Exploring Forgiveness And Reconciliation: An Index of Posts

Several weeks ago, I sat down to write two or three blog posts on forgiveness and reconciliation as an aspect of how spiritual abusers use shame and condemnation to control followers. They were intended to finish up some loose strings and unfinished items as a part of this series of posts exploring how to best confront a spiritual abuser. Many churches use Matthew 18 as a way of berating people to subtly force them into complying with extra-Biblical requirements, a primary passage concerning forgiveness. I realized that I couldn't rightfully explore reconciliation without also including forgiveness. My effort to write just a few posts turned into something of an adventure exploring forgiveness as well as how abusers of all varieties exploit trust.

Disclaimers!

As I've stated many times in the series, I am learning as I go and don't claim to have all the answers. I've had the opportunity to study this material as part of my own spiritual development, and I only wish to pass on the good stuff. I also hope that others can learn from my mistakes as I aspire to stop making them. Please don't interpret these writings as how-to lists that must be followed blindly. I offer them to help inspire the reader to continue on in their own thoughtful journey as they work to make sense and to transcend their own experiences.

I approach the topic from a Christian perspective, but depending on the issue, anyone from any faith can glean some insight into the process. Let me add the disclaimer that considering that this blog discusses abuse, I gave that issue a greater weight of consideration. Abuse causes healthy individuals to lose perspective and causes them to accept conditions and demands that are not usually a part of offense and disagreement between people within healthier relationships. The theologian might take some issue with this bias and rightly should if I were tackling the critical topic in the general sense. Please note that I geared my approach to address forgiveness in the context of relationships that abuse trust and power in order to meet the primary mission of this website. In this context, I agree with men like Augsburger who see offering forgiveness to a spiritual abuser without their repentance as virtually meaningless, also an effort that poses a threat to victims and survivors of abuse.

By stepping back somewhat from “forgive to be forgiven,” I also wanted to avoid the interpretation of forgiveness as a type of work. People who come out of high demand religion generally believe that God's grace must be merited through performance, even though we can never do anything to merit God's grace. He gives it to us out of love when we repent. But abusive systems turn the imperative of forgiveness into what is understood as“Forgive immediately (regardless of whether the other party repents and whether you're ready or not), or else you don't merit anything from God. If you don't, you'll go to hell.” In the fullness of all the New Testament presents on forgiveness, we should understand that we are to offer to others the loving kindness that God offered to us, and when we fully experience that forgiveness in our relationship with God, we should be naturally inclined and joyfully willing to share that same kindness with others. But I didn't want to make that a focus which might be seen by some as a type of condemnation because of how so many groups misinterpret forgiveness.

I'm also concerned about readers who are yet undecided about how they esteem Christianity as they work through the aftermath of pseudoChristianity in a Bible-based group. Though I took a strong Christian approach, I did not put a great emphasis on forgiveness of others as strongly attached to God's forgiveness of us. Most people who come out of these settings (the primary audience of this website) have a keen knowledge of this concept and could easily interpret too much of this kind of discussion as condemnation. I purposely curtailed my discussion of this interdependent relationship for that reason, and also because there was so much other material to cover.

(Another topic I'd like to explore in even greater depth in the future also includes how one can make peace with God and their faith, particularly for those who have left evangelicalism, fundamentalism, or Christianity altogether.)

Housekeeping

And in the interests of the pragmatic details, please be patient with the formatting. Translating bulleted items and making these many subjects easy to browse is a challenge. I pulled out some obvious topics as headers to include links to relevant posts, and some of the posts are listed under more than one category or subtopic.

Well, there you have it. Enjoy!

Introduction and Basic Information

• Revisiting Forgiveness and Confronting an Abuser
• Navigating Forgiveness: Where We're Going from Here
• Defining Forgiveness and Reconciliation
• What Forgiveness Is NOT
• Thoughts to Consider as You Start the Serious Work of Forgiveness
• Forgiveness Scriptures
• Good Books and Resources that Explore Forgiveness
  

The Journey of Forgiveness: Three Primary Paths Through the Process

(Denial, Bitterness and Healing)

• Finding the Path Through the Journey of Forgiveness
  • Grief in Forgiveness (Anger as a Function of Grief and Justice)
  • My Own Experience of Anger in the Process of Forgiveness Following Spiritual Abuse
  • Making Peace with Anger in the Process of Forgiveness
  • Be Slow To Wrath but Recognize It Quickly So You Can Get On With the Process of Forgiveness
  • David Seamands on Anger in the Forgiveness Process
  • Forgiveness and the Path of Denial (Denying Anger)
  • Self Deception in Forgiveness: The Path of Bitterness as a Cycle of Blame (Expressing anger in indirect and unhealthy ways)
  • Resources for Transforming Anger
• Path of Denial
  • Forgiveness and the Path of Denial (Pretending in various ways that the offense never occurred. It suppresses conflict but actually thwarts forgiveness and intimacy.)
  • Challenging Denial on Both Sides of Feigned Forgiveness
• Path of Bitterness
  • Self-Deception in Forgiveness: The Path of Bitterness as a Cycle of Blame (You think you're pursing forgiveness, but you're really just exonerating yourself and collecting dirt on the offender. It's a passive-aggressive [ineffective] way of communicating.)
  • The Inner Prison of the Path of Bitterness as a Diversion from Forgiveness
• Path of Healing
  • Embarking Upon Paths of Healing in the Process of Forgiveness
• Lousy Alternatives to Forgiveness (per David Augsburger)
• Love's Labors Lamented and Reclaimed (Healing from rejection)

Justice in Forgiveness

• Ayn Rand on Sacrificing Justice to Mercy: Forcing the Innocent to Suffer Twice
• Fears About Forgiveness: Throwing Away Justice in the Name of Mercy?
  

Complicated Forgiveness, Special Situations and Common Questions

• When Forgiveness Gets Complicated... Special Situations and Common Problems – What Should We Do?”
• Forgive and Forget?
• Differentiating Sins from Stumbling Blocks and Debunking the Doctrine of “Taking Up Offenses” (Sins should be handled differently than personal irritations. Explores Bill Gothard and the Shepherding Movement's aberrant doctrine of suppressing conflict by making offenses themselves a sin.)
• Repentance In Forgiveness (See comprehensive list of all related posts about repentance HERE.)
  • Defining Repentance on the Journey of Forgiveness
  • Differentiating Genuine Repentance from the Feigned Counterfeit of the Smug and Entitled (We must offer forgiveness, but that doesn't mean that the offender doesn't need to repent. If they don't, we must move on to release the offender to God, offering them a less ideal type of forgiveness so that we can move on from the offense.)
  • Seven Misunderstandings of Repentance (Guest post by Adele Hebert)
  • Fears About Forgiveness: Throwing Away Justice in the Name of Mercy?
• Understanding People on the Journey
  • Streets to Avoid on the Journey of Forgiveness (Wisdom from Portia Nelson) (Appreciating the futility of situations wherein a party involved in an offense doesn't choose to cooperate and respond in an ideal way.)
  • Cognitive Dissonance in Confrontation and the Process of Forgiveness (Limitations and human weaknesses that limit or slow down our ability to process emotionally charged information. How negative emotion can thwart our ability to be rational, especially when confronting others about offenses.)
  • When your Family and Loved Ones Offend You (Recognizing that loved ones don't always offer us unconditional love, even though they should.)
  • Loved Ones Who Repeatedly Hurt Us: Landorf Heatherley's “Irregular People” (Wisdom from the book, Irregular People, a term for describing people who have trouble treating us with appropriate love, respect, encouragement, and empathy. )
  • Complicated Forgiveness from My Own Journey (Personal account of rejected forgiveness, and understanding forgiveness and reconciliation as the same thing.)
  • Respecting the Weaker Brother on the Journey of Forgiveness (Developing compassion for and patience with people who are too wounded or threatened to forgive because of their own limitations or past trauma.)
  • Style, Personality Conflicts, and the Myers-Briggs Inventory in Forgiveness (Communication and personality clashes that can make negotiating forgiveness more difficult.)
  • Understanding Narcissism and How It Makes Forgiveness Difficult
• Completing Forgiveness When the Offender Doesn't Repent
  • The Other Type of Forgiveness: Releasing the Debt While Looking to God for Justice
  • Peaceful Compromise When Ideal Forgiveness Doesn't Happen (Pondering how to part and respectfully when conflict cannot be resolved.)
  • (Also see the Matthew 18 section in the index of posts concerning Facing Your Spiritual Abuser and exploitation of church discipline in Spiritual Abuse)
• Forgiving Others, God, and Self
  • My Own Process of Forgiving the Church After Spiritual Abuse
  • Forgiving God and Making Peace with Faith After Spiritual Abuse
  • Sage Wisdom About Forgiveness from Corrie ten Boom (WWII death camp survivor who offers much advice about forgiveness.)
  • Forgiving Ourselves
    

Communication and Self-Care in Forgiveness

• What ARE Boundaries? Facilitating True Forgiveness
• Become Both Forgiving and a Hard Target for Manipulation at the Same Time
• Confronting Others to Foster Trust in Forgiveness (Review of communication styles and how they can hurt or help forgiveness.)
• How Betrayal Bonds Exploit Trust and Power: Merging Forgiveness and Reconciliation (How traumatic bonding occurs and how it can put a victim at risk if one follows the Path of Denial in forgiveness.)
• Streets to Avoid on the Journey of Forgiveness (Wisdom from Portia Nelson) (Appreciating the futility of situations wherein a party involved in an offense doesn't choose to cooperate and respond in an ideal way.)
  

The Obedience of Forgiveness as an Act of Love and Worship

• The Choice of Obedience When Forgiveness is Difficult (Commitment to pursue forgiveness as an act of worship out of love for God.)
• More Thoughts About the Obedience of Forgiveness from Juanita Ryan (An excerpt from her book, An Enduring Embrace, quoting a section called Asking for Healing as Prayer.
• Moving Through the Pain on the Journey of Forgiveness (Encouragement from the Ryans' book, Rooted in God's Love, and the National Association for Christian Recovery)
• Thoughts to Consider as You Start the Serious Work of Forgiveness (Thoughts from Sandra Wilson's book, Released from Shame. Giving up the fantasy of what we want to happen in our relationships to accept reality so that we can move into a better future.)
• Sage Wisdom About Forgiveness from Corrie ten Boom (WWII death camp survivor who offers much advice about forgiveness.)
  
• Love's Labors Lamented and Reclaimed (Coping with rejection and lack of understanding)

Fostering Forgiveness by Creating a Milieu of Trust (This is the duty of the offender to the offended as a function of justice, the primary way that an offender demonstrates true contrition for wrongdoing.)

• The Importance of Trust Building in Forgiveness
• “Boundary Busters” Versus Basic Prerequisites of Trust in Forgiveness (Relationship factors and actions that destroy trust.)
• Traits That Foster Trust in Forgiveness (Becoming a more trustworthy person.)
• Confronting Others to Foster Trust in Forgiveness (How to become a better communicator to help build trust with those we have offended.)
• Repairing Trust After Offense To Facilitate Forgiveness (Rebuilding damage trust differs a bit from building trust in a relationship. How to proceed after you've offended someone to help encourage their sense of safety and trust after an offense.)
• Fostering Forgiveness Through Apologies: the Effective and the Flawed
• Hesitant to Reconcile? Steve Cornell on Forgiveness and Reconciliation
  

Distinguishing Forgiveness From Reconciliation (and recognizing the pitfalls)

• Defining Forgiveness and Reconciliation
• Gothard's Bunk About Begging for Forgiveness Through Manipulation
• The Problems of Merging Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Be Wary of Exploitation by Christian Mediation via Spiritual Abuse (Tendency in high demand evangelicalism to force fast reconciliation through legal mediation services like Peacemaker Ministries.)
• How Betrayal Bonds Exploit Trust and Power: Merging Forgiveness and Reconciliation (How abusive relationships wear people down and put them at risk for further abuse when reconciliation is forced.)
• Hesitant to Reconcile? Steve Cornell on Forgiveness and Reconciliation
  

Forgiveness Quotes

• Forgiveness Scriptures
• Nothing is Too Hard for Him
• Releasing Our Unfulfilled Dreams Through Forgiveness
• (Lousy) Alternatives To Forgiveness
• A Contrary Truth Concerning Forgiveness
• Forgiveness Sets All of the Prisoners Free
• Spurgeon on the Sweetness of Forgiveness
• Forgiveness Changes Things
• More Quotes About Forgiveness (secular sources)
• Sage Wisdom About Forgiveness from Corrie ten Boom (WWII death camp survivor who offers much advice about forgiveness.)
  

Forgiveness Resources

• Resources for Transforming Anger
• Good Books and Resources that Explore Forgiveness
  .