Re: Caller and email blocking an ex-girlfriend after 9 years of on again/off-again...

Just "doing the theraputic thing" is not forgiveness. It really has nothing to do with pyscho babble or anything along those lines and predates it by a few eons. One reason so many people end up in therapy rather than just getting a little helpful counseling or advice is that they don't forgive. They think forgiveness is somehow saying that the other person is alright and obviously their actions were NOT. However, forgiveness does NOT say they're ok.

Forgiveness is for *you*, it has jack squat to do with anyone else. It in no way condones them, their actions, the situation, any of that. Forgiveness can be seen as restating to yourself your own boundaries and leaving them firmly within their own. Their actions are their problems. Forgiveness helps *you* in dropping the anger and keeping the lesson.

More simply though, forgiveness is about detaching the anger from the situation, making it easier to not "carry it around" later. Forgiveness and forgetting are NOT the same thing. I can forgive someone for treating me like dirt yet still remember their treatment so as to not fall for it again, from them or from someone else later. I can look back on it objectively, not emotionally. All forgiveness does is allow me to not have built up anger inside. It acknowledges that anger was useful at the time, but is no longer necessary once they are out of my life.