Family and Faith Magazine Christmas Edition Issue 11 | Page 7

“

...unforgiveness
affects the person
who needs to forgive
more than the person
who needs to be
forgiven.

”

“So what we professionals do is that
we encourage the forgiveness because
unforgiveness affects the person who needs
to forgive more than the person who needs
to be forgiven. But we say to that person that
that aspect of trust is not your responsibility,
it is that person who offended you; it is their
responsibility to earn back that trust.”
Dr. Davidson added that the offender needs to
work on themselves; grow, heal and change in
order to make themselves trustworthy and be
in a position to be back in the victim’s space
again. “Because what has happened in the past
is that we have had people who are abusers;
and they physically abuse their partners and
they are very remorseful (but they are in) the
cycle of abuse; they are remorseful, they want
to make up and you make up and they start it
again and it has a tendency of getting even
worse and we have seen people who have
actually died. So what we are saying to people
is, yes you have forgiven however this person
has to earn back the trust; this person has to be
sincere, genuinely remorseful, genuinely sorry,
genuinely repentant and really put in the work
to be trustworthy again and that’s when you
can experience total, real reconciliation.”

How to truly rebuild trust

So what kind of work is involved with becoming
trustworthy again? First of all the person
has to acknowledge that what they did was
wrong. They have to own it, they have to take
responsibility. “They need to make sure they
are not blaming someone else; they are not
justifying their actions. They need to remove
all those defense mechanisms that they are
likely to have been using and take ownership,”
Dr. Davidson advised. In other words they
should seem to be saying ‘what I did was
wrong and I am extremely sorry.’

The second step is that the offender needs
to get help. This is to “make sure that they
understand why they did what they did
because all behavior has meaning. And to see
how they can make sure that for now and the
future they are not going back down that road.”
Dr. Davidson added that sometimes
getting help might involve total spiritual
transformation in which the person who
caused harm experiences God’s forgiveness
and conversion. He noted however that it is
wise for that person to “put themselves under
the authority of someone to help them to grow
and become this new person.”
Within this context, he pointed to a frequently
referenced scripture passage, that he says is
often misunderstood. “1 Corinthians 5:17 it
says therefore if any man be in Christ he is a
new creature, old things have passed away ,
behold everything becomes new. The passage
is really saying therefore if any man be in
Christ he is becoming a new creature, old
things are passing away, behold everything
is becoming new. It’s a process. So you don’t
get converted tonight and all of sudden all of
the terrible things you use to do by tomorrow
you stop doing them, that doesn’t happen,”
he explained. That is why discipleship is so
important as you are re-socialized to do things
differently, he emphasized.

Marriage is more
about giving than getting

Applying the 5 truths about forgiveness on
the part of the victim and taking ownership
for the wrong that was done on the part of the
offender are the necessary ingredients for true
reconciliation, whether it be in friendships or
intimate relationships. But since more seem
to be at stake in a marriage relationship,
Family and Faith Magazine posed a final
question to the veteran relationship counselor.

“

We asked: In the marriage relationship, when