I suggest that exploring the question of forgiveness is worthwhile when someone who has experienced conflict is having a difficult time moving past the conflict, regardless of whether or not they are entertaining the idea of making amends with the other persons involved.

How Can Forgiveness Happen?

In this chapter, Laura Davis recognizes that there are many differing opinions not only on what forgiveness is, but also on how it can come about during conflict resolution. Accordingly, she outlines four ideas about how forgiveness can be achieved.

Davis says that Forgiveness can be achieved through:

1. Conscious Effort,
2. Giving it as a Spiritual Gift,
3. Accountability, OR
4. a Unilateral Circumstance.

Let’s explore some of these ideas a little more.

Forgiveness achieved by Conscious Effort.


Davis explains that this conscious effort to forgive may come about through:

• Praying and asking God to help one forgive the person who wronged them OR
• Obtaining “mastery over a wound”

This last concept of mastery over a hurt comes from author Beverly Flanigan. This concept of forgiveness involves the process of a person overcoming a situation that nearly destroys them. Thus, forgiveness is accomplished either by soliciting the help of another (God) or by utilizing one’s own inner strengths and abilities.

Forgiveness achieved by Giving it as a Spiritual Gift.

Here, Laura Davis gives several examples of people who see forgiveness as something that happens naturally when the conditions are right.

This school of thought is perhaps best described in a woman named Donna Johnson, who was able to forgive the father who raped her because he took responsibility for what he did to her. While readers aren’t given specifics about exactly what “taking responsibility” looks like, one way to interpret it is to say the person in question acknowledges what they did wrong.