The Forgiving Self

Description for THE FORGIVING SELF: THE ROAD FROM RESENTMENT TO CONNECTION by Robert Karen, Ph.D.: Can we be forgiven our insensitivity and betrayals? Should we always forgive those who have hurt us? What enables us to reopen our hearts when we do? Interweaving themes from literature, movies, current events, and from his practice as a clinical psychologist, Robert Karen addresses the difficult questions at the heart of many human dramas, highlighting the struggle between our wish to repair our relationships on the one side and our tendency to see ourselves as victims who need revenge on the other. Dr. Karen writes that our capacity to forgive reveals much about our character–including our ability to recognize the humanity in someone who has hurt us and to see our own limitations and complicity in whatever went wrong. He argues that the forgiving spirit not only liberates us from feeling victimized by others but frees us from compulsive self-hatred and regret as well: for forgiv