Quote: ...instead of being upfront with myself that it's a continuous decision to forgive
OK, Sage, I'm going to go nerd on you here, since I know you are an engineer, as am I. I tend to think of forgiveness as a discrete function, a step function. A "0" or a "1". You start out unforgiving (toward your S), you make a conscious decision to forgive, you forgive, and then forever afterward, you live with that. You can't take it back, depending on circumstances or new developments. Your S lives in a state of being forgiven. Forgiveness, in that sense, is a commitment a bit like a marriage vow. Once made, never to be retracted. That doesn't mean that you forgive for future acts - those have to be dealt with as they come along - but it does mean that you quit thinking about the question of whether to forgive the past infidelity, in all its different parts.
The problem that I have, given that I'm using this understanding of forgiveness, is that I don't want to forgive, and don't want to tell her that I have forgiven, until I'm ready to forgive forever (not allowing myself to revisit the decision).
What you referred to seems to be more of an "analog" type of forgiveness, where it can be given and retracted incrementally. I'm not sure that I've interpreted your thinking correctly here, can you explain your thinking a little more? As always, Sage, I'd love to read more of your erudite thoughts on this stuff.
Let me go a bit further into this. I do not think that in forgiving we are giving up our right to normal responses, such as feeling terrible about what was done to us, to feel untrusting, etc. What we are giving up is the right to exact a punishment on our S's - to hold it over their heads, to cause guilt, to use their betrayal against them to win arguments or to justify our own misdeeds.
