Forgiving the Unforgivable

Beverly Flanigan

Description

"A clearheaded study of what life can do to us and possible ways to begin again." --Carl A. Whitaker, M.D., author of Midnight Musings of a Family Therapist and coauthor of The Family Crucible Women and men who have been deeply hurt by someone they love often experience a pain that spirals out to undermine their work, relationships, self-esteem, and even their sense of reality. In Forgiving the Unforgivable, author Beverly Flanigan, a leading authority on forgiveness, defines such unforgivable injuries, explains their poisonous effects, and then guides readers out of the paralyzing anger and resentment. As a Fellow of the Kellogg Foundation, Flanigan conducted a pioneering study of forgiveness, and from that study, from her clinical practice, and from her many years of teaching, researching, and conducting professional workshops and seminars, she devised a unique six-stage program, presented here. Filled with inspiring real-life examples, Forgiving the Unforgivable is both a practical and a comforting guide to recovery and healing.
Preface.

Introduction.

PART I: Anatomy of an Unforgivable Injury.

1. Anatomy of an Unforgivable Injury.

2. Harms and Harmers.

3. The Aftermath of Injury.

PART II: The Journey of Forgiving.

4. Phase One: Naming the Injury.

5. Phase Two: Claiming the Injury.

6. Phase Three: Blaming the Injurer.

7. Phase Four: Balancing the Scales.

8. Phase Five: Choosing to Forgive.

9. Phase Six: The Emergence of a New Self.

PART III: Tools for Forgiving.

10. Tools for Naming the Injury.

11. Tools for Claiming the Injury.

12. Tools for Blaming the Injurer.

13. Tools for Balancing the Scales.

14. Tools for Choosing to Forgive.

15. Reflections on the New Self.

PART IV: The Need to Forgive.

16. The Need to Forgive.

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• développement personnel
• Psychology
• Interpersonal Relations
• guide

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470295441
• Langue: English

Extrait

F orgiving the U nforginable
F orgiving the U nforginable
B EVERLY F LANIGAN

Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Copyright 1992 by Beverly Flanigan. All rights reserved.
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., New York, NY
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., Ill River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone].
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley Publishing logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Wiley Publishing, Inc., in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty : While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or to obtain technical support please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993 or fax [phone].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Flanigan, Beverly.
Forgiving the unforgivable / Beverly Flanigan. -1st Collier
Books ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-02-032230-5
1. Forgiveness. I. Title
[BF637.F67F53 1994]
158 .2-dc20 93-34336 CIP
Manufactured in the United States of America.
20 19 18
Cover design by Lynne Amft
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
part I. Anatomy of an Unforgivable Injury
1. Anatomy of an Unforgivable Injury
2. Harms and Harmers
3. The Aftermath of Injury
part II. The Journey of Forgiving
4. Phase One: Naming the Injury
5. Phase Two: Claiming the Injury
6. Phase Three: Blaming the Injurer
7. Phase Four: Balancing the Scales
8. Phase Five: Choosing to Forgive
9. Phase Six: The Emergence of a New Self
part III. Tools for Forgiving
10. Tools for Naming the Injury
11. Tools for Claiming the Injury
12. Tools for Blaming the Injurer
13. Tools for Balancing the Scales
14. Tools for Choosing to Forgive
15. Reflections on the New Self
part IV. The Need to Forgive
16. The Need to Forgive
Notes
Index
PREFACE
This book presents a construct of forgiving that I believe is both theoretically sound and empowering for those who attempt to use it to forgive people who have harmed them. I do not view the material presented as a substitute for professional therapy but as a companion to it if people need additional help.
It is my sincerest hope that those of you who use this work to help you forgive the unforgivable are able to complete the journey of forgiveness if you choose to attempt it. I am told by all who have done so that the final destination is worth the trip.
Forgiving the Unforgivable was spawned from a lifelong interest in the problems people experience and the methods they use to resolve them. I am sure this interest evolved from my family s commitment to people and their passion for inquiry. I thank them for these. I also want to thank my friends, who have given me their unswerving support during the preparation of the book.
My most special thanks go to all of the people who volunteered their stories of forgiving. Their names have been altered to protect their identities, but their experiences reveal the determination of the human spirit when it refuses to be broken by adversity. To all of you, I am deeply grateful.
Forgiving the Unforgivable could not have been realized without the support of the Kellogg Foundation and my agent, Jane Jordan Browne, the constructive comments of my editor, Natalie Chapman, and the expert assistance of Betty Zeps.
Introduction
My interest in forgiveness began many years ago, when I was a young social worker in Alaska. I was working with an adolescent girl who had witnessed her father murder her mother. The girl had also been raped by her father. Although many seasoned helping professionals have faced this situation fairly often, I was confronted for the first time with a client who, regardless of the evidence that lay before her about her father s behavior and character, struggled determinedly to forgive him. Also for the first time, I was in a deep quandary about whether to help someone reach for an objective with which I was not certain I agreed.
When I left: full-time clinical practice to teach, questions about clients who wanted to reconcile with people who hurt them persisted; so did my students questions about the ultimate purposes of the helping process. Should people who are abused by their parents simply reject their own mothers and fathers? Should they express their rage toward others? For how long? What is enough? Should they break their vows of fidelity because their spouses become cruel or ill? Is the goal of empowering a person to assist that individual in placing blame on another? My fascination with the underlying value of helping others and with the goals of helping continued to spur me to attempt to find answers to these questions, mostly because I strongly suspected that the goals clients had for themselves were often not those of helping professionals.
Many people, whether professionals understand it or not, seem to need to make things right with each other when things have gone wrong between them. Forgiveness is one mechanism for righting wrongs. Over the course of my work, I have come to suspect that there are many more people than we can imagine waiting to hear the words I forgive you or Please forgive me so that they can finally feel at peace with the people they have once loved.
If a group of average people were asked the question When you review your life, what one thing about it still makes you feel bad? the answer for many would involve forgiving. Some would feel bad because they had been unable to forgive another; some, because they had not been forgiven by a person for whom they had once cared. Forgiveness is the method by which people in intimate relationships let each other off the hook for various acts of ruthlessness and unkindness. It is the figurative glue that holds together intimate bonds. But it is elusive; and remaining unforgiven or unforgiving is an all-too-common fate for countless individuals. Forgiving is among the most difficult of human undertakings; unfortunately, most of us have no idea how to forgive each other or even if we should attempt to do so.
Very little is actually known about forgiving and how it happens. In fact, more is written about the results of forgiving than about the process itself. For example, the end product of forgiveness is that it presumably repairs ruptures between people. 1 It is said to release those who injure others from paying off a debt, whether the debt is material or emotional. Forgiveness allows the forgiven to start all over as though his * slate of old behaviors were wiped clean. 2 It is said to be permanent; that is, once given, it cannot be retracted. 3 But such observations shed little light on what it is-on what actually goes on in the hearts and minds of people who have been deeply wounded and who have struggled to forgive the person who did the wounding. In 1982, I set out to find some answers about the experience of forgiving the unforgivable.
From 1980 through 1983, I was fortunate enough to have been a fellow of the Kellogg Foundation (one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the country). As part of my fellowship, I decided to return to the classroom to audit some courses. In a doctoral seminar I attended one afternoon, the students were entertaining several questions: Are moral people required to forgive? Their answer was yes. Are they required to forgive even a tyrant like Rudolf Hess (who was still living in Spandau at the time)? Again, their answer was yes.
The logic behind the students consensus was that when tyrants act in injurious ways, they engender in the broader society the likelihood that hatred seething in victims of tyranny spills out in ever-widening spheres of influence onto nonvictims and eventually everyone connected with nonforgiveness. The hateful recriminations of a victim, their logic went, are as morally dangerous as the acts of the tyrant. Each one, the victim or the villain, is likely to contribute to a society s evolution into a crueler place. Regardless of its source, hatred creates meanspiritedness in the human condition. So when an individual does not forgive one who injures him, he perpetuates evil and, in the end, affects the well-being of everyone. Forgiving, by this logic, is the only ethical response to villainy.
The problem, though, was that forgiveness was never well defined. If people have a duty to forgive, what exactly is forgiving? I began to examine other sources of informa