Greatest Forgiveness Challenge:

The secret of mutual empathy

I have experienced as prerequisite to empathy, Gregory, the release of all charge on memories that I am unable to release in and of themselves. In this regard, please see also my response below to Daphne. 

My favorite recipe for empathy (and a variation of the Golden Rule) is the Native American wisdom byte, "Walk in your brother's [or sister's] moccasins for three moons before tipping over his [her] teepee." 

Fully realized empathy is always and only mutual. Accordingly, in the present instance such an equivalent exchange might consist of your eliciting from your wife a full recounting of her feelings during the time of your mutual estrangement, which you may then follow (the estrangement having also been mutual, not just her own) with a full recounting of your own feelings. 

The secret of mutual empathy is for those concerned to lay their respective (and respected) feelings beside one another rather than to make an issue of them.


So what's the "however" in this?

Good 'fessing, Wendy.

When I am similarly thwarted by circumstances and/or other's failure to be upfront with me and/or by something unpleasant that I di to myself, etc., I ask myself a question: What else have I gained from this besides negative feelings? I contemplate the situation in light of that question until I can see something(s) positive in it as well. Forgiveness then tends to become proportionately easier.



Forgiving what cannot be forgotten

You have raised here, Daphne, the issue of forgiving what cannot be forgotten. 

In my own case thus far, the most that forgiveness has accomplished in such situations is to free me FROM memories that I cannot be freed OF. I can at most free myself of their charge, not of the memories themselves.



Frosting doth a cake not make

By coincidence, Thomas, I am also 66 years old and "retired" (though I prefer to call it "retreaded," since I am presently vulcanized with the new educational vocation provided by AllLearn and my other online activities).

My inability to directly ask for forgiveness from, and make amends with, those in the past who are no longer accessible in the present has necessited my recognition that forgiveness BY me is ultimately non-dependent on anyone's forgiveness OF me. In my experience, self-forgiveness is as prerequisite to my feeling forgivEN by others as it is to my feeling forgivING of others. 

Accordingly, being able to directly ask for and receive others' forgiveness is like frosting on a cake: additionally delicious, yet not prerequisite to the cake's own delicious existence.