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Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Does it really matter whether the person you've hurt forgives you? If you're attempting to be super objective about quantifying the damage you did, then yes, empathy towards you is irrelevant, but it's equally irrelevant if the victim holds a lifelong furious grudge against you.

It isn't irrelevant because the people been empathetic towards you are subjective, it is wrong because they are not faced with the consequences of your actions that the person you've harmed is - their perspective is biased towards a bubble that excludes them.
That experience of the person you've hurt is part of The shit that actually happened, the consequences are real events - even when they happen on a subjective level within people's skulls - and reaching conclusions on the basis of ignoring or contradicting those is based on ignoring The shit that actually happened, a.k.a. reality.

The person you've effected is unlikely to do that. With the exceptions of extreme cases of abuse, people generally don't exclude their own perspective and experience - they can't pretend it didn't happen. If they forgive you, it's not because of a position that enable them to easily ignore The shit that actually happened.

As far as forgiveness goes...
At the core I think forgiveness is about trust - to hold a grudge is to be on guard, to live expecting that the next time you meet the person your holding a grudge against they are going to give you the same punch your holding a grudge for in the first place. When it's not directed at someone in particular, it usually gets directed in general - at people, at life, at the opposite gender, sometimes at a race or nationality, sometimes it's even towards a more abstract concept, like sexuality or war. A big part of any trauma is the scar it causes and how deeply it can ingrain the fear of it happening again.
To forgive, when it's genuine, it's actually a result of mutual feedback allowing trust to be rebuilt, in which expressing understanding and remorse and trying to repent and make things better to whichever extent you still can - depending on the action - convinced them that you are unlikely to do so again, that they can go to sleep peacefully knowing that the next time they meet you they are not going to get punched again.
I think if you truly accept responsibility for the harm you caused another, you kind of need at least try to fix and heal whichever parts of the harm you can, and this is most often the biggest part of it that you can (If such a part is available to you at all).

Originally Posted by DanaC

I am done with this conversation.

I am not sure if I should respond to that - generally I think the responsibility to stay out of a conversation is on the person who doesn't want to be part of it though, so I'll go with that.

Originally Posted by DanaC

Look -you want to hold on to guilt and sorrow - take it out at nights and dust it down to feel it all over again?

No, that is exactly what I meant in regards to people using self-flagellation as a strategy to create an illusion of some sort of karmic balance.

Originally Posted by DanaC

Ffs, nobody is suggesting you go marching up to the family of someone you killed and tell them everything's fine. It's not at anybody else's expense. This is about what goes on in our own heads. It's about our relationship with ourselves.

You are just describing the opposite side of the same coin I described - I was saying that the stratagy of forgiving yourself is entirely contingent on never having to actually face up to whoever you've harmed and being able to create a pretend universe in which their experience and consequences don't exist.

It's meaningless because nobody - including yourself - actually exists in that universe. It usually becomes at other people's expense when you then need to go to arms to maintain the illusion that such a universe is real.