[bradley13]

Forgiving someone makes sense, if you believe they honestly made a mistake, or if they are willing to change their future behavior.

Forgiving does not make sense, if it just gives a narcissist another shot at you. "Fool me once..."

We have neighbors like that. We wanted to believe the best of them, and let them get away with crap 2 or 3 times. You don't have to be mad at people like that, you just have to realize that their nature is not going to change.

[SamBam]

Forgiveness doesn't have to imply returning to the same level of trust. You can forgive your child for having lost your phone, and yet choose to wait until they're older before lending them the phone again.

Forgiveness is more about your own internal state. Are you still holding onto the pain of the betrayal? Most of the time, you're just continuing to let that thing harm you, if so.

Forgiveness can also be about finally acknowledging that you can't change the past.

[ldd]

From the article:

  Forgiveness means letting go of anger and resentment towards someone who wronged you. It doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying it was okay.

You can always forgive and never trust, or trust less. Or even forgive and never speak to the person that you forgave.

So exactly like you did with your neighbours. Sounds perfectly healthy to me.

[czl]

> Forgiveness means letting go of anger and resentment towards someone who wronged you. It doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying it was okay.

Assuming that definition why would one ever not "forgive"? What this advice in essence says is "be logical and do not let intense feelings drive your decisions".

There is a variant of this advice involving positive feelings such as "do not let the positive feelings you may have towards a charismatic sales person drive your purchase decisions / your positive feelings towards a charismatic politician drive your voting" or better still "do not let an intense infatuation cause the ruin your marriage (cheating) / ruin of your career (work place relationship) / ruin of your life (unwanted pregnancy / child)"...

Again what this advice in essence says is "be logical and do not let intense feelings (both good or bad) drive your decisions".

[trustissues123]

It's probably a matter of definition, but I think it's useful to distinguish forgiving and (re)trusting.

IMO this is the most important distinction on this topic, whatever definition you give. The difference between:

- to forgive (that is, letting go of negative feelings, accepting what happened), and to

- to trust (that what happened would not happen again).

You definitely don't need the other person (or their actions) for the former. But you need evidence of some change for the latter. (Ideally you need the other person to acknowledge what and why it happened, and following actions to attest to the new behaviour)

You can easily forgive a child that somehow misbehaved, without any work or interaction on their part, and have zero hard feelings. Which is different from trusting that the child's behaviour has changed.

Mixing forgiving and trusting, as is done throughout the article, is not at all productive.

You seemed to have forgiven them, but you don't trust them. How could you?