Hall And Fincham Summary

Summary

Hall and Fincham give the insight into self-forgiveness, as preceding researchers paid little attention to this topic. They stress that the avoidance of self-forgiveness may lead to mental and physical consequences; and it may result in a suicide. This challenged the authors to raise awareness about self-forgiveness, organise the knowledge of the matter, and encourage further research.

Hall and Fincham started with detailed description of both interpersonal and intrapersonal forgiveness from the perspective of philosophy, psychology, and social studies. A philosophical understanding “as a show of good will toward the self while one clears the mind of the self-hatred and self-contempt that result from hurting another” (p. 622) argues

My understanding of it had come down to two points – admitted guilt and forgiveness – which differentiated the extent of self-forgiveness. Guilt without forgiveness made up remorse that deprived of self-forgiveness; guilt and forgiveness designed the process of self-forgiveness; and forgiveness without guilt was the case where pseudo self-forgiveness was an excuse. Now I see that the system of the concept is far more complicated and requires further investigation; as a lack of self-forgiveness has a wide range of negative

I feel that I need to make additional research on the influence of self-forgiveness experience on those people who committed crimes. Gaining self-forgiveness through psychological counselling might have positive impact on the restructuring of a criminal identity.

Let’s imagine that a person (for example, Jake) committed a crime and asks for my help, because he suffers from remorse and the pain that he caused. He killed a person, and now the fells regret for what he did. He also admits that he hurt the family of this person.

Under my supervision, Jake must become “decreasingly motivated to avoid stimuli associated with the offence, decreasingly motivated to retaliate against the self, and increasingly motivated to act benevolently toward the self” (p. 624). In other words, my task is to turn self-destructive behaviour into self-constructive. To implement this, together with Jake we will discover his intentions, what offence he experienced and experiences, if he feels himself as a victim apart from the dead victim,