Moving On: Forgiving Self, Others and Society

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean."

Dag Hammarskjold

     Forgiveness is the final step to any internal healing process.  How do we as humans forgive when we feel betrayed by another’s actions or punished by what we feel are unbearable losses?  How do we make sense of the death or disability of a child? 

Acts of violence? War? Lies?  Divorce? Affairs?  How does it feel when you feel when you have given your all to help another only to be rejected?  Or , simply, when a friend promises one thing and does another? How do we overcome the wounds of childhood when a parent  who was supposed to love us above all else, but, in fact, hurt us more that anyone else?   As a people how do we forgive or excuse our self from a history of war and oppression?   As clinicians, we may have experienced instances, wherein a client cannot move through the trauma to the final resolution of forgiveness.  Re-experiencing a wound without forward progress can keep our energy bound and our minds going in circles or nowhere at all.  How do we, as individuals and clinicians, address these concerns and facilitate healthy resolution and positive movement?    How do we move on, forgive and heal?  At present we have an ever widening gap in the 'national divide'.  The results of the recent elections have contributed to an even greater sense of disillusionment for many clients.   Forgiveness is a courageous act that cannot be hurried, but how can we facilitate this final step, allowing the client to move on?  

In this course, we will explore the path to forgiveness on both and interpersonal and societal levels.  We will review the tenets Cognitive Dissonance Theory and their application to the intrapsychic workings of forgiveness. The gender specific stress responses  of 'fight vs. flight' and 'mend and befriend'  will be  reviewed. We will also look at world models of peace and reconciliation for examples of forgiveness on the global scale.

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