About how to ask for forgiveness. How to forgive someone who does not apologize

Sometimes it’s very difficult to forgive a person, even when he asks for forgiveness.

Evil or rash words spoken by other people can occur again and again in my head, especially if I'm tired or upset with something and pity myself. If those who said these words are asking for forgiveness, then I know that I must forgive them, thereby recognizing the fact that they have humbled themselves. But even more important is what Jesus says: “And if he sins against you seven times a day and turns seven times a day, and says: I repent, forgive him.”  Luke 17: 4.

But what if other people didn’t think that what they said or did was bad? Or maybe they know this, but they don't care? Perhaps I can hardly forgive those who ask for forgiveness, and my mind says that those who do not ask for forgiveness do not deserve it.

Despite all this, there are six main reasons why we should forgive those who do not regret their actions.

1. God continues to say that I must forgive everyone.

In 1 Peter 3: 8-9 we read that we should be "... friendly, humble wisdom, do not repay evil for evil or swearing for swearing, on the contrary bless, knowing that you are called to that in order to inherit the blessing."

My forgiveness should not depend on whether other people regret their actions or words or not. God still requires that I can always forgive. This is His commandment. Moreover, if I do not forgive, then God will not be able to forgive me, even if I ask for forgiveness for my actions. “And if you do not forgive people their sins, then your Father will not forgive you your sins.”Matt. 6:15 a.m. This is really very serious.

2. Dying on the cross, Jesus set an example for me.

One of Jesus' last acts when He lived on this earth was to forgive those who condemned Him to death: “Father! Forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing. ”  Luke 23:34.

We are called to become like Him. Pupils take this seriously.

3. Bitterness and resentment should not poison my life.

Can I do good if my thoughts are full of annoyance? Then God cannot use me. He cannot bless me. Bitterness poisons my thoughts and my spirit. She defiles me. And the responsibility for this lies with me, and not with the person who did something or said. “Try to have peace with everyone and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord. Watch that no one is deprived of the grace of God, that some bitter root, having arisen, does no harm, and that many are not defiled by them. ”  Heb. 12: 14-15.

4. Forgiveness gives strength to my spirit.

In 1 Tim. 6:11 is written: “But you, man of God, flee this, and prosper in truth, piety, faith, love, patience, meekness.”

In doing so, I "acquire the skills" to distinguish between good and evil. (Heb. 5: 12-14). I find myself in various situations of life and turn to the Word of God to find out how to react, because my understanding and feeling that what is right is wrong. It is erroneous, because our human nature is infected with sin that entered the world due to the fall. Sometimes it is so hidden that I do not see it. However, he is, and I must find him, recognize and reject. This life gives me strength and is the victory of good over evil, if I choose to live according to the Word of God, instead of living according to my human understanding. (2 Cor. 2:14)

5. Most people do not understand the meaning of their actions.

If people understood that what they say or do in relation to other people influences their attitude towards God, that this determines their happiness, then they would strive to be better, kinder, to be more loving. They would ask God for help to live a better life. However, most people do not have such a relationship with God. They live, thinking about their future here on earth, they do not think about eternity. I must forgive them because they do not know what they are doing, as Jesus said.

6. Because I am guilty too.

I am a person and am able to upset and offend others. If I did not say and did nothing to offend others, my conscience can be calm, but this does not mean that I did not upset or offend someone with what I said (or did not say) without realizing it of this. I do not know what people think of me, and what effect my mistakes made in ignorance have on them. Jesus said: "Which of you is without sin, first cast a stone at her."  John 8: 7.

I should not judge or dislike those who do not ask for forgiveness, since I know that there are things for which it is possible and I should ask for forgiveness. Jesus exhorts us to judge ourselves, to test our motives and what is hidden in the depths of our hearts. When I do this, I see how I myself need God's forgiveness and people's forgiveness. I am not as pure as I would like.

Oh no, forgiving is not easy. However, the more I listen to God and read His Word, the more I understand how I should respond, and then it becomes easier for me to forgive. Gradually, I lose my “human” understanding of good and evil, and receive the thoughts of God, which consist in a life full of warmth and kindness. I should not establish “justice”, I can give this right to God.

When I leave this to God, I enter complete peace.

There are at least five reasons that explain the benefits of the phrase: "It's my fault, please forgive me."

1. These words help the person you are offended to feel the objectivity of your feelings.
2. They help improve relationships. A person who was previously considered indifferent and insensitive begins to be perceived as a person who deserves trust.
3. This phrase helps a person to live on, not returning again and again to past grievances.
4. Since asking for forgiveness involves humility, perhaps this experience will serve as a deterrent that will prevent the offender from making the same mistake again.
5. Better relationships will help restore confidence in the future.

Not only the words that make up the request for forgiveness are important, but also the way we pronounce them.

• To demand forgiveness or to contact a third party so that he asks forgiveness on our behalf, it only means to aggravate the situation.
• A person who asks for forgiveness against his will also cannot be considered completely repentant.

STEP 1: declare your intentions

Take full responsibility for the trouble you caused. You should not think: "I would never have done so if she had not first begun to act defiantly." Just as you shift the responsibility for your words, feelings or actions to other people or circumstances, the world around you will control you.

Remember that any person strives for self-government and self-regulation and at the same time resists it. It is for this reason that you can achieve your goal only by conducting a critical analysis of your personal qualities.

You can say: “Tanya, last week I did what I cannot be proud of. I did it, and I want you to know that I realized my mistake. "

STEP 2: Express your sympathy

Put yourself in the place of another person. Although it’s easier said than done, still try to find the right words to say about your mistake. This will allow the person to understand that you are aware of the cause of his pain. You can ask yourself the question: “What would I feel or think if this happened to me?” Tell your feelings to the person you offended.

For example, you can use one, several, or all of the phrases below:

1. I understand that you feel betrayed.
2. It seems to me that my behavior disappointed and embarrassed you.
3. If I were you, I would feel upset and humiliated. This is true?
4. I think that you think that I do not care about you.

Note that all these thoughts are expressed in the form of questions or assumptions, not categorical statements. Nobody wants to be told how he should feel, this could be seen as an attempt to give an assessment of what is happening. Understanding, on the contrary, involves a careful study of the situation and the creation of an objective picture of what happened. Remember the difference between these two approaches.

STEP 3: Use caution when making promises.

It would be reckless of you to say: “I promise that this will never happen again. I promise that I will never hurt you again. ” This is almost impossible, since we all have flaws and live in an imperfect world.

Much better to say:   "I will try to do everything in my power to never hurt you or offend you."

You should always have the most noble goals. It is not necessary to perform all these steps mechanically in order to disarm your victim and thereby create the opportunity to make the same mistake again. You must carefully study your own intentions in order to avoid the appearance of hidden goals. If you find in yourself such hidden goals, open them and change your behavior.

STEP 4: Give the person you offended the biggest gift

You must provide an opportunity to forgive you. Yes, yes, your request for forgiveness must be sincere and gentle. I do not urge you to ask for forgiveness on your lap, but your partner should feel that his forgiveness is really important to you.

The words “I'm sorry” and “I'm sorry” are not enough, because in this case you put your desires first! Any sentence starting with a first person pronoun will apply primarily to you.

But the person to whom you hurt wants to be sure that you have realized your mistake. If you casually throw “I'm sorry” or “Sorry for what happened last week,” you are focused on yourself. Most people will answer “Everything is OK,” without taking your apology seriously.

However, you will not be able to resolve an unpleasant situation in this way and restore lost trust and respect, although this is your main goal.

You could say differently:

1. Could you forgive a man like me?
2. Do you think you can ever forgive me for hurting you?
3. I understand that I have lost your confidence, but I want you to know that our relationship is important to me. Could you forgive me with time?

Most people are willing to forgive if your request for forgiveness is sincere.  If trust is restored, the relationship becomes even better than before.

Why? I can only assume that as people jointly overcome difficulties, their relationships gain more sincerity, directness, and reliability. We prove to ourselves and to each other that we are stronger than any problems and obstacles. As steel is tempered in fire and under the blows of a hammer, so relationships become stronger over time if they have respect.

However, you may encounter obstacles to rectifying the situation, as a person may refuse to forgive you. This is the worst case scenario. The person offended by you is not able to cope with his pain. Resentment, anger and a desire for just retribution can overwhelm him. Most people are ready to forgive gradually, at one percent a day.

With respect to those who refuse to forgive you, you can demonstrate what I call “courageous vulnerability” when you open up to another person asking for forgiveness while realizing that you run the risk of being refused.

A direct request for forgiveness completes the cycle for which you are personally responsible. This does not mean that you cannot again ask this person to excuse you. Every time you ask for forgiveness, you are improving in your spiritual development!

Many of us lack courage, because defensive mechanisms protect us from such a hardening experience. Our ego tells us: “Do not allow this. These people are to blame for everything. Your anger must be stronger and longer than their anger. " Some abusers even manage to betray and act like their victims, and the victims begin to think that they themselves are to blame for the fact that they are being mistreated.

For example, a friend who constantly gives unnecessary advice. When you finally decide to ask him to stop giving advice, your friend may be offended by saying: “I try my best to help you, and here is your gratitude!” In such cases, a sense of humor and common sense will play a big role in the relationship.

Some ask to teach them how to forgive the offender. According to the teachings of Christ, you must at least three times ask for forgiveness. If you continue to be denied, then release this person with the thought: "Bless him and help me become better." Those who refuse to forgive feel the need to constantly feel their resentment, so if it weren’t for you, they would have found another person who saddens their lives.

Ask for forgiveness at least three times, remembering that you will receive exactly as much as you ask, and you will not receive anything that you decided not to mention. Also, remember that asking for forgiveness alone does not guarantee that you will be forgiven. You must stop offending people. This is the law of life.

STEP 5: how can I make amends?

If you get to step five, you're in luck. Another person either agreed to try to forgive you, or you have already managed to achieve complete forgiveness. In response, you should ask him the question: “What can I do to make amends?”

If a person has already begun to forgive you, most likely he will answer: “Everything is in order, forget about it. You don’t have to do anything. ” However, this is his point of view.

You must do two things.  Firstly, never to commit such misconduct again, and secondly, in any case, make this person something pleasant. It's time for chocolates and flowers!

STEP 6: Return to Your Problem Again

Several weeks passed, and relations began to gradually improve. Therefore, you can return to the problem again to check if friendship has actually recovered. It may seem to you that this step is unnecessarily methodical, but this is not so. You must make a conscious effort, because the goal is to purposefully build strong relationships that exclude the possibility of your failure to fulfill your obligations.published by econet.ru

We all make mistakes in relationships, and commit acts that offend our loved ones. Yes, of course, we try to avoid this, but still it happens. And it is very important to be able to admit your mistakes, and be able to ask for forgiveness. Do not assume that if you have a close relationship, it means that we could not hurt by definition, and accordingly, "there is nothing to be offended by me, I'm here with you." It is very important for a loved one to hear this request for forgiveness. If they apologize to you, it means that you are important, you mean that you don’t want to lose relations with you, and there is reason to believe that the next time they won’t do this to you. Of course, there are farewell “sorry, but I'm leaving”, but now it’s not about them. What is the best way to ask forgiveness from a loved one if you accidentally offended him or made a mistake in order to smooth out the consequences of your erroneous or awkward behavior?

We are not talking about physical and emotional violence at all now, because this, in principle, should not be, not the slightest admission to this. It is not for this that a man trusts us with his thoughts and feelings, he doesn’t let us into his life so that he has to defend himself against whom he longs for love and respect, is worthy of this and has every right to do so. Aggression is destructive for relationships, it must be completely eliminated, because the boundaries of the permissible tend to spread up to very sad consequences.

In some situations, a loving person himself is ready to forgive us, but respecting himself, he cannot allow his boundaries to be violated again and again, causing him pain.

How best to ask for forgiveness so that it helps to maintain the relationship as much as possible?

We really do not like to admit our imperfection, our whole being resists. I want to make excuses, to refer to unsuccessful external circumstances and in general other people. But this nullifies the benefits of apology. Therefore, it is necessary to voice your mistake aloud and take full responsibility for it.

And no jokes and depreciation of the situation and, all the more, shifting responsibility to the offended. “Sorry, let's make peace, it's such nonsense. You have so often been offended by me lately, I’m generally afraid to say a word, you must have taken a beast »Such messages even more offend your loved one. This is a psychological defense, we want to make our guilt in the eyes of a loved one less, and to keep our self-esteem intact.

Also, one should not theatrically wring their hands and show with their whole appearance, or even voicing how you suffer and suffer because of the incident. This is like a conscious or unconscious manipulation in which you force a person to feel sorry for you and switch from resentment to empathy to your “unbearable” suffering.

But it is important for you to show your empathy, and express regret about what happened. It is in this part of the apology that we can show a person how much we value relations with him, and remain close and loving to him, despite some misunderstandings, carelessness or a careless word, oversight.

Understanding and explaining the reasons for what happened increases the listener's loyalty of an apology. It indicates that a person not only wants to maintain a relationship, but also wondered why this happened and how to prevent this from happening in the future.

If you can somehow please then your loved one, somehow compensate the damage caused to him, do it without fail. You touched some kind of pain, a string in his soul, you made him feel unloved, insignificant, somehow contributed to lowering his self-esteem, maybe physically destroyed something important for him (for example, accidentally deleted important files in a shared computer or smashed your favorite vase). If there is at least some way to eliminate the consequences (restore files, for example), it is simply your holy duty to do this as soon as possible. If such a possibility does not exist (in the case of a vase, for example, then you can do something nice in some other area. In the case of moral damage, you need to understand what feeling is affected by the person, and you can “shed balm.” If this feeling significance, give it to a loved one. If he began to doubt your love, think of what can be done for him to feel how much you love him. "5 languages \u200b\u200bof love" re-read if confused. It will be very useful, and not only in order to ask for forgiveness.

A prerequisite for all these events is one hundred percent sincerity, otherwise such an apology will not give anything to the relationship, but will only aggravate the situation.

And, of course, your loved one rightly believes that you have made a conclusion and, in fact, fulfill your promises and will be more attentive, careful, careful and surely do everything possible so that the incident does not happen again. And if, you just got forgiveness for being late for 15 minutes (30 times in the last month), and agreed that if you are late, you will always be warned, and the next day you will be half an hour late without warning again , then this time it will be much more difficult for you to get forgiveness. You promise something - do it, as if it were not hard to rebuild.

Take care of your relationship, try not to hurt a loved one, and take the mitigation of the consequences of this pain seriously if it did happen.

Sometimes it happens oh, how not just to say two completely uncomplicated words: “I AM SORRY”. Why some people never apologize, is it really so hard to say “sorry”. Let's delve a little into the psychology of apology, and our relationship with these words or their absence.

Some people refuse to say, I'm sorry, even when they are perfectly aware of their guilt, including cases where the misconduct is not so great, and it would seem that it is not at all difficult to take responsibility. Sometimes a simple “sorry” in a matter of seconds can prevent conflict, someone’s anger and negative emotions.

But ask for forgiveness ,   just like saying did I do something wrong. For some people, recognizing that they did something wrong is impossible. Even if they know that this is so, and even when they really regret their actions. It is strange to observe, but this unfortunate person may actually regret and still refuse to utter words, while acknowledging his repentance and correcting his wrong.

To acknowledge that we have made a mistake, a certain level of self-esteem and ego strength is required. It is very difficult for people who deeply doubt themselves to apologize for something specific, because one mistake can destroy their self-confidence. The idea that, once stumbled, you can still be a valuable and good person, is unattainable for someone whose opinion about themselves is greatly underestimated.

An apology is a recognition of wrong, which can provoke a huge com inadequacy and shame. Thus, to cause irreparable damage to the fragile representation that they have built about themselves. For a person with a damaged self-esteem, a recognized mistake can be tantamount to destruction. Just like the one who was innocently accused of as a child, who was told from a young age that he is responsible for every problem that arises and will accordingly be punished.

Having matured, such people, as a rule, go in one of two directions:

• either they apologize for all, even what they haven’t done yet,
• or they refuse to apologize for what -oreven that they alreadydone.

The latter consciously or unconsciously decide that they will never again accept the blame. They closed the door to all the locks. Such apologies are associated with their early experience of constant guilt. The unjust and unscrupulous responsibility imposed on them simply did not leave any psychological space for responsibility, even when appropriate.

There are also people with a low level of empathy who do not really regret that you have suffered from their actions. They believe that apologies are only suitable for situations in which they purposefully  hurt you. And you do not deserve any regret if you feel pain unintentionally provoked by them. And, therefore, technically there is no fault. Your pain, in itself, does not really matter and does not cause their sympathy.

There are many more reasons why some people cannot or will not apologize. For some, apologizing is too scary, sad, dangerous, it means being vulnerable. The list goes on and on.

To say I'm sorry is to admit that I care about how you feel, that I care, that it hurt you. I worry about you, in fact, wanting to drop my ego, stopping defending my version of myself. I care about you enough to accept my experience at this moment. I take great care of you, wanting to admit that I am imperfect.

Getting a sincere apology is an incredible gift. We feel heard, acknowledged, understood and valuable. Without thinking that these words can be painful for another. When another person looks into our eyes and apologizes for having hurt us through his actions or behavior, we feel loved and important.

When someone apologizes to us, we also feel that their frustration is justified and justified. The apologizer takes responsibility at a certain level for the result of his actions, intentional or not. And when this happens, our insides relax; we no longer have to fight to prove that our experience is true, that we have a right to our pain, and that it matters.

It is not about arousing pity for the beggar. And about accepting that we cannot change, and refusing to waste energy on the struggle for an apology with someone who does not have the opportunity to give them to us.

When it hurts, we need an apology to relax, move forward and let go of the pain. But sometimes, when we cannot get them, we need to learn to relax on our own, without the help of another. Trusting and knowing that our pain deserves kindness, because it exists, and that our rightness is justified and valid, because it is our truth, is the beginning of our independent healing process.

Think of the deep value of simple and sincere regret. When you are lucky enough to receive a sincere apology, take it, feel the greatness of what this other person is offering, get his willingness to be vulnerable and accountable, to take care of you, and not about your own ego.

Also, when you have the opportunity to say that you are sorry, realize this chance to be generous, perhaps leaving your comfort zone. And feel the depth of the gift that you give.

Apologize and goodbye.

Material provided by the psychological center "Transfiguration"