Anyone familiar with Italian opera or the plays of Shakespeare knows the terrible price paid

for grudges, vendetta, and revenge.

Under the sway of these emotions, painful incidents linger in the mind, sapping our ability

to find peace and happiness.

The 18th century English poet Alexander Pope gave us the antidote, to urge human to forgive

divine, but finding a way to forgive without giving up our principles is often no easy task.

In this course, I'm going to address what forgiveness is and how to implement it.

I'll be speaking here about forgiveness where it is most often needed in the context of

your everyday personal life with family members, friends, co-workers, and business associates.

One of our challenges in understanding this process is that the word forgiveness is inadequate

to explain a very complex concept.

This actually embodies three different things each of which applies to different situations

and provides different results.

The three types of forgiveness are, exoneration, forbearance, and release.

Let's take each in turn.

Exoneration is the closest to what we usually think of when we say forgiveness.

Exoneration is wiping the slate entirely clean and restoring a relationship to the full

state of innocence it had before the harmful actions took place.

There are three common situations in which exoneration applies.

The first takes place when you realize that the harmful action was a genuine accident for

which no fault can be assigned.

The second is when the offender is a child or someone else who, for whatever reason, simply

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