Forgiveness is sort of a backwards concept, like phlogiston (which ~= "the absence of oxygen"). Forgiveness ~= "the absence of resentment". So if you don't resent in the first place, then you can reach a state of "forgiveness" without actually performing an act of "forgiving".
Forgiveness as the absence of resentment
11 tweets · April 2019 · 77 likes · 4 retweets · read on Twitter
Resentment isn't a belief, or an emotion. More of an attitude, or stance, or orientation. And it's related to grudges, spite, bitterness, & grievance. (And blame, and entitlement, and being offended.) None of these words *is* the thing (map≠territory) but there's a thing here.
And, like many people who recommend forgiveness, I hold that resent is not beneficial for anything. There's a well known quote, “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
Note that even if you think that punishment makes sense, say for game-theoretical reasons*, resentment and punishment are totally separate things. You can punish someone without resenting them, or resent them and not actually effectively enacting any punishment on them.
*I mostly don't think punishment makes sense, but that's a tangent here. See this thread for clues on that (click the tweet below then scroll up)
I do, however, believe that sometimes someone might act in such a way that you don't want to spend more time with them, not from a stance of punishment but for the same reason you don't do other activities you don't enjoy (eg you usually don't put on music you don't enjoy).
This, you can also do without resenting. It will actually be much much more effective for _you enjoying your life,_ in fact, if you can do it without resenting the person.
It isn't easy—consistently taking a post-resentment stance basically requires an entire mental OS upgrade. But it's worth it—that upgrade allows clearer thinking, including making sense of about ppl's expected future behavior, & making choices about how you engage with the world
Clarification 👀 There is a huge difference between the mental act of forgiveness and the *speech act* of forgiveness. I'm not talking about the latter at all. The question of "when does it make sense to tell someone you forgive them for something?" is a whole different thing.
There are contexts in which that can be worth doing. The obvious one is because they've apologized and you want to recognize their apology. But I think that often the impetus to say "I forgive you" actually comes from an urge to assert power over someone.
Also here's a very old blog post of mine on this topic, that's still relevant: malcolmocean.com/2013/12/apolog…