Our common experience in fact is the opposite — that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persisten… - Desmond Tutu

Just as this scale predicted the future health and happiness of the children in this study, so does knowing and telling our own stories of harm predict our future health and happiness in recovering from that trauma. When we know our stories and make sense of what has happened, we get connected to the larger story of our lives and its meaning. We become more resilient, we are able to handle stress, and we heal.

Forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence.

One might go on to say that perhaps justice fails to be done only if the concept we entertain of justice is retributive justice, whose chief goal is to be punitive, so that the wronged party is really the state, something impersonal, which has little consideration for the real victims and almost none for the perpetrator. We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense.