Essay on Forgiveness

Forgiveness can be defined as the foregoing of resentment or revenge when the wrongdoer's actions deserve it. Forgiveness is a very subjective theme and everyone has there own idea on who should and who should not be forgiven. Forgiveness can encompass many different things, from merely accepting someone's apology to helping them to find there way out of the situation they put themselves in.


I think, that to be able to forgive others, you have to first be able to forgive yourself. By this I mean that if you feel guilty about something, you have to be able to accept that you made a mistake, but you also have to then carry on and move forward. If you cannot forgive yourself, you will constantly be berate yourself and you won’t be able to leave the past behind. Of course, you have to learn from the mistakes you made and endeavour never to repeat them, but it’s not necissary to constantly berate yourself over something that has already happened and cannot be changed. Often, we are the last people to forgive ourselves. In my opinion, once you realize that you have spent enough time making yourself feel bad about something you have done, it becomes clear that quite often, others have long since forgiven you.
Forgiving others is a very subjective and complicated process. Everyone has their own set of morals and ethics, which means that everyone has a different view of what can be forgiven and what it means to forgive. I think that the hardest people to forgive are the ones who are the closest to you. If someone else wrongs you, it is easier to forgive, because you most probably don’t expect much from that person anyway. If someone who is close to you however, a friend or partner for example, then for them to do something which requires forgiveness means that they have betrayed your trust to some extent. I think that the level of trust breached determines how easy it is to then forgive someone. I think if someone made a genuine mistake and this hurt you, then there is nothing to forgive, but if someone intentionaly betrays your trust or does something even though they know it will hurt you, then this makes it much more difficult to forgive.


In my opinion, everything can be forgiven, but not forgotten. For one thing I we must learn from our mistakes, so to forget an instance would leave yourself vulnerable to being hurt in the same way again. Obviously it is easy to say everything can be forgiven, but you never know how you will react when youfind yourself in that very situaion, where you have to decide whether or not you can forgive someone. Even though I think everything can be forgiven, that doesn’t mean that the relationship between the forgiver and the forgivee will go back to the way it was. It is not always possible to trust someone to the same extent as before and even if it is, trust is something which has to be earned back.