"Forgiveness has helped me to see the process of working through my transgenerational transmission of unresolved trauma, guilt and shame as a gift."
Paul Kohler
kata2022-11-14T14:43:40+00:00"Forgiving the perpetrator is a means of dealing with your internal issues and ensuring you’re not embittered by the experience."
Gethin Jones
kata2022-11-14T18:18:15+00:00"For me forgiveness started with first forgiving the system, then forgiving my mum and eventually forgiving myself."
Figen Murray
kata2022-11-14T16:28:05+00:00"Forgiveness became the vehicle I used to stay within my own humanity."
Lis Cashin
kata2022-11-16T16:17:32+00:00"My journey to healing started with self-forgiveness and then it became compassion."
Joan Scourfield
kata2022-11-14T17:51:10+00:00"I used to feel that if I forgive Jacob it meant I’d forgotten James but now that Jacob has done so well forgiving him feels really natural."
Elizabeth and Fernando Jimenez
kata2021-08-05T12:20:22+01:00"At first it was very difficult to forgive Nick but then I realised it was not about forgiving the man but about forgiving his stupidity."
Ivan Humble
kata2021-02-25T09:31:40+00:00"I had been totally focused on our differences but after three months of talking to Khalil I discovered common ground."
Andrea Martinez
kata2022-11-14T15:38:41+00:00"Deciding to forgive was a process, it’s not something that can happen overnight."
Jacob Dunne
kata2022-11-16T09:34:27+00:00"It’s extraordinary to think that the people I harmed the most were the people to judge me the least."
Anne-Marie Cockburn
Rachel Bird2022-11-14T18:15:15+00:00"They wanted him to be punished but I just said, "I'll never ever get justice for Martha because she's dead so why waste two young lives instead of just one"."
Susan Waters
davewilkinson2022-03-22T17:37:54+00:00"I sense a freedom in trusting the process of life, that justice will find its own course and consequence."
Madeleine Black
Rachel Bird2021-02-25T15:10:28+00:00"I used to think that they were evil, but I started to understand that they didn't come into this world that way."
Hanneke Coates
Rachel Bird2021-03-19T14:27:46+00:00"I thought I had forgiven my Japanese captors, and yet was always aware of the hairs rising in the nape of my neck when I heard a Japanese voice."
Liz Brereton
Rachel Bird2021-02-25T16:17:54+00:00"In my view what he needed was psychotherapy, not prison."
Grace Idowu
Rachel Bird2022-11-16T19:34:38+00:00"When I recovered myself I told him, 'I’m not crying for David, I’m crying for you. What have you done with your life?"'
David Rogers
simon2023-09-05T09:10:59+01:00"My wife and I both said after the trial, Adam’s life is gone, but we don’t want to see another life ruined."
Geoff Thompson
simon2023-06-13T15:05:38+01:00"Forgiveness is pragmatic. It offers a real and lasting vengeance."
Tracey Ford
simon2021-03-23T16:50:21+00:00"My work involves trying to give young people hope, helping them see there is life beyond their teenage years."
Denise Rhodes
Rachel Bird2021-03-04T16:15:48+00:00"He was just a kid, and a bit thick, and here he was in prison, with a criminal record and I was responsible for that."
Elizabeth Turner
simon2023-02-21T10:13:09+00:00"For me forgiveness is about finding an inner peace and accepting the cards you’ve been handed in life."
Matthew James
simon2021-03-05T11:43:15+00:00"On leaving the prison I realised that things had changed for me; I’d gone from being a victim of crime to being able to see things more from Billy’s point of view."
Margaret Foxley
simon2021-08-26T10:16:13+01:00"Forgiveness for me is a healing process, but it depends on people communicating and understanding."
Kathleen Key
simon2021-03-23T16:53:27+00:00"I needed to know why he had been drinking; what had brought him to that point in his life where he had no thought for anyone else?"
Natalia Aggiano
davewilkinson2022-10-18T11:08:58+01:00"It was what my mum had taught me – to love him for who he was, not for what he did."
Yulie Cohen
davewilkinson2021-03-05T14:12:37+00:00"Once I had felt forgiveness for my attacker, I saw that I also had to forgive my parents."
Barry and Margaret Mizen
davewilkinson2021-10-28T13:49:26+01:00"The only answer to violence in our society is a peaceful response; however there must also be a sense of justice."
Mary Foley
davewilkinson2022-11-14T10:03:20+00:00"Forgiveness relieved me of a burden I didn’t want to carry."
Peter Woolf and Will Riley
davewilkinson2021-03-05T14:55:35+00:00"Talking is the only way forward. People who don’t talk (which is the majority of victims) are delaying and even maintaining the pain."
Rosalyn Boyce
davewilkinson2021-03-05T16:08:54+00:00"I said that it was my forgiveness to give and that what he decided to do with it was up to him."
Julie Chimes
davewilkinson2021-03-05T09:54:03+00:00"I refused to be pigeonholed as a grim faced victim, although this was the angle many photographers and journalists wanted."
Richard McCann
davewilkinson2021-09-07T08:16:48+01:00"I don't believe forgiveness is a one off act; it’s rather something that enters and leaves our consciousness like the tide and it requires working through continually."
Gill Hicks
davewilkinson2022-11-14T11:12:11+00:00"Through my experience and the sharing of my story, my work has helped create an alternative narrative, that we are all interconnected and interdependent."
Simon Wilson
davewilkinson2021-03-11T17:18:28+00:00"I think everyone has the capacity to forgive but they sometimes need help finding those inner resources."
Sue Hanisch
davewilkinson2021-03-12T12:29:01+00:00"Through my experience I have come to believe that we are all equally capable of being the victim and the perpetrator."
Richard Levy
davewilkinson2021-03-11T17:51:39+00:00"If we don’t understand we’re in danger of history repeating itself."
Marie Fatayi-Williams
davewilkinson2021-03-05T10:55:49+00:00"You need to work hard to achieve peace. It doesn’t just come on a platter of good. You cannot give what you don’t have."
John Carter
davewilkinson2021-03-12T09:27:05+00:00"They gave me the resolve to not steal and to certainly not commit violence against another person ever again."
Jo Berry and Pat Magee
davewilkinson2022-11-16T16:17:13+00:00"No matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each other's lives, we could all have done what the other did."
Michael Watson
davewilkinson2021-03-12T10:47:53+00:00"Certainly I believe in the concept of forgiveness. It is always better to give than to receive."
Marian Partington
davewilkinson2022-11-11T08:19:26+00:00"Working towards forgiveness seems to be the most imaginative way of becoming free and offering freedom."
Camilla Carr & Jon James
davewilkinson2021-03-12T12:56:09+00:00"I tell them that I believe forgiveness begins with understanding, but you have to work through layers to obtain it."
Charlotte Maude
davewilkinson2021-03-12T13:02:29+00:00"We live in a blame culture where people now assume that if anything goes wrong you should sue."
David
davewilkinson2021-03-12T13:08:13+00:00"I don’t deserve forgiveness, but unless you can reach that point where you feel OK, you can never fully heal and move on."
Denise Green
davewilkinson2021-03-12T13:17:16+00:00"Forgiveness was not a word I used at first, but hearing the bitterness and anger I knew I didn’t want to go down that road."
Francis & Berthe Climbié
davewilkinson2021-12-16T08:07:50+00:00"To be locked into a fixed attitude of retribution is to kill a child twice."