to hold on to self-righteousness can never hold on to good relationships.
However, this is not to say that everything should always be forgiven. Often, in the case of continued abuse, the relationship needs to be severed. That being the case, there are certain conditions to forgiveness in a continued relationship. This is to prevent wrongs from being forgiven without consequence, or having the negative behavior repeat itself. This problem exists in certain personality types, which I refer to in the book as “Blind Supports,” more than it does for others. Too often extreme Supporters don’t acknowledge abuse but instead rationalize it away, allowing it to become worse. Putting your foot down can often be an important aspect of creating harmonious relationships. A good way to know if this is you, is if you are dealing with the same issue over and over again in your relationship.
If you don’t acknowledge or recognize abuse, you will accept more of it. If you make excuses for the abuse against you, justify, rationalize, or over-forgive it, you deem it okay to happen again.
Often abuse is such an ingrained part of people’s lives they don’t even realize it is happening because they are so accustomed to it.
Conditions to genuine forgiveness should include:
1. Acknowledgement (without justification) by the one who was hurt, of what occurred. Without understanding that you are being abused, you don’t know to stop it from happening further, thus keeping yourself in harm’s way. Don’t run away or turn your back on the problem, allowing it to come back. The pain and hurt needs to be expressed, even if it is just you writing it down. (When unsure about abuse, ask yourself, would you treat/talk to a person like that? If the answer is no, then you are acknowledging it is, at minimum, inconsiderate and possibly abusive.)
2. Honest communication to the abuser why it is unacceptable behavior and their acknowledgment. If you fear this communication, then you are allowing it to go on further and often escalate.
3. No longer ignoring the abuse now or in the future. This goes for all other relationships as well.
It is not always easy for a person to give honest communication to someone abusing them, so the communication exercises in Chapter 11 are designed to help make a difficult communication such as this easier.
I hope this is helpful. In my next blog we will talk further about the importance Keys to letting go of Self-righteousness.
More on this can be found in the book, “The Power of Personality Types in Love and Relationships”
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