Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Sarasota, Florida

The Power of True Forgiveness

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." —H.W. Longfellow

One ex-prisoner of war asked another, “Have you forgiven your captors yet." The second one replied, "No, NEVER!" "Then it seems like they still have you in prison, don’t they?"

Forgiveness, like mercy, is a signature strength. Many of the world’s major religions emphasize forgiveness as one of their core attributes.

Judaism defines it as the cancellation of a debt so that the debtor can be restored to right relationship with the offended individual(s). Christianity emphasizes a God who forgives those who turn to Him and encourages its followers to forgive as they have been forgiven. Islam believes in the ability of God to forgive all sins. While Buddhism is not a theistic religion, its doctrines of compassion and forbearance come close to the notion of forgiveness.

Compassion has to do with the easing of suffering of all sentient beings. Look with mercy rather than judgment on the offender. Forbearance involves letting go of resentment toward the offending one.

While these views have been around thousands of years, only recently have psychologists turned their attention on forgiveness: its importance for psychological and physical reasons.

Toward the end of the 20th century, social scientists began studying forgiveness. In 1998 the philanthropist Sir John Templeton began a campaign to provide 10 million in funding for scientific research on forgiveness.

What is forgiveness?

Forgiveness occurs when an individual who has been hurt or offended decides and practices giving up his or her desire to avoid the person who hurt him or her, or gives up the desire to exact revenge on the person, and also to seek reconciliation between the two, if it is safe and possible.

It is important to distinguish forgiveness from

• pardoning (which is a legal concept),
• condoning (which includes justifying the offense),
• excusing (which implies that a transgression was committed because of extenuating circumstances),
• forgetting (which implies that the memory of a transgression has decayed or slipped out of conscious awareness), and
• denial (which implies an unwillingness or inability to perceive the harmful injuries that one has incurred) (Positive Psychology, p. 447).

These processes are often incorrectly substituted for forgiveness and lead to the confusion many have in understanding essentially what forgiveness is and what it involves.

A leading researcher of forgiveness, Dr. John Enright defined “genuine forgiveness,” following philosopher J. North (1987) who proposed that forgiveness occurs when an individual who has incurred an interpersonal transgression is able to “view the wrongdoer with compassion and benevolence and love while recognizing that he has willfully abandoned his right to them” (p.. 512). This definition emphasizes the interpersonal context where forgiveness can take place, the perceived transgression that imbalances the relationship, and the change in motivation on the part of the offended one.

"Cheap grace"

Forgiveness is difficult for many in our culture in part because of the many confusing views of what it means. One common view is that forgiveness means glossing over the wrongs another causes us. Whitewashing the hurts and pains other causes us. Forgiveness then can become a kind of emotional dishonesty.

For example, his older brother hits little Johnny. Mother steps in and orders the older brother to say he is sorry. She then asks Johnny to make up with the older brother before he has had an opportunity to process his feelings of anger, hurt, and vengeance. Mother short-circuits the process. In essence, she is telling Johnny to discount his feelings of hurt.

This pattern of childhood expresses itself in adults who believe that any negative behavior toward another can be remedied or made right with a superficial, glib, “Forgive me, I’m sorry.”

This glazed view of forgiveness is what the martyred Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called “cheap grace.” Cheap grace does not demand anything from the offending party: no remorse, no changed behavior.

Marital therapist Janis Abrahams Spring calls this “cheap forgiveness.” She defines it as a quick and easy pardon with no processing of emotion and no coming to terms with injury; its compulsive, unconditional, unilateral attempt at peacemaking for which you ask nothing in return” (p. 15).

Forgive and forget?

Another cultural view of forgiveness is that when one forgives one should forget the offense. Live and let live is the attitude. Regarding the small hurts we inevitably cause each other simply because we are human, this is probably good advice.

I have worked with persons who were “injustice collectors.” Like the proverbial elephant that never forgets, these persons offer litanies of the minor hurts, grievances, slights and rude behavior they have experienced from others. For them, healing comes when they can release and let to of these minor resentments and to forget them. In minor hurts, forgiveness and forgetting is good advice for our emotional and spiritual well-being.

However, when it comes to major hurts, forgiveness does not mean forgetting. Should a Holocaust survivor forget the cruel barbarism of the Nazis? Should a physically abused wife or sexually abused child forget the violence inflicted on them? Should a mother whose teenage son or daughter is killed by a drunken driver forget?

Usually the exhortation to forgive and forget comes from one who has never been deeply hurt by the actions of another.

Developing the capacity to forgive

In the life cycle, the person’s disposition to forgive grows with age. Studies have demonstrated that young children are generally the least willing to forgive and older adults more willing.

For example, researcher Enright (1989) found that chronological age and reasoning about forgiveness was correlated strongly in a sample of American children, adolescents and adults. Similar patterns were noted in a study of French adolescents. In both groups, adults were seen as individuals who could forgive in a variety of transgressions.

Why is this? Researchers have drawn on the theories of moral developmental expert Lawrence Kohlberg to explain this process. In his view of how moral development proceeds, Kohlberg reasons that in early stages of moral development children forgive only when the offended one has obtained revenge or the transgressor has made restitution. In the middle stage, the person forgives because religious, social or moral pressures evoke compliance. At the higher stages, people forgive because it promotes a harmonious society and is an expression of unconditional love.

The personality characteristics of the forgiving individual have also been studied.

Forgiveness is a process

Forgiveness is an act of the heart, a movement to let go of the pain, the resentment, and the outrage that has been carried as a burden. It has many stages—grief, rage, sorrow, fear and confusion.

Depending upon the nature of the hurt and the relationship with the offender, you will experience many feelings in the process of forgiving. For you see, forgiveness is not primarily for others, but for us.

Forgiveness is essential to our physical well-being. Psychosomatic medicine which investigates and treats the effects of beliefs and emotions on the body reminds us that. Harbored resentments, grievances, hostile feelings toward another if not released can literally make us physically ill.

In his groundbreaking work on the ingredients that make persons prime candidates for heart disease and heart attacks, Dr. Redman Williams at Duke Medical Center identified hostility and cynicism as two of the prime ingredients. My clinical work collaborates that finding. I have worked with people clinically who held onto resentments and grievances toward family members for so long that they became emotionally and physically ill.

Look what happens to us physically when we do not forgive. The body manufactures masses of “high voltage” chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. When too many of these high-voltage chemicals hold up in the blood stream, a person becomes a rapidly ticking time bomb, a prime candidate for some specific ills such as a vascular tension headache.

The heart begins to pound like a sledgehammer in the chest, the muscles in the neck and shoulders begin to constrict; abdominal pains develop. If the situation continues unchecked, gastric ulcers, gastritis or irritable bowel syndrome can result.

With forgiveness, on the other hand, the anger and resentment dissolves. The body stops pouring high-voltage chemicals into the bloodstream. The healing begins.

Forgiving is also important because it frees us of the role of victim. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, tells of a woman in his congregation who came to see him. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support her and three young children.

“'Since my husband walked out on us,' she says, 'every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while he is living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him?'”

Kushner answers, “I am not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasn’t; it was mean and selfish. I’m asking you to forgive him because he doesn’t deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter, angry woman. I’d like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. You are not hurting him by holding on to resenting him, but you are hurting yourself.”

The Power of empathy

Empathy has been found to be an important ingredient in forgiveness. Empathy refers to the ability to identify with another’s experience while being clear that it is the other’s experience. Empathy involves putting ourselves in the perspective of another. It is “walking in another’s moccasins for three miles.”

Dr. Everett Worthington taught others how to forgive: one night he had to become his own best pupil. The call came on New Years Day, 1996. His brother’s voice was shaky. “I have some bad news,” he said. “Mama has been murdered.”

In the next five minutes, Mike sketched for him what he saw when he and his stepson, David, walked into the scene. That night, Worthington, his brother and sister talked about it. Their mother had been beaten to death with a crowbar, her body assaulted with a wine bottle. Rage bubbled up in him like lava. He heard himself saying, “I’d like to have that murderer alone in a room with just a baseball bat. I’d beat his brains out.”

That night about 3:00 a.m., he fought the bedcovers, imagining the scenes of violence, his thoughts overflowing with hatred and revenge. Ironically, only days before he had finished co writing a book, To Forgive Is Human: How to Put Your Past in the Past.

Finally, his own book brought him up short. Did he really believe, as they had written, that empathy was a key to forgiving? Could he empathize with the person who had murdered his mother? Or was that book just for other people?

He did not know who did it and never would find out. But that night he tried to picture the crime scene. He imagined how a pair of youths might feel as they stood in the dark street preparing to rob the house. Perhaps they had been caught at robbery previously. They would have been keyed up. The house was dark; no car was in the driveway. No one’s home, they must have thought. Perhaps one said, “They’re at a New Year's Eve party.“ They did not know that Worthington’s mother did not drive.

A quick rap of the crowbar and they were in, hastily emptying drawers, dumping the contents on the floor. Worthington imagined their shock when her voice came from behind. “What are you doing in here?”

“Oh, no!” one must have thought, “I’ll go to jail. She is ruining my life.” He lashed out with his crowbar, slamming his mother three times. Panicked, the youths went crazy, trashing the house, both for having their plans ruined and for the shame of having murdered.

Worthington felt he understood better what had happened. He writes, “Whoever murdered my mom did a terrible thing. Nothing will change that. Through empathy, however, I saw that he had lashed out in fear, panic, guilt, and anger. I thought of how I had talked about beating him to death with a baseball bat. I was willing to do what he did, only with, more forethought, more naked malice.”

He thought, “Whose heart is darker?” He almost spoke aloud. When he thought about the evil that he was capable of plotting, he was humbled. He saw his own guilt over planning revenge.

He writes, "As a Christian, I believed that even as I confessed my evil intent, I would receive divine forgiveness for it. I felt that forgiveness flood me. I knew what the youth needed. So I forgave him, and I have since felt peace."

For more information or to make an appointment,
please call Dr. Mullen at (941) 364-9919
or email him at: David@drdavidemullen.com

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