Existential Psychology

Forgive The Person Who Has Wronged You Today

By  | 

The ingrained assumption that someone needs to apologize before forgiveness can take place leads those who have been wronged to carry around a painful emotional burden for a long time, sometimes their whole lives, since most perpetrators have no intention of apologizing for what they’ve done.

What forgiveness does is close an open gestalt, it puts the period on a sentence so that you can move on to the next part of your story. Forgiveness is about your relationship with yourself, much more than about your relationship with the person who has wronged you. You’re the one dealing with those painful emotions on a daily basis. You’re the one whose life continues to be negatively affected by the resentment, the bitterness, the unfairness of it all.

By waiting on an apology, one that might never come, you’re handing over whatever power remains to you to the person who took it from you in the first place. You’re letting this person control your destiny. You don’t need to wait for that apology. You can forgive the person who has wronged you today.

Keep it a private affair, there’s no need to get in contact. If they haven’t reached out to you then they probably aren’t in a place where they want your forgiveness. But this doesn’t mean you can’t bestow it and receive all the same psychological benefits that are derived from forgiveness under customary circumstances. Think like Jesus thought when he said, “Forgive them father for they know not what they do.”

Wise words from the existential point of view. The person who wronged you did it out of ignorance, out of not being a psychologically or emotionally mature person, since psychologically and emotionally mature people rarely wrong others and when they do they quickly realize it and seek to make amends. Perpetrators of injustice might consciously believe they know what they’re doing but they don’t, their acts are the result of the failure to self-actualize and therefore stem from ignorance.

This is why you can forgive the person who wronged you without waiting for an apology. An apology comes from insight and, depending on the severity of what happened, the perpetrator has already betrayed a fundamental lack of insight. Don’t waste any more of your life waiting for something that is probably never going to come. Unburden yourself of those painful emotions. Forgive the person who has wronged you today and get back to the business of your own growth and self-actualization.

Related posts:

  1. Apologizing As A Power Struggle When you have wronged someone it means that you have taken away their power. You have put your interests before their interests, you’ve trampled their rights. You may now hope that with an apology you can make things right. This is why we can view apologizing as the continuation of a power struggle although most […]...
  2. Forgiveness Is For The Forgiver When we think about forgiveness we usually think about redemption for the person asking for it, as a sort of cleansing, a clean slate so that this person can move forward without feeling stuck. But the exact same thing can be said for the one doing the forgiving. Forgiveness if for the forgiver as much […]...
  3. How To Apologize Apologizing seems like it should be a pretty straightforward affair but for many people it is anything but. At the unconscious level what might make apologizing so difficult is that you equate the act with surrender, which implies handing over all the power in the relationship to the other. The question to ask yourself, if […]...
  4. Psychology Of Seeking Revenge Seeking revenge appears to be about righting a past wrong but it’s actually about mitigating a present hurt. Although the events happened back then those hurt feelings are still very much alive right now. And so from the psychological point of view while revenge is almost always consciously rationalized as simple justice, as giving the offending […]...
  5. Forgiveness “Forgive them father for they know not what they do.” – Jesus What makes the person of Jesus worthy of admiration and emulation is that, like all the great masters of living across time, he practiced what he preached. Enduring his greatest trial, tormented and belittled, forced to watch from the cross as his possessions […]...
  6. Rewriting The Grief Narrative Of course grief is boundlessly painful when we had a healthy, happy relationship with the person lost to us. But it’s also boundlessly painful when we had an unhealthy, unhappy relationship with the person lost to us, because we realize at some level of awareness if we’re feeling forgiving that our chance has passed us […]...
  7. Forgiving Wrongdoing When we feel that we’ve been wronged the instinct is to seek revenge, to punish the perpetrator for that wrongdoing. But of course we don’t usually call our revenge fantasies revenge, we call them justice. More often than not those white hot revenge fantasies cool off and turn into slow burning resentment and hostility, which we carry […]...
  8. Gift For Language What keeps a lot of people from learning a second language is their own entrenched belief that they lack the gift for language acquisition. But this is a rationalization, an easy excuse that’s accepted without too much push back. If this sounds familiar, realize that you do have the gift for language. How do I […]...
  9. Moral Indignation Whenever anyone is caught in a less than honorable act a chorus of moral indignation is sure to follow. The irony  from the psychoanalytic point of view is that it’s the people who make the most noise, who let their moral indignation be known in no uncertain terms, who are most likely to frequently engage […]...
  10. Sometimes Listening is Better Than Giving Advice You learn pretty quickly in the counseling situation that sometimes what clients remember and appreciate was your compassionate listening, your presence as they hashed out problems themselves, although you thought it was your brilliant insight into those problems that would garner the most points. Sometimes listening is better than giving advice, and this holds true […]...
  11. You Do Not Have To Tell Your Partner Everything You Are Thinking And Feeling There is a pretty common sentiment out there in romantic relationships that it would somehow be dishonest or inauthentic to hold back certain thoughts or emotions. Even when these thoughts or emotions are destructive to the relationship, damaging its foundations, disintegrating trust and intimacy, some people feel like it’s their obligation to communicate the information. […]...
  12. Do Not Punish The Wrong People For What Happens To You When our plans are thwarted or we feel diminished in some way, many of us find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having a lot of negative energy to unload but not feeling able to direct it towards the correct person due an imbalance of power. So we punish the wrong people, usually those closest […]...
  13. When People Feel They Have Been Seriously Wronged When people feel they’ve been seriously wronged they don’t always know what to do with those hurt feelings. One of the most common responses is a form of reaction formation where they repress the discomfiting sense of being vulnerable and alternatively present a strong, even aggressive facade to the world. And they usually feel an […]...
  14. Forgive And Remember The expression ‘forgive and forget’ is a poor way to make amends. It runs against a key psychological principle which is that increased awareness is essential to living a fulfilled life. By bringing the unconscious into the conscious you get to make decisions that are based on what you actually want. ‘Forgive and forget’ means […]...
  15. Choosing The Person You Want To Be From the existential point of view what separates the human process of becoming from the process of becoming of all other organisms is that human beings have some say in the matter; they’re capable of directing their own growth and development, of responding to their given situations as they see fit, of deciding upon the […]...
  16. Fear of Aging For The Young Person Most of us are terrified of dying, though we repress this fear from our conscious awareness. But there is nothing quite like the process of aging to forcefully remind us that we are indeed organisms tied to the natural world, that however godlike we fancy ourselves our bodies disagree with us, betraying our fragility and […]...
  17. Wronged Many people who were wronged by a primary caregiver or other significant person hold on to bitterness, resentment, anger, and other painful emotions for years or even decades. Letting go is easier said than done. An idea that can be really helpful to make the conscious decision to move towards closure is that keeping these […]...
  18. Person Centered Approach The typical disdainful view the general public holds of therapy is of slightly ridiculous therapists who are too touchy feely, who say things like  ‘How did that make you feel?’, who mindlessly parrot back what their clients say to them, as in: Client: “It really hurt me when he treated me that way.” Therapist: (with […]...
  19. Person First Language An essential step in moving towards a just world is to start using person first language in our interactions and our perceptions. When we talk about person first language we mean always putting the human being before a disability, psychological disorder, or any other aspect that globally categorizes. Here are some examples: Instead of Schizophrenics, […]...
  20. Situate The Problem Outside Of The Person When we situate the problem within the skin of the person experiencing that problem, the response is always going to be guilt, defensiveness, denial, combativeness, hurt, and other aversive thoughts and feelings that will interfere with productive outcomes. In narrative therapy the granite sentence is “The person is not the problem, the problem is the […]...
Related Items