Hurts – your own or those done to you – keep you
stuck. Forgiveness therapy can help you gain perspective and move on
When I was 26, my world fell apart. I had just started graduate school
and was travelling back and forth between Richmond, Virginia and Washington, DC
because my wife was finishing graduate school in a different city. On one of
those trips, I was doing laundry and found a note crumpled in the bottom of the
dryer. It was addressed to my wife from one of her classmates: ‘We should leave
at separate times. I’ll meet you at my place afterward.’
Although not
confirmed until months later, my wife was having an affair. To me, it was a
blow of monumental proportions. I felt betrayed, swindled, even mocked. Anger
exploded in me and, over days and weeks, that anger settled into a simmering
mess of bitterness, confusion and disbelief. We separated with no clear plan
going forward.
Although this pain
stabbed with an intensity I hadn’t felt before, I was certainly not alone. Many
people experience similar hurts, and much worse, in their lives. Being in
relationships often means being offended, hurt or betrayed. As people, we often
suffer injustices and relationship difficulties. One of the ways that humans
have developed to deal with such pain is through forgiveness. But what is
forgiveness and how does it work?
Those were the
questions I was working on at the same time that I was going through my
separation. I was attending graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth
University, and the clinical psychologist Everett Worthington was advising me.
Ev is one of the two pioneers in the psychology of forgiveness, and from my
first day he had me exploring forgiveness from an academic perspective (I left
his office after our very first meeting with a two-foot stack of papers to
review). I have since gone on to become a licensed psychologist and professor
in counselling psychology at Iowa State University, specialising in forgiveness
in psychotherapy settings.
Early work by
Worthington and myself, and by others, identified what forgiveness was not.
Robert Enright at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the other pioneer in the
psychology of forgiveness, was instrumental in this work. For example, he and
his colleagues distinguished between forgiveness and
condoning, excusing or overlooking an offence. For true forgiveness to occur,
they asserted, there needed to be a true offence or hurt, with real
consequences. A good illustration might be the clients that Enright and one of
his students, Suzanne Freedman (now a professor at the University of Northern
Iowa), described in a paper: female survivors of childhood incest. For
true forgiveness to occur in this context, they argued, the women needed to
first acknowledge that a true hurt had been done to them as children. Denying
their own pain or overlooking the atrocity would not be forgiveness. And, if it
came, forgiveness would occur only after working through that hard reality of
what had happened. Over many months and through challenging personal work, the
women in the study resolved much of the fear, bitterness, anger, confusion and
hurt, and achieved a remarkable level of peace and resolution regarding their
past abuse.
Another main issue
that became quickly apparent in the research was whether reconciliation needed
to be part of forgiveness or not. For scholars and therapists like me who are
interested in helping people achieve forgiveness for often serious offences
such as marital infidelity and past abuse, forgiveness is restricted to an
internal process. Thus, forgiveness doesn’t necessarily include reconciliation
but is the internal process by which someone resolves bitterness and hurt, and
moves to something more positive toward the offending person, such as empathy
or love. In contrast, reconciliation is a process through which people
re-establish a trusting relationship with someone who hurt them. This
distinction became foundational in my own healing.
Although this
distinction is important, it doesn’t mean that reconciliation is not a valuable
consideration for those of us who see forgiveness in this way. Instead,
reconciliation becomes a separate process, independent of forgiveness, yet
important and valuable in its own right. This was a considerable balm to me in
the months following my separation. Despite the pain, anger and confusion I
still felt months later, I knew that I would want to move toward forgiveness at
some point in the future. I didn’t want my past bitterness to infect any future
happiness I might find in romantic relationships. I didn’t want to carry this
burden the rest of my life. Instead, I imagined a time when I would want to set
it aside and move on. My real fear, though, was that by forgiving I would necessarily
have to reconcile with my wife or, alternatively, that if I didn’t want to
reconcile, I would have to hold on to the anger. By seeing forgiveness as a
separate process from reconciliation, new options appeared. I understood then
that I might forgive or not, and I might reconcile or not.
A similar process has
played out for many clients I have worked with. For example,
I remember the palpable relief I sensed in a group of people I was treating
when I brought up the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. The
members of this group were struggling with different offences, from being
swindled out of thousands of dollars by an ex to romantic affairs and other
betrayals. When I presented the possible distinction between forgiveness and
reconciliation and we discussed how this could play out in their own
experiences, I sensed a collective sigh. There was a weight lifted from the
members simply through the understanding that to forgive didn’t necessarily
mean to reconcile. There was a freedom the members experienced that opened our
conversation and assisted their process toward forgiveness in a new and rich
way.
For example, Jo (not
her real name) was reeling from a fiancé who stole $10,000 from her and then
vanished. There was obviously no way for Jo to work on reconciliation, even if
she had wanted to, and yet with this distinction she could see how she might
still move forward with forgiveness.
On the other hand,
Maria, who was working to forgive her adult daughter for hurtful things she had
done, wanted to keep the relationship; she was very interested in
reconciliation. Understanding the difference helped her to see that she could
work on both forgiveness and reconciliation in different ways to help heal her
relationship with her daughter.
All in all, a proper
understanding seems to help people embrace forgiveness and opens new
possibilities for healing and growth. But how does it work and in what ways can
people use it for their own benefit?
I have spent most of
my academic career trying to answer this question. Specifically, I have studied
ways to help people forgive others when they have struggled to do so. The
science on this is still quite young, but there seems to be a common core of interventions that provide the most help in moving people
towards a resolution of their hurts.
The first is a
tried-and-true part of almost any psychotherapy: sharing the story in a safe
and nonjudgmental relationship. Almost all established forgiveness
interventions prescribe a time of sharing of the hurt or offence. This is
particularly powerful in a group setting, in which participants share their
different experiences with each other, and witness and hold each other’s pain.
However, individual settings also provide considerable healing and
understanding just from the telling of one’s story, without anyone trying to
give advice, shut down negative feelings, or whip up feelings of anger and
revenge in an OMG, he’s the worst person in the world! sort of
way. Over and over again in our forgiveness programmes, participants tell us
that one of the most important and effective parts is the opportunity to share
with others what happened to them. They have said that the most helpful part
was ‘knowing that others had similar struggles’, and ‘being able to vent – we
could talk about things I couldn’t elsewhere’, and ‘That I felt listened to,
really understood, and that I could get this off of my chest.’
This reaction is
understandable given how hard it can be to talk about times when we have been
hurt or offended. For some, it is difficult to share because there is so much
shame and humiliation related to being hurt. Few people want to openly share
times when they have been weak or mistreated, betrayed or rejected. There is
much vulnerability in these stories. In addition to the shame that people feel,
there is often the desire to avoid the pain associated with the hurt: If
I share, I will have to relive the pain, and I might not be able to handle that.
Interventions that can help people overcome these obstacles to sharing their
pain and receiving support and validation can go a long way towards helping
them recover.
Following a thorough
retelling of the story, most interventions offer a time for people to consider
the offender’s point of view. The goal is often to help people develop
understanding or even empathy for the person who hurt them. There is great power
in empathising, as there is great potential for harm.
Three years after
finding that crumpled note, I pursued a divorce, and moved on with a new spirit
of forgiveness
When done well, this
part of the intervention helps people expand their perspective and gain a new
awareness for the complexities of the events surrounding their hurts. It can
lead to a broader view of the events that make the offence less about an evil person
delighting in hurting them, and more about a complex situation in which someone
made hurtful or bad decisions. This perspective-taking and understanding can
open the door for forgiveness. An excellent example of this is work by Frederic Luskin, director of the
Stanford Forgiveness Project, and Reverend Byron Bland, chaplain at Palo Alto
University. In 2000, they brought together both Protestant and Catholic people
from Northern Ireland, all of whom had lost family members to sectarian
violence, and offered a week-long forgiveness experience at Stanford University
in California. A large part of that experience was helping each group to see
the other in a more human light, to move away from the bitterness toward the
other group, and to leverage empathy to move toward forgiveness. As one
participant who had lost his father reported: ‘For years I held resentment for
Catholics, until I came here to Stanford.’
Of course, if done
poorly or without boundaries, trying to develop empathy can be nothing more
than blaming the victim and encouraging those who have been hurt to question or
minimise their feelings or allow others to hurt them in the future. The
important and difficult part of this process is in helping people to hold both
the legitimacy of their pain while exploring other points of view. The goal is
to help people to embrace their feelings as understandable and their reactions
as justified, even while they gain an appreciation for the offending person’s
perspective. This takes time and often shouldn’t be approached until a
considerable period has passed since the offence. How much time is dependent on
many factors, such as the severity of the hurt and the relationship one shares
with the offending person.
In my own forgiveness
journey, I made great use of sharing the offence and developing empathy. I
received considerable help from several family members and friends and a caring
counsellor who all heard my story without judgment about what I should have
done or should do. Instead, they listened, they held my pain, and they let me
express myself freely. My best friend bore the brunt of it. We had scheduled a
short beach trip together the same summer that I found that note to my wife. As
the timing worked out, I confronted her right before that trip, and she
admitted to the affair for the first time right before my friend and I left on
our trip. I spent two days on the beach in North Carolina spewing my rage and confusion,
sharing story after story of all the little deceits and misdirection I was only
now putting together. How he tolerated all that, I don’t know. But for me, it
was an initial cleansing that helped lead to my ultimate forgiveness.
The next major part
of my forgiveness journey was building empathy for her. This didn’t happen
right away. In fact, it wasn’t really until years later that I was able to get
a new perspective on it. It took that kind of distance for me to be humble
enough to see the things that I had contributed to the relationship. I saw my
part. I saw how she might have felt trapped by me, by family and by friends to
enter into a marriage that looked enviable to outsiders but most likely was
never quite right for her. I began to see how these forces might have
influenced her to make the choices she did. I can now feel for her and how
difficult and confusing all that might have been, and I can see that she
probably had no intention or desire to hurt me. She felt stuck and she reacted
to that experience. Out of this and the distance I now had from the hurt, I can
say that I truly wanted what was best for her. I hoped that she would have a
fulfilling life. Eventually, I chose to forgive my wife and I chose not to
reconcile. Three years after finding that crumpled note in the dryer, I decided
to pursue a divorce, and moved on with a new spirit of forgiveness and peace.
In addition to
helping people to forgive others, researchers have also begun exploring ways to
help people forgive themselves. Marilyn Cornish, a counselling psychologist at
Auburn University in Alabama, and I developed one of those interventions, based
on a broad, four-step model. The steps include: responsibility, remorse,
restoration and renewal. We focused this intervention on helping people who
carried considerable guilt for hurting others.
The general approach
of our intervention is to help people take appropriate amounts of
responsibility for the offence or hurt, identifying ways in which they are
culpable for the other person’s pain. Out of this responsibility, they are
encouraged to identify and express the remorse they feel. We believe it’s
healthy to embrace our guilt and to place that feeling in a realistic context.
From this point, it is then possible to move toward restoration. In this step,
the person is encouraged to make amends, to restore damage done to others and
their relationships, and to recommit to values or standards that they might
have violated when hurting others. Finally, the person is able to move into renewal,
which we understand to be a replacement of guilt and self-condemnation with
renewed self-respect and self-compassion. This renewal is appropriate only
after a true accounting of the offence. But once that has been done, we believe
it’s beneficial for the person to move into a renewed sense of self-acceptance
and forgiveness.
Self-forgiveness
helped her face her children more honestly and move into a restored
relationship with them
We have tested this
intervention in one clinical study.
For this, we invited people who had hurt others and wanted to forgive
themselves to participate in an eight-week, individual counselling programme.
Of the 21 people who completed the study, 12 received the treatment immediately
and nine received it after being on a waiting list. Those who received the
treatment immediately reported significantly greater self-forgiveness and
significantly less self-condemnation and psychological distress than those on
the waiting list. In fact, after controlling for their self-condemnation and
self-forgiveness, the average person who received the treatment was more
forgiving than approximately 90 per cent of people on the waiting list.
Furthermore, once those on the waiting list received the treatment, their
change in self-condemnation, self-forgiveness, and psychological distress
mirrored the treatment group.
Several months after
the conclusion of the study, I received an email from one of the clients. I’ll
call her Izzie. She wrote to thank us for the counselling; she said it changed
her life. Izzie entered the study because she was struggling with the
implications of having had an affair earlier in her life. In addition to
feeling lonely and disconnected from her family as a result of the divorce that
followed, Izzie still struggled with the shame and guilt of her actions. This
shame led her to withdraw from her children, and then to feel more guilt and
shame at her inability to nurture them and be the mother she wanted to be. In her
email, she detailed how the process of self-forgiveness helped her take
responsibility for the events in an appropriate way and move through her
remorse toward renewing her relationships. She told us how she was able to face
her children more honestly and move into a restored relationship with them.
Having given up and worked through her own self-condemnation, she was now free
to relate to them in a new way and to be more the parent she wanted, and they
needed her, to be.
Forgiveness, of
others and one’s self, can be a powerful, life-altering process. It can change
the trajectory of a relationship or even one’s life. It is not the only
response one can make to being hurt or hurting others, but it is an effective
way to manage the inevitable moments of conflict, disappointment, and pain in
our lives. Forgiveness embraces both the reality of the offence and the empathy
and compassion needed to move on. True forgiveness doesn’t shy away from
responsibility, recompense or justice. By definition, it recognises that
something painful, even wrong, has been done. Simultaneously, forgiveness helps
us to embrace something beyond the immediate gut-reaction of anger and pain and
the simmering bitterness that can result. Forgiveness encourages a deeper, more
compassionate understanding that we are all flawed in our different ways and
that we all need to be forgiven at times.
