It isn't always easy to forgive someone who has wrongfully harmed us.
1 In fact, we are often very reluctant to forgive. Simon Wiesenthal's book,
The Sunflower, presents an interesting case study that illustrates this point...
What accounts for our reluctance to forgive? Probably a number of factors, but here I want to focus on the factor of self-respect.
2 Any person who wrongfully harms another fails to show sufficient respect for the person he has harmed. Implicit in the act of wrongdoing, then, is the claim that the victim does not deserve a full measure of respect...
3 I think many of us believe that if we forgive an offender who is guilty of serious crimes against us (especially an unrepentant offender), we are essentially agreeing with the claim that we do not deserve a full measure of respect. In effect, we are saying "That's OK—it doesn't matter that you mistreated me. I'm not that important." If this is the case, then our reluctance to forgive may be the result of a healthy desire to maintain our own self-respect.
4 Although the desire to maintain our self-respect is certainly important to honor, I believe that it need not lead to a refusal to forgive. In fact I believe that if we truly respect ourselves, we will work through a process of responding to the wrong, and this process will lead to genuine forgiveness of the offender.
5 If we attempt to forgive the offender before we do this work, our forgiveness may well be incompatible with our self-respect. However, once this process is complete, it will be fully appropriate for the self-respecting individual to forgive the offender...
(From Forgiveness and Self-respect)