It is said that the only healthy response to apology is forgiveness. But the ultimate question remains, what does it mean to forgive? When I was growing up, I thought forgiveness was letting go of every evil intent, hurt and restoring the feelings of love. This was easy when I was a kid growing up but became something much difficult when I was older. I remember during my Junior High School years; my classmate was fighting with a girl in another class.
Richlove was this girls name and I remember it like it was yesterday. I went in to separate them and Richlove took everything on me for separating them and insulted me in ways i can't describe. I was very hurt, and I walked out. She later on apologized to me, and I forgave her, but the feeling of hurt did not evaporate, and the warm feelings of love did not return. I could not get out of my head the picture of her insulting me and replaying the scene, the hurt returned. I thought by forgiving her, the feelings of love will just return.
Now after years of being a counselor and reading books of great counselors before me, through the scriptures and the experiences I've had, I have learnt great deal about forgiveness.
Forgiveness presupposes that a wrong has been committed. When one of you speaks or behaves unkindly to the other, it calls for an apology and forgiveness if the relationship is to be restored. When one of us offends the other, an emotional barrier is erected between the two of us. The passing of time will never remove the barrier. Barriers are removed by sincere apologies and genuine forgiveness.
There are three Hebrew words and four Greek words that are translated as forgive. They are synonyms with various shades of meaning. The most basic idea is “to pardon", or “to take away.” When speaking of God forgiving us, the scriptures say, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our transgressions from us. Forgiveness removes the barrier and lifts the penalty. No longer does God demand that we pay for our wrongdoing. When we sincerely apologize and request His forgiveness, He pardons us and will never again hold that failure against us.
We are to forgive as God forgave our sins. Thus, forgiveness is not a feeling but a decision. It is the decision to offer grace instead of demanding justice. Forgiveness removes the barrier and opens the possibility for a relationship to grow. What i did not know in my early days was that forgiveness does not destroy our memory. I have sometimes heard people say, “If you have not forgotten, you have not forgiven.” That statement is untrue. The human brain records every experience, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant.
Psychologists have explained the human mind as having two compartments. One is called the conscious mind, and the other, the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is composed of those things that you are conscious of in this moment. For example, I am fully aware that at the moment I am sitting in front of my laptop. The subconscious mind houses past experiences that are stored in mental files. Some data flows freely from the subconscious to the conscious mind. At a given time, we may choose to bring data from the subconscious to the conscious.
For example, if you ask me “Where did you go last night?” I could reach into the subconscious mind and tell you “I went to church.” Before you asked the question, I was not consciously thinking of church. But at will, I could retrieve that information. Other experiences are buried deep in the subconscious and may be difficult to retrieve even with effort. On the other hand, sometimes memories leap from the subconscious to the conscious mind without being requested.
This is often true of hurtful memories. Even after you have chosen to pardon their behavior and remove the barrier, the memory of the event may leap back into your conscious mind, and with the memory comes the feelings of all that you went through. The memory does not mean that you have not forgiven. It means simply that you are human and remembering a painful experience.
Ref: GARY D. CHAPMAN, PhD, Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married
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