Please explain forgiveness to me

December 4, 2011 3:53 PM

Please explain forgiveness to me!

I have forgiven people in the past for fairly minor things and I know what it is like to be forgiven as well as want to be forgiven. My question is about the kind of forgiveness that is necessary for the forgiver to move on with their lives. The person in question doesn't know and will never know about my forgiveness (I would never contact them nor would they likely appreciate my forgiveness). Please share with me your first hand experience with this kind of one-sided forgiveness, the steps that you took and any insight on how effective and lasting forgiving another person has been for you. Also, did forgiving someone without their knowledge change how you felt? And, if it did, was the change obvious or did it occur slowly, over time? Was it lasting or is forgiving someone an ongoing process? And, can a person forgive another person without somehow sending a message to themselves that what that person did was 'okay' (I worry about this).
Thank you!

posted by marimeko to human relations (32 answers total)

My other favorite advice site, Dear Coke Talk (warning, adult language and themes) dealth with this topic recently and I think her explanation is cogent.
posted by restless_nomad at 4:03 PM on December 4, 2011 [4 favorites]

You absolutely can forgive someone without telling yourself what they did was okay.

To move on, I often find it helpful to approach the situation from a position of feeling compassion for the other person. For example, if someone says something needlessly rude to me, I'll make up a little story about how troubled that person must be, and how needy for any attention (even negative), to have said such a thing, to put someone else down to build themselves up. I try to show some caring, either inwardly or towards the person (e.g., "I'm sorry you feel that way, is everything all right with you?", etc., depends on situation/appropriateness).

All said and done, if you've done what you consider the "right" thing, be it overtly doing something or feeling forgiveness in your heart, you shouldn't dwell on it. You've done all you can, right? Fretting or stewing further won't change the situation.

Ask yourself: What is this to eternity?
posted by xiaolongbao at 4:19 PM on December 4, 2011

I'm not a big Oprah fan but she recently had a family of girls on who had been raped repeatedly by their father and brothers. She talked about forgiveness and how it doesn't mean excusing but accepting that you can't change what happened so that you can move forward and not be hobbled by the pain inflicted upon you. Her site has several links that discuss forgiveness that you might find helpful.
posted by shoesietart at 4:28 PM on December 4, 2011

I don't view forgiveness as telling yourself that what someone did to you was ok. I see it instead as my decision to permanently let go of the moral right to punish them or retaliate for what they did.

BTW, I also view forgiveness as being an action I take for me more than for the other person. Acid held inside a vessel (including a person) will destroy it from within -- far more so than acid poured on something (or someone) else.
posted by summerstorm at 4:31 PM on December 4, 2011 [11 favorites]

I don't view forgiveness as telling yourself that what someone did to you was ok. I see it instead as my decision to permanently let go of the moral right to punish them or retaliate for what they did.

This is really nicely put. Forgiveness is often seen, incorrectly, as a kind of synonym for approval. It's not. You can acknowledge that the other person did something upsetting and still forgive them -- that is, let go of your anger/hatred/desire for vengeance/etc.

For pretty dramatic examples of forgiveness, there are some moving, fascinating stories at Murder Victims Familes for Reconciliation, an anti-capital punishment organization made up specifically of people who have lost loved ones to murder. As one woman says:

The good news is, that when I came to acknowledge my mother’s murderer as a human being, I began to reclaim my own humanity and heal. I realized that I could reach out and extend my forgiveness and even love, to my mother’s murderer, despite not knowing who he was, or where he was. Forgiveness brought me release from fear, and the inner peace I was looking for. We must work to end the cycles of violence that proliferate in our society, not add to them.

posted by scody at 4:42 PM on December 4, 2011 [3 favorites]

When I think of forgiveness, I think of this story (at 5:55) from Zen Shorts.

I think it applies as one-sided forgiveness very well - the idea of leaving it "back there", and not carrying it with you. Imagining it as a very physical thing to do - to take a burden of your conscience and heart and put it down and walk away is how I view one-sided forgiveness. As in that story, the person never needs to know you've done this; and leaving them back there doesn't mean that you won't encounter them again - but it means you meet them with a little more wisdom and you're not worn down from carrying them.
posted by peagood at 4:50 PM on December 4, 2011 [1 favorite]

Think about human history and honor-based cultures. Wrongdoings are seen as something that take away people's honor and only by confronting the wrongdoer the honor can be restored. And it is very important to restore that honor, because without it you will be treated like shit in the future. Forgiveness in this context is a semi-respectable way out from destructive loops that this kind of thinking creates.

In modern society you don't have to confront back. Nobody can take away your honor in any meaningful sense. Forgiveness nowadays is recognizing that there are no scales that need to be balanced except those in your mind, and those scales were created as a reaction to the wrongdoing and you can let them go. Those scales were there to help you to get out of the situation and to recognize that it was bad and you don't need any big glowing '!' in your mind anymore.

In practice this happens when you can remember the wrongdoing as just something that happened without recreating and reliving that strong emotion of you being wronged.
posted by Free word order! at 4:55 PM on December 4, 2011 [2 favorites]

My mom was emotionally and psychologically abusive. Or I should say "is", because she behaves as long as I do not give her much personal information or get too close to her, but times when I've been more relaxed her bad behavior starts up again.

I was incredibly angry at her most of my life. She caused deep wounds in me and my brothers, wounds that have had long-lasting effects on our lives and some that will never heal. I couldn't see how I could ever forgive her. Our initial conversations about the abuse resulted in accusations that I fabricated everything. As years have gone on she's accepted that she did something wrong (as all of her children have pulled away from her and show equal anger) but overall thinks she "did her best" and was a pretty great mom. So instead of accusing me of making things up, she started demanding I forgive her so that we could have a relationship. She does not understand my anger, will never understand my anger, and takes any friendly overtures from me as validation that she's "right". Obviously this did not make me any more amenable to starting the process.

But somehow forgiveness has happened anyway. I don't have a close relationship with her and never will. But I talk with my parents regularly, where I used to go for a year or more without contact, and I am even able to relate details of my life that used to be focal points of her abuse. This Christmas I will be going to their place for the first time in nearly half a decade.

Two things happened. First, somewhere in between was I was able to humanize my mother. I began to see her as not solely a malevolent force in my life who visited irreparable psychological damage, but as a deeply flawed, unhappy human being who did not know how to deal with her own fears and failures and, like an upset child, lashed out at those over whom she had power. There is a lot that went on her past to make her the mother she became. And it is clear from how desperate she is for any kind of a relationship with her children that the mother she became is not the mother she wanted to be. Her life, from that viewpoint, is a tragedy.

So I've developed compassion for her, and from that compassion I've been able to let go of the anger. It doesn't make what she did OK. And as I mentioned, she will still hurt me if I give her a chance. But it helps me to understand her, and to feel pity for her, and it is terribly hard to hold a great deal of anger against someone you pity.

The second thing was that rather than lamenting what I could have been without her, I recognize what I have done despite her. I believe I am a more introspective, compassionate, and understanding person for what I've been through. What I have achieved today is a result of the strength I've built in confronting the damage she's dealt and working through it. Through that pride I can continue to succeed.

It doesn't matter if my mom dies thinking she was perfect and her children were just ungrateful brats. It doesn't change the unfulfilled life she's had as a result of her actions. And her fully accepting her actions and apologizing wouldn't change the work that needed to be done on my own to fix myself. I look back now and realize how much that anger held me back. Understand the abuse and its effects on my life was the easy part. Ultimately the last delay that came in moving on with my life, past the abuse, was my fear that letting go of my anger would implicitly condone what she did. And it didn't. It simply didn't. Letting go of my anger and forgiving her only allowed me to finally cut the last of her negative effects on me once and for all.
posted by schroedinger at 5:13 PM on December 4, 2011 [29 favorites]

I have spent a lot of time this week thinking about this exact topic. Partly for personal reasons and partly for scientific reasons. I have watched some very significant moments unfold and seen a range of responses. I haven't seen that there is any consistency in how the forgiving (witnessed or unwitnessed) affected the person doing this forgiving. What I can say is that those people who were some how spiritual seemed to do much better at this. By spiritual I don't mean religious. I heard them say things like it does no good for them to hold on to their anger - that it doesn't bring the person that they lost (in this case following a tragic death) back and it doesn't provide them with any of the answers about what might have happened. They have said that holding onto anger or blame for any event only makes them more unhappy.

Now this is very hard for me to get my head around although I have to admit there is much logic in what they are saying. I am trying to figure out if I want to forgive someone who is now dead for some terrible, terrible things that they did whilst they were alive. I don't know what I will gain from doing this forgiving and I have largely moved on with my life since these terrible things happened. I did look at the obituary for the person and not surprisingly, there were very few entries. The entries that were there were by people who knew this person later in his life. I was really shocked by one of them who described this man as caring. It seems possible that that the person I'm considering forgiving may have talked about some of his regrets with someone else - some one new in his life. Now I would have thought that if he was feeling remorse in a sincere way then he may have contacted me so I still debated whether this was a breakthrough or simply further manipulation of someone else. At any rate, it did force me consider that we all have a bit of ying and yang in us - none are fully evil and none are fully good. I still haven't decided what I'm going to do, mostly based on the fact that I'm not sure that I'll feel any better or worse or that it is worth the effort.

What I can tell you is that the people who stand fastly that they will not forgive seem angry and unhappy and those that are able to grasp the concept of forgiving seem very at ease with themselves. I know that is a sweeping generalization and I can't begin to quote any stats for you but I do honestly believe that angry people are unable to forgive and move on to a happier or more settled place.

Part of me hangs on though because I think I rationalize that when you forgive someone you are letting them off the hook and telling them it is ok for what they did - and some things really, really are not ok. Maybe the forgiving is what gives you back power and takes it away from them.

I'll tell you the other side of the story as well. There are things I've done in my life that have caused hurt to people. I think I've apologized for many of these mistakes but I'm sure there are times I've hurt and not known it. There may also be times where I've hurt because I've been hurt and that's not so right either. There are times where I've let time heal this rather than facing the apology head on - maybe I'm just as bad as the person I can't forgive.
posted by YukonQuirm at 5:32 PM on December 4, 2011 [1 favorite]

Somewhere along the line it became popular to entwine the idea with forgiving & forgetting. Screw that! Remembering what went wrong is how you prepare yourself to avoid falling into that same beartraps the next time. So in your letting go process, table the idea of forgetting. You won't, and you shouldn't. By double-tasking it to forgiveness you make it that much harder to regain your balance.
posted by Ys at 5:54 PM on December 4, 2011 [2 favorites]

I found this previous comment helpful on the concept of forgiveness...Here it is if you don't want to go to the link


"One of the most useful concepts of forgiveness that I've encountered (probably in a Making Light thread about awful families) is to think of it in terms of forgiving a debt. It doesn't mean that what he did to you was OK, or can be dismissed -- it means that you acknowledge you're never going to receive what you're owed, and that you're not going to pursue it any longer. That's the kind of forgiveness that lets you move on. (As opposed to the sort that certain people may encourage you to feel, especially in family situations, which is "pretend what he did to you is OK and then let him do it again")

posted by McCoy Pauley at 4:13 AM on October 5 [17 favorites −] [!]
posted by murrey at 6:16 PM on December 4, 2011 [6 favorites]

To quote Anne Lamott, "Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and expecting the rat to die."

Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting, and it doesn't necessarily mean ever trusting the other person again. (You can forgive somebody and still never let them inside your boundaries ever again.) It does mean that you will no longer be renting them space in your brain for free, and it does usually mean you'll find it easier to move on to a place where you're no longer suffering over something that's over, done, and unchangeable.
posted by Lexica at 6:32 PM on December 4, 2011 [4 favorites]

Apologising and forgiving are something that one person does. Reconciliation is something that requires both parties. You can forgive without apology and you can apologise without forgiveness, but you can't reconcile without both.

Lexica's quote from Anne Lamott always struck me as really, really true. I'd recommend her books about faith, where she deals with forgiveness a few times (my favourite, Travelling Mercies, Plan B, and Grace [Eventually]).

I also have found the idea of ubuntu helpful - we are people through and because of other people. If I take someone's humanity from them, it makes ME less by making them less. The idea of forgiveness then becomes not only self-interest but interest in the community: we all can't continue to live with me being eaten up by the wrongs being done against me.

The Man to read on that idea is Desmond Tutu - No Future Without Forgiveness particularly. Or Nelson Mandela, who writes about forgiving people who haven't apologised. I would trust anyone who was able to forgive and reconcile after 30 years of wrongful imprisonment.

Also, Anjie Krog writes about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where ubuntu was the motivating belief: admitting what you've done and asking for forgiveness helps everyone heal. Victims getting to face their victimiser and confront them for what they did and then also free themselves from the oppression of that crime by forgiving them. That's powerful.

It's not perfect, but In My Country is a Hollywood representation of Krog's book, Country of My Skull, and deals with how a white woman came to terms with apartheid in South Africa.

Forgiveness and South Africa always go hand in hand for me. As fucked up as things still are there, there is a real sense that the country has emotionally healed because of how strongly the transition emphasised forgiveness and ubuntu.
posted by guster4lovers at 7:32 PM on December 4, 2011 [2 favorites]

Along the lines of the Desmond Tutu book above -- you may want to track down a copy of The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal. The first half of the book is his own story about an encounter he had while he was in Auschwitz, when he was brought to the bedside of a mortally wounded Nazi soldier who wanted to confess his crimes to, and be forgiven by, a Jew. Wiesenthal heard his confession, but didn't say anything and left. He kept asking himself and his friends what he should have done; some said "yes, you should have forgiven him" but other said "hell no you shouldn't have". He ends the story by turning to the reader and saying "well, hell, I still don't know, what would you have done?"

The second half of the book is a series of essays from other people -- religious and political leaders -- answering that final question. Desmond Tutu offers one response, as does the Dalai Lama, a series of Christian and Jewish religious leaders, writers, and such. There are an astonishing number of views on forgiveness and a number of different opinions on what its purpose is.

I first read that book in 1999, and the things I took from it were that forgiveness is sometimes REALLY not easy; nor should it be; and that sometimes it is not about "oh, everything's all better," but it's more about the forgiver realizing "okay, my continuing to be angry at you isn't hurting you, and it IS hurting me - so I'm going to forgive you, not because I think it's okay what you did, but because closing the book on this is the only way I can move on and get that energy back for myself."

And as for the personal account: I reread that book in September and October of 2001. And largely because of that book and the thoughts it provoked, I can honestly say that I was able to forgive Osama Bin Laden (in the "I am closing the book and moving on" sense). I still hoped he would have to answer for his crimes someday, but I was able to start moving on from what he'd done and start recovering myself.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:51 PM on December 4, 2011 [2 favorites]

Wow! I just wanted to mention that this is helping me immensely right now--thank you!
posted by marimeko at 7:55 PM on December 4, 2011

As others have mentioned, forgiveness is something you do for yourself, not something you do for others. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, you should never let someone live in your head rent-free. Letting go gives you the power to get on with your life.
posted by Gilbert at 8:27 PM on December 4, 2011

There's a pretty good documentary I saw a few years ago called THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS that presents concrete illustrations (via examples like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Amish school shootings in Pennsylvania, and the 9/11 attacks) of a lot of the conclusions other people have mentioned here already (that forgiveness is done for the good of the forgiver, that forgiving someone often has very little to do with whether that person is repentant or will see "justice", and that forgiveness doesn't necessarily require amnesia about the wrong being forgiven). It's available on streaming Netflix if you're interested.

The thing that stuck with me about this film is its observation that it's relatively easy to "forgive" someone who's been punished, or who's repentant -- but it questions whether a forgiveness that's contingent on those things is really forgiveness at all, or merely satisfaction at vengeance being done. Forgiving someone who is unrepentant, or who has escaped justice or retribution, on the other hand -- that's pretty hard. Not everybody interviewed in the film can do it.

And I think that observation helped me put things in perspective -- some of the people who have wronged me in the past will /never/ admit what they've done, will never show contrition, and will never see any kind of punishment for what they've done, so I'll have to do without those things if I want to achieve some sort of catharsis about these wrongs, and for my own mental well being that's precisely what I /do/ want to achieve.

I picked this up here on Metafilter some time ago: "Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past." The past is fixed -- so it's up to me: I can be hung up on this unchangeable thing, or I can let it go and focus instead on the alterable present and future.
posted by orthicon halo at 8:58 PM on December 4, 2011 [7 favorites]

Answering the questions as-asked:

I see forgiveness as primarily one-sided. I seldom think about the public or transactional part of it. I realize that exists, but the forgiver-side is what comes to mind when I think of the concept.

The steps I take are just to sit with the pain -- acknowledge it, accept it, act however I need to to honor it -- and then wait as long as it takes, while gently reminding myself of matters of existential-moral perspective:

• We all share ignorance and a capacity to make honest mistakes.
• We all share evil and a capacity to do cruel things for bad reasons.
• We all wind up dying alone having done only a fraction of the good we meant to.
• I'm a mammal with a nervous system that experiences pain. It takes time to release.

This sort of perspective-talk helps me contextualize pain, anger and sadness and be patient with it.

Forgiving someone without their knowledge absolutely changes how I feel. I feel less bad! It's slow though. I don't just "suddenly" forgive. To me it's like letting go of a fear or an ignorance, growing into a person no longer overwhelmed by the pain. I always remember how-to-feel it -- I always remember the originating events -- I have just quieted it in my mind to the point it no longer dominates any of my life. It's placed on a dusty shelf in the attic, not sitting on my chest while I'm trying to sleep.

It can be an ongoing process if I discover new dimensions to the way the original pain affected me. That can bring emotions back to the foreground and require some additional sitting-with-them. So I do that.

I think it's possible to forgive without saying "what was done was ok". It was bad. It was just bad-in-context. Bad-in-perspective. Bad in a world with lots of badness. And most of all: bad in the past, so no longer requiring quite so much of my attention in the present. I have a life to live and I'd rather not have a past wrong obscure the remaining present.
posted by ead at 10:23 PM on December 4, 2011 [3 favorites]

It depends whether you love the person or not. It's a lot harder to forgive people you love. Further, I'd even say you don't need to forgive people you don't love so much as you need to accept your own pain and accept your past experiences and forge new ones in regards to some painful subject, etc. People who don't matter are 'ideas' or 'memories', and don't need to be (and often aren't) real 'characters'. The person becomes a representation of something else that's tormenting you. What is that thing they represent? It's doubtless inside you. What you are battling, once they are gone, are fears and raging cold places within your own self. It's not about forgiveness so much as about finding peace within yourself, and all the usual suspects help: time, meditation, religion, therapy, new love, nature, puppies and so on. Ultimately, you'd never 'forgive', say, the Nazis, if you're a Concentration Camp survivor-- but instead you'd learn to make peace with your ideas of human darkness, hopelessness, existential despair. That can take your whole life. It becomes who you are: this daily process of not-despair. To find an identity is to find an identity that's defined outside of this despair; your own identity. Who you are cannot be what they/it (that experience) has tried to force you to be. You are you; it is in the past. It cannot touch you. Every day, you prove that to be true and let it go, let it go, let it go.


Now, love, as I said, leaves more difficult residue in some ways. You can't depersonalize them-- they are a person who hurt you, not an idea, not a force of nature, not 'evil'. They betrayed you on the deepest of levels, and it torments you partly because you can't hate them for it, and can only love them and suffer and be angry. It may seem that you can't forgive them while you still love them; the love and the rage become one feeling, inseparable. You are trapped with it, if/once they are gone: you can't fling it at them, can't express yourself, can only smolder and let it burn you up, it seems.

It helps to write unsent letters. It helps to let time do its job to help forget. Most of all, it helps to work at clutching that love close to you. It may seem counterintuitive, but forgiveness and mercy isn't about denying justice. People who're really into justice tend not to get that. Love exists no matter what-- it is based upon acceptance. Remembering why you loved in the first place-- that selflessness, that openness-- it heals you first and foremost. No person, no evil can rob you of that source of goodness and purity. Ultimately, forgiveness and justice can both stem from love. Love accepts it all just as love sets limits for mutual health. People we'd trusted may lash out, make horrible mistakes, inflict horrible pain-- but they too are hurting, blinded, irrational, trapped in some stupid mental loop.

The thing that ultimately convinced me is that forgiving and loving then letting go just feels better; rage destroys you, love heals you. It's just a question of allowing that channel to stay open and free.
posted by reenka at 11:00 PM on December 4, 2011 [3 favorites]

It's a very difficult thing to achieve in a culture which doesn't require that the offender even know that they did anything wrong, much less even apologize, much less make amends.

The idea that forgiveness can be achieved by the forgiver alone is wrong, really. That may be necessary because, usually - the offender won't apologize - why would they? It's not culturally required of them. So very often the furthest you can go is acceptance. They did this, they're like this, that's not going to change.

A good book for working this out is "How Can I Forgive You?" by Janis Abrams Springs.
posted by tel3path at 11:58 PM on December 4, 2011 [1 favorite]

p.s. And I know that "forgiving and loving then letting go just feels bettter," of course it does, and I would love not to have been traumatized by traumatizing incidents. Will EMDR enable me to forgive? If I'm able to just bop around not thinking about it the way the offender presumably does, will I have attained forgiveness, or just gotten over it?

The problem I have with this is that forgiveness is for my benefit, as the injured party, so if forgiveness equals feeling better why don't my injuries *poof* heal because I decide to let go? Why do I still get triggered? Is it because I enjoy wallowing in my pain?

I think the truth is forgiving might feel better or it might not, but it's not something done solely by the injured party and solely for the benefit of the injured party, and it's somewhat independent of "getting over it". Our culture promotes this idea with desperate assiduity because it's the most convenient model *for the offender*, but it's never done a thing for me and, more importantly, doesn't accurately represent the importance and cost of the transaction at the heart of true forgiveness. There's little or no cultural support for attaning that.
posted by tel3path at 12:04 AM on December 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

I am so happy to see this here.

I've been wrestling with issues of past trauma and forgiveness and related things. My therapist is leaning heavily on the forgiveness side of things, which... just does not make sense to me, because I can't untangle the Forgiveness Equals It's Okay You Did It thing. The best I've got to right now is that I can't forgive, but I can forget, most of the time.

I haven't got anything to add, particularly, but.. thank you all for this discussion. It's given me a lot to think about.
posted by cmyk at 12:14 AM on December 5, 2011

Nthing "thank you for this discussion." I'm actually going through the process of confronting and moving past old trauma, and this has helped me think about it in a different way. Something that's been helpful to me is separating the action from the actor. The action is scary and huge and absolutely not okay, but the actor is small, pitiful person with their own problems. Even though the actor's still walking around, the action's over. I don't have to worry about it anymore. I can recognize the humanity of the actor without excusing the action, and in doing so forgive.

Ask yourself: What is this to eternity?

I like the rest of your comment, but I do have a small issue with this bit. It's true that everything diminishes in comparison, but I think it's important to avoid devaluing past experience. Things affect people as much as they affect people, regardless of how insignificant they may look or eventually become. Not to say that one should wallow--simply that one should focus on the experience of pain without trying to diminish or magnify it.
posted by flawsekno at 2:32 AM on December 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

One thing that holds me back - sometimes it seems like if you "forgive" the rest of the world says, "Ah ha! You were wrong. It didn't really happen the way you think it did."

You might want to work through what you are dealing with to see if that's the sore spot.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 10:03 AM on December 5, 2011

The problem I have with this is that forgiveness is for my benefit, as the injured party, so if forgiveness equals feeling better why don't my injuries *poof* heal because I decide to let go? Why do I still get triggered? Is it because I enjoy wallowing in my pain?

I don't think anyone said forgiveness equals automatically feeling better as much as being a pre-requisite for setting down the heavy burdens of hatred and despair and being able to move on with your life. Not that it didn't happen, or is magically better, or everything is fine now... but beginning the journey.

It'd be nice if psychological injuries just *poof* healed because we really wanted them to, but sadly, as eads notes, we're mammals with nervous systems and brains and this shit just doesn't go poof in the real world.

Sometimes I almost wish there was another word for the kind of forgiveness which is not absolution.
posted by canine epigram at 10:22 AM on December 5, 2011

I've been thinking about this for a while too, and I keep coming back to things I read in Sugar's advice column on The Rumpus. Sugar has said four things that have particularly resonated with me:

Forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you again.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule.

Nobody will protect you from your own suffering.

Every last one of us can do better than give up.
posted by colfax at 10:57 AM on December 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

What I'm also questioning is why we are taught that forgiveness is a prerequisite for healing. I can imagine scenarios where a person could get on with their lives, move on, and still hate instead of forgiving.

I think forgiveness is a spiritual duty, but I'm skeptical that it's a prerequisite for healing.

This is in addition to my earlier point that casting forgiveness as a prerequisite for healing, adds to the burden of the injured party by implying that, if healing is incomplete, forgiveness must therefore be incomplete.

Biblically, it's made clear (yes, in the New Testament) that certain kinds of people - cynical users who take advantage of others for their own ends, specifically - are to be treated with "a mixture of mercy and fear". (Book of Jude) Popular culture does uphold the necessity of this, but really deemphasizes that it's an actual biblical instruction that by its context must fit into a concept of forgiveness. In other words I avoid people who I think will hurt me if I interact with them again, but there's not a lot of cultural emphasis on the fact that this is a biblical prescription. People do this anyway, in practice, if they know the alternative is bending over for it, but if you don't know better, it can make you feel spiritually "less than" to do so.
posted by tel3path at 11:33 AM on December 5, 2011

tel3path: I think forgiveness is a spiritual duty, but I'm skeptical that it's a prerequisite for healing.

I've wondered about this a lot (isn't it actually healthier for me to remain angry?). But after years I start realizing I am in pain and start looking for other methods to deal with it. It does add to the burden of the injured party.

canine epigram: Sometimes I almost wish there was another word for the kind of forgiveness which is not absolution.

I agree. I am surprised there aren't several words in English used to describe various types/levels of forgiveness.


I want to thank everyone for their input thus far--it's been really helpful!
And, please, keep 'em coming...
posted by marimeko at 12:43 PM on December 5, 2011

"isn't it actually healthier for me to remain angry?"

I don't think so. I think the anger is what you use to protect yourself, stop you from getting persuaded to bend over for it again. Also, it feels good, in a way.

After a while, though, you're just flogging a dead horse. The boundary should be established, so you shouldn't need to police it with anger any more. Makes sense?
posted by tel3path at 3:29 PM on December 5, 2011

I've wondered about this a lot (isn't it actually healthier for me to remain angry?). But after years I start realizing I am in pain and start looking for other methods to deal with it. It does add to the burden of the injured party.

This is exactly it. It may be healthy for you to GET angry, and to BE angry for a while, but it may not be healthy to REMAIN angry for too long.

It's like: if you have a bad cut, it's healthy to bleed a little (I heard somewhere that for minor cuts, bleeding a bit helps clean the wound out, after a fashion), and it's healthy to scab over and be sore there while you're healing. What's NOT healthy is continuing to pick the scab off again and again so you can bleed afresh and scab over again and again and again. Eventually the scab needs to heal and fall off on its own, and the skin grow back and the wound needs to close.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:52 PM on December 5, 2011

This is exactly it. It may be healthy for you to GET angry, and to BE angry for a while, but it may not be healthy to REMAIN angry for too long.

In my experience, fresh anger may (or may not) be powerful and motivating, but stale anger is always corrosive and toxic (to me, not the other person).

In the book Good Life, American Zen teacher Cheri Huber discusses (among other things) why the ninth Zen Precept is generally stated as "Not to be angry" rather than "Not to get angry". The Dalai Lama talks about how when things happen that are not what he wants to happen, "anger arises."

One of the challenging things about forgiveness, I think, is that it's only possible when I manage to let go of the anger as opposed to trying to push it away. Getting to a place of "this isn't helping, and I feel worse as a result; I think I'm ready to let it drop" is very different from feeling that I shouldn't feel angry, or that I need to make myself stop being angry, or anything like that.
posted by Lexica at 9:26 PM on December 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Forgiveness is accepting the impossibility of a positive resolution. Accepting this allows me to consciously spend less time thinking about whatever hurt me. Forgiving someone is a decision I make for myself so that I have more energy and time to spend on what I enjoy. I think the change brought on by this type of forgiveness is subtle, slow and probably a lifelong process.
posted by smokingmonkey at 7:39 PM on December 6, 2011