How Can I forgive You?

How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To Janis A. Spring

2005

Weight: 1 lb

Method of Disposal: Leaving somewhere

I am willing to bet that this book would have been helpful if I had read it when I bought it. I cannot remember now, but I am sure I bought it when I had a certain person in mind that I wanted to forgive. I did not feel as involved or motivated to read it, as I probably did then, when I picked it up a week ago, but I persevered. I was not entirely impressed, but I think I probably did some latent learning. I have a built in resistance to self help books so this is likely more a commentary on me than on the book itself. The author uses a lot of very helpful real life examples and, while a lot of them focus on adultery, there are plenty dealing with parent/child conflicts, sexual abuse situations, and even one dealing with a therapist/client relationship. I was particularly impressed by this last relationship. The client confronted the therapist about the hurt she endured working with him, and he wrote her back with a thoughtful and helpful response. This was so new and unique to me. I believe in therapy, and I have heard about/experienced a lot of bad therapy sessions and good ones. I have never heard about someone confronting their therapist years later and getting an insightful and helpful response. It made me feel good about people and about counseling and about forgiveness. I appreciated that diversity and it encouraged me to delve into myself, my history and my present situation, to think about how I forgive and how I accept forgiveness. Who I have forgiven, who has forgiven me, and who I have yet to forgive. It is only in instances of trauma that I feel I have not yet been able to forgive. The author allows that freedom but also puts forth some ideas about how to go about dealing with that pain/yearning if I wanted to. It also made me think of who I need to apologize to and how I might go about apologizing in the future. That cannot be bad, right?

ALSO, I did learn that there is a Forgiveness Institute. I never knew. http://www.internationalforgiveness.com/