This book details a five-phase model of the process of forgiveness and reconciliation, exploring how it can be understood as a threshold experience with the potential to offer profound emotional renewal.
Illustrated with numerous case study vignettes, the book presents the findings of a research study gathered from observing and interviewing 50 dying persons, investigating the preconditions for forgiveness and reconciliation, and examining how a sense of grace, freedom, peace, and deep connectedness may occur. The book also contextualizes reconciliation and forgiveness as cultural phenomena extending beyond purely behavioral patterns of cooperation and involving great emotional maturity and strength of personality.
Centered on humility, self-knowledge, truth-finding, and consciousness, Forgiveness and Reconciliation is important reading for practitioners, scholars and students in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, and palliative care and to all those interested supporting people in conflict situations in the middle of their lives or in working with dying persons.
Author(s): Monika Renz
Series: Routledge Focus on Mental Health
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 107
City: London
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What is reconciliation, and what is forgiveness?
The historical and religio-historical backgrounds of reconciliation and forgiveness
Pilot study: "Forgiveness and reconciliation processes in dying patients with cancer"
Notes
1. Why reconciliation? Why forgiveness?
1.1 Are we free to forgive?
1.2 What motivates us to engage in the process?
1.3 Before major life transitions: The opportunity of being close to death
1.4 Forgiveness and reconciliation as an expression of strength
1.5 What if the other side refuses?
1.6 Unreconciled conflicts affect us as relational beings
Notes
2. The need for perspective
2.1 Reconciliation and forgiveness happen after category change
2.2 Spaces of feeling
2.3 Conscious realization, post-maturation, truth-finding
2.4 Reconciliation and forgiveness begin with new empathy
2.5 Renunciation, waiting, trusting: Overcoming hard times
2.6 How realistic is reconciliation as a mutual process?
2.7 Third parties enable reconciliation and forgiveness
2.8 Risking vulnerability: The significance of scapegoating
2.9 What do victims need?
2.10 What do perpetrators need?
2.11 Forgiveness as decision: Two models from the victim's perspective
2.12 Deliverance from guilt: Two models from the perpetrator's perspective
2.12.1 First model: Twelve-step program of alcoholics anonymous
2.12.2 Second model: Liturgy of the Eucharist
Notes
3. The five-phase reconciliation process
3.1 Denial or avoidance
3.2 Crisis
3.3 Experiences of hope (or the factor of grace)
3.4 Decision
3.5 Reconciliation and forgiveness
Notes
4. It happens where regret and grace meet
Notes
References
Appendix
Index
