Many patients come in with conflicts about forgiveness; just as many have a very good reason to not want to forgive. Sexual and physical abuse, neglect, infidelity, and other circumstances make it incredibly hard to forgive. I oftentimes have a lot of difficulty knowing how to intervene when patients are stuck in a place of non-forgiveness. Part of this might be because I am quite early on in my training, but I also don't have a good understanding of what the benefits are of forgiveness. To be honest, I haven't really thought about in quite some time (hence, blog post).
What I do think about a lot is what forgiveness does for me and how it feels when others forgive me. Over the past few years, months even, I have certainly hurt many people, both intentionally and unintentionally. When I become aware that I have had an impact on someone, both negative or positive, I feel it. It hurts. Sometimes it is unbearable.
So what is forgiveness? I Googled it, and I wish I hadn't. I would not recommend it.
To me, forgiveness is a reconciliation. Yes, these are absolutely different ideas and concepts, and from the quick Google search I did, it is recommended that I do not conflate these ideas. But if we really sit down and think about forgiveness, is there not an internal reconciliation that occurs? A movement of benevolence toward an object/person that caused harm? There is a coming together, an integration, of the good and evil. Just because one person is doing the forgiving does not mean that the act of forgiveness is not interpersonal.
One of my favorite professors at my undergraduate program, Dr. Boleyn-Fitzgerald, a philosopher, wrote about forgiveness. He talks about forgiveness within the context of anger. He argues that:
Anger is a difficult but important emotion to control, and forgiveness is the most obvious virtue to help us control it. The analysis of forgiveness advocated by contemporary philosophers, however, has a host of problems. It mischaracterizes and undervalues forgetting. It encourages moral agents to think in a way that will impede their attempts to control anger. It causes agents to let go of anger in a way that is arrogant, insulting, and unjust. The contemporary philosophical analysis of forgiveness must be rethought. If people who employ the concept are led into a variety of moral failings, then we need to either question what we mean by “forgiveness” or determine if we think it is a virtue. Since most people believe that forgiveness is a virtue more strongly than they believe that complex forgiveness is the correct account of forgiveness, we should abandon complex forgiveness. Thus, we are led to an alternative analysis of forgiveness as simple forgiveness. Simple forgiveness allows us to claim that any act of letting anger go is an act of forgiveness. This analysis, implicit in some Buddhist writings, may be the most helpful way of thinking about the virtue of forgiveness, and hence what we should mean by the term “forgiveness.”
This is a lot to digest and I am still making sense out of my argument here. If you're interested, you may want to read the paper to get a better understanding of his ideas. I think what struck me was his description of how we understand forgiveness. When we forgive, we do not forget. In fact, I would argue that through forgiveness, we may think about the person whom we are forgiving even more (duration, not frequency) because it is not as painful. What's more, we may even say that by forgiving, we are moving toward benevolence and compassion. This very act is interpersonal. It has to be.
- cg
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