Life Challenges

Doorways of Support and Inspiration:
Forgiveness

Resolving Violence with Forgiveness Richard R. Gayton. Ph.D.

The symbols of violence have such a dark richness of meaning that they can dominate our minds with fear, sorrow, and gloom for months and even years. The Forgiving self provides alternative, life-affirming symbols that help restore us to health if we seek them diligently and practice calling them into our consciousness at every opportunity.

The foremost hallmark of having successfully assimilated these life-giving symbols into the deepest reaches of our personality is the complete forgiveness of all parties connected to the violent events. Those parties include ourselves, the murdered loved one, the murderer, the molester and the molested, the abuser and the abused, the rapist and the person raped, the drunk driver and the person who was hit, and those others who might have prevented harm or who could have been more supportive of us. Why are the victims of violence included for forgiveness? Because we have the difficulty of forgiving ourselves for being there and for having to take responsibility for our own physical and emotional injuries. A survivor of violence will not find inner peace without dispensing with these grievances against himself and others.

...The wound of violence requires us to fundamentally change our beliefs about ourselves and others if we are to transcend hostility and grow. We cannot deny that we hate, nor can we hold on to the hate because of the damage it does to us. We cannot forget the past, yet we must embrace the present even more firmly than the past because it contains the only potential for love and connectedness in our current lives. Finally, we recognize our woundedness and honor our need for healing until, in the end, we decide that hating no longer gives to us but rather takes from us the vital energy for the day's tasks. We lay it down.

From The Forgiving Place: Choosing Peace After Violent Trauma, by Richard R. Gayton, Ph.D., WRS Publishing, Waco, Texas, 1995, pp. 91-92.

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