The route of the word forgive is from early German, 'fragebaną'. Meaning to release or give up. Forgiveness is not about understanding the motivation of the person who's hurt you. Nor is it about their penitence - although both can make forgiveness easier. Forgiveness is about letting go of the anger and resentment that continue to cause pain, long after the offending action is over (and even after the offender is dead). The purpose of forgiveness is not 'brainwashing' or detachment from reality. It's about letting go of suffering to proceed through life with less pain. Which allows us to be kinder and more humane people, since we're no longer at risk of externalising our own suffering.
Forgiveness is about understanding the cause of the injury, correcting the damage, mitigating future risks, and restoring emotional stability /once those things are resolved/. The first three are necessary conditions for effective forgiveness.
For instance, it's ineffective to forgive a spouse who continually beats you. It may allow you to paper over your emotions and have a semblance of peace. However it doesn't prevent the next attack or correct the damages. You need to get to the bottom of why this person thinks it's okay to beat you, or you need to get to a place where you'll be safe. Delusional forgiveness can get you killed in this situation.
So please do not advise people to deploy forgiveness without the three necessary conditions: cause, correction, and mitigation. Your advice may cause them to ignore options for active forgiveness that will genuinely increase their safety and prevent future harm
Example: Someone you care for has been raped, and feels the need to seek justice. You tell them how that will just cause them more pain and probably lead to no conviction, and offer them the idea that they can simply forgive the attacker and move on, as the more mature and healthy alternative.
In that case you have not given advocacy to the person you cared for. You have advocated on behalf of the rapist.
I'll reierate my thesis. Effective forgiveness has 3 material parts required to make emotional release safe and effective:
1. Modelling the cause of harm
2. Compensating the harm done
3. Mitigating future harm
Please do not advocate for forgiveness without advocating for these three components. Forgiveness without material changes creates further harm.
What your describing isn't anything to do with what we traditionally consider forgiveness - either in Western or Eastern traditions of spirituality, or contemporary psychotherapy.
You're describing self protection. Which is an important set of skills for resilience and harm prevention, but has little to nothing to do with forgiveness. I'm afraid you're editorialising by creating a straw man rape victim argument. Just to be clear - although this is not the topic under discussion - I support rape victims attempts to obtain justice through the criminal justice system. And obviously agree that no one should stay in a situation where physical or sexual violence is threatened or likely.
To be clear I'm not advising people to allow themselves to continue to be harmed. I'm not engaging in prescriptive advice at all. Rather I'm describing the process of overcoming the pain of emotional (and sometimes physical) trauma.
Forgiveness is not about any of the above. It's about moving on (internally) from continual retraumatisation - after the source of trauma is no longer present. It's an internal emotional process for the most part. But one that cannot begin until the person engaging in it is physically and emotionally safe.
