The freedom of forgiveness

1 February 2021

Letting go and choosing who you want to be

Words Dr Catherine Philpot

Some situations have a sting in the tail. While they’re upsetting, hurtful and disappointing at the time, the after-effects are the worst.

When you wake up in the night, long after someone has hurt you and you still can’t sleep, you feel your blood pressure rise and your muscles tense – it’s then that you’re experiencing the sting. When the feelings of hurt, anger and betrayal stick around long enough so that your immune system is suppressed, you’re catching every passing cold and you still can’t relax, you could also be experiencing the sting.

Unforgiveness is the sting that I am talking about here.

SCIENTIFIC MODEL

For a time, psychologists thought of forgiveness as a religious construct. Under the influence of the scientific model, they ignored the moral imperatives that were grounded in any religious tradition, including Christianity. Instead, they searched for truths that could be verified with outcomes that could be measured.

After a century of growing influence, psychology finally turned to examine this thing called forgiveness. In the early 2000s, research in this area hit its peak. Psychologists found that people who expressed forgiveness experienced a more stable, positive mood than people who did not. Even in South Africa, in the aftermath of the apartheid era, lower rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder were found among those who had forgiven their offenders, than those who had not.

Psychologists still debate among themselves what exactly this thing called forgiveness, is. Does it mean that you have to restore your relationship with the person that hurt you? What about the drunk driver who killed your loved one? If you never knew him before he stole that life from you, what does it mean to forgive him?

Psychology also has a way to go yet in applying the insights it has learned from the labs and surveys, to the counselling rooms. While many psychologists would be aware of the research about forgiveness, you might struggle to find one who could help you on the road to letting go of the anger and hate towards those who have hurt you.

IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY

Christianity, with its 2000-year head start, has a lot of insights that are helpful in the doing of forgiveness. You could even say that it is a religion of forgiveness, when you consider that the object of its worship is said to have died so that all mankind could know that they are forgiven.

The big question for Christians is that as we acknowledge our own mistakes and failings, and how much we have been loved and forgiven by God for them, how can we not pass on what we have received to others?

Psychologists have identified that one of the barriers to forgiveness in many relationships is ‘competitive victimhood’, where both parties to a conflict compete over who has been wronged most by the other, and who needs to move forward first to apologise and forgive. In some ways, Christianity’s path to forgiveness is competitive victimhood’s polar opposite. As you recognise how much you have missed the mark and have still been found worthy of God’s love, you grow to recognise that others are no different.

Even forgiveness for grievous offences becomes possible by this route. You don’t need to be an axe murderer to forgive an axe murderer. Recognising the weakness in our shared humanity helps in letting go of judgment, for who knows what you would do if you had had to walk in another’s shoes?

The first time someone tried to teach me this, I was a full-time psychology academic researching forgiveness. My teacher was an Alawa woman I was interviewing for my postdoctoral research on Indigenous attitudes to the apology*. She said to me, “You know, I don’t think this country is really going to be able to forgive until we really understand the cross of Christ.” I smiled (possibly condescendingly) Christian though I was, and thought she was being religiously naive. A zealot.

But the more I think about it, the more I think she was on to something.

Q&A

Salvos Magazine: You say psychologists debate what forgiveness is. What is the big problem?

Catherine Philpot: Part of the problem is that people do so many different things and call it forgiveness. For example, if someone hurts you and you respond by saying, “Oh  well, he didn’t really mean it”, that is not so much forgiving as excusing. If you respond by saying, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad”, that’s not forgiving but condoning. Some might even say they’ve forgiven an offender, but follow it up with a, “But if I ever see him, there’ll be trouble” comment that makes you wonder what they mean by forgiven.

The growing consensus among psychologists is that forgiveness means choosing to let go of anger and bitterness towards someone who has hurt you. What is debated is the extent to which you need to replace the feelings of anger with love and a desire to wish someone well.

SM: What are the main reasons people forgive?

CP: There’s a common perception that people feel compelled to forgive when someone apologises to them. While that may be true in some contexts, in my research I found that people are often suspicious of apologies, and for significant offences find that they are not enough. Rather than pointing to apologies, people who forgive have often thought about who they want to be. From this space, people forgive, either because they don’t want to be defined by their past or their offender and become bitter, or because they do want to reflect the values they believe in.

SM: Does forgiveness mean that you have to give up on getting justice?

CP: You can choose to let go of anger towards someone and, for a range of reasons, still believe that justice needs to be served. It may be that justice is needed for the offender’s sake so that they can learn from their actions, or that justice is needed to protect yourself, or for others’ benefit. This isn’t always an easy space to be in, but it is true that forgiveness is not the same thing as allowing injustice.

SM: I don’t want to forgive because I don’t want to get hurt again. Is that okay?

CP: It is absolutely okay to not want to be hurt again. Forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation, which is about restoring a relationship with someone who has hurt you. It is okay to say I forgive you, but I don’t want to be in relationship with you anymore. On the other hand, forgiveness is a good tool to help you not be hurt again. By letting go of anger, you no longer have to live in it, which means you no longer have to live in the offence and can choose to be who you want to be.

Catherine Philpot is a Salvation Army officer (pastor) and psychologist in Queensland.

* Then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologised to the Stolen Generations in February 2008.