Ep: 16 To Forgive or Not to Forgive

Have you ever been pressured into forgiving someone? I think most of us have been through the Hamlet-like conundrum of “to forgive or not to forgive.”  

• Samia talks about communication and her personal struggle with forgiveness, how they are related.
• We discuss the spectrum of communication skills.
• We discuss forgiveness and what it means realistically.
• Samar discusses her communication conundrum with a friend-date.

LINKS:

SAY SALAAMS

Matcha Talk Website

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See you next time,

Samia + Samar

Basic Breakdown:

Samia shares what happened with her in which she discovered that communication is a core value thing for her and due to being in the current situation in her life, which is in turn not allowing her to forgive.  She discusses how that effects her personally. 

They both discuss what is communication and how it is a learned thing, how some people are on a spectrum of communication skills.

Attaching communication to self worth. 

The issue at hand is forgiveness and how it is difficult because you can not help but be a human being.

Samar is in the same boat, seeing posts on social media about forgiveness being essential.  

There is the human thing of hurt and there is the islamic thing of forgiveness. It is difficult to find the balance between the two. 

Prophetic Seerah story on Wahshi رضي الله عنه.

Where is it okay for forgive?

"We never get stung twice" - forgive but not forget in order to be wise.

Samar talks about distance/space and unforgiveness.

Samia shares her life coach's lesson that there will come a point when you will take a positive step towards a person purely for Allah's sake and it will not effect you. 

Forgiveness takes time - go through the emotions rather than attempting to jump above them. 

Samar shares that forgiveness is difficult and that is why it is mentioned as much as it is.  It is virtuous and we should celebrate the struggle. 

The reward is worth going through the struggle.

There are some hurts in relationships which are beyond repair - physical abuse - in which they are forced to forgive.  

Discussion on that.

They start a discussion on communication and Samar talks about the two-way street of friendship.  

Samar does not understand how people can not know how to communicate.

Samar shares her friend-date with someone who did not turn out to be a friend because of the difference in communication.  She was on surface level communication when Samar wanted to dig a little deeper.  The different communication style did not lead to any thing.

Samar tries to defend that never-friend but ends up not being able to. 

Samia shares the news story of limits of communication which is about murder against a transgender woman.

They discuss the previous relationship with that never-friend and try to understand what had happened in the past that didn't result in anything.

It turns out that there just wasn't any reason except for complexity of a human a being.