Forgiveness isn’t making excuses for someone. It is letting go of a desire for revenge. If you had a chance to press charges, that wouldn’t be vengeful. The legal consequences imposed by the courts help prevent offenders from victimizing someone else and sometimes lead the offenders to amend their lives. If you don’t have any chance to press charges, though, of course it is OK to know you’ve done what you could and just get on with your life. There is no reason to keep obsessing and suffering from something when you can put it in the past and find a way to heal from the harm.
Sometimes it takes longer to let go than others, because a violation of justice brings on emotions of anger and sometimes fear. People work through these emotions in their own way. This kind of emotion can be the strongest, actually, when someone who is angered about an injustice is also carrying around a lot of guilt for things they have done. Those who cannot forgive themselves or who can’t accept forgiveness for what they have done often have a hard time forgiving others. People with an over-developed sense of “justice” so often turn out to be hiding a deep sense of guilt over acts they are very ashamed of that it is almost a cliche.
People have also been known to turn to addiction to anesthetize feelings they don’t know how to cope with. That’s why so few people who have addictions can get clean and sober without learning how to face up to and cope with all the difficult things they’ve done or had done to them in their lives. The addicts who weren’t hurting when they became addicted are often very ashamed of what they’ve become and done since becoming addicts, so they can have the same issue even if they didn’t start out abusing addictive substances in order to cope with bad feelings about themselves or their lives.
Addictions have ruined the characters of many persons who were, at one time in their lives, both contented with life and worthy of the trust of those around them. That’s why all those who have been through the process of cleaning up their lives so often say, “Do you know how you can tell if an addict is lying? His lips are moving.”
There, but for the grace of God…
