Stories

"Forgiveness has helped me to see the process of working through my transgenerational transmission of unresolved trauma, guilt and shame as a gift."

"Forgiving the perpetrator is a means of dealing with your internal issues and ensuring you’re not embittered by the experience."

"For me forgiveness started with first forgiving the system, then forgiving my mum and eventually forgiving myself."

"Forgiveness became the vehicle I used to stay within my own humanity."

"My journey to healing started with self-forgiveness and then it became compassion."

"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."

"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."

"I had been totally focused on our differences but after three months of talking to Khalil I discovered common ground."

"Deciding to forgive was a process, it’s not something that can happen overnight."

"It’s extraordinary to think that the people I harmed the most were the people to judge me the least."

"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"."

"I sense a freedom in trusting the process of life, that justice will find its own course and consequence."

"I used to think that they were evil, but I started to understand that they didn't come into this world that way."

"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."

"In my view what he needed was psychotherapy, not prison."

"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?"'

"Forgiveness came from wondering how on earth someone could inflict that kind of pain on another human being without feeling anything."

"My wife and I both said after the trial, Adam’s life is gone, but we don’t want to see another life ruined."

"Forgiveness is pragmatic. It offers a real and lasting vengeance."

"My work involves trying to give young people hope, helping them see there is life beyond their teenage years."

"I’m not a victim any more, I’m a survivor."

"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."

"For me forgiveness is about finding an inner peace and accepting the cards you’ve been handed in life."

"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."

"Forgiveness for me is a healing process, but it depends on people communicating and understanding."

"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?"

"It was what my mum had taught me – to love him for who he was, not for what he did."

"The only answer to violence in our society is a peaceful response; however there must also be a sense of justice."

"Forgiveness relieved me of a burden I didn’t want to carry."

"Talking is the only way forward. People who don’t talk (which is the majority of victims) are delaying and even maintaining the pain."

"I said that it was my forgiveness to give and that what he decided to do with it was up to him."

"I refused to be pigeonholed as a grim faced victim, although this was the angle many photographers and journalists wanted."

"Can I forgive him for something he denies?"

"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."

"Through my experience and the sharing of my story, my work has helped create an alternative narrative, that we are all interconnected and interdependent."

"I think everyone has the capacity to forgive but they sometimes need help finding those inner resources."

"Through my experience I have come to believe that we are all equally capable of being the victim and the perpetrator."

"If we don’t understand we’re in danger of history repeating itself."

"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."

"They gave me the resolve to not steal and to certainly not commit violence against another person ever again."

"The act of friendship invites forgiveness."

"Certainly I believe in the concept of forgiveness. It is always better to give than to receive."

"My motive is love, not hate."

"Working towards forgiveness seems to be the most imaginative way of becoming free and offering freedom."

"I tell them that I believe forgiveness begins with understanding, but you have to work through layers to obtain it."

"We live in a blame culture where people now assume that if anything goes wrong you should sue."

"I don’t deserve forgiveness, but unless you can reach that point where you feel OK, you can never fully heal and move on."

"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."

"To be locked into a fixed attitude of retribution is to kill a child twice."