You Do Not Have to Forgive

"I don't want to forgive."

The woman sitting next to me at a workshop said it plainly. The facilitators stood there and kept pushing her to forgive.

I was feeling really angry, because a lot of my clients already feel guilty that they haven't forgiven, and shame. The anger was about what the pushing does to a woman who has already decided that this door stays closed, and who now has to defend that decision in front of a group.

The workshop where forgiveness was pushed

Watch the sequence. A woman names a clear position about her own inner life. The people with authority in the space treat the position as a symptom of something unfinished in her. Everyone present learns what the acceptable answer is.

When there's a culture of forgiveness and putting this shame on them, and then they can't forgive, it creates a problem. First there was the harm. Then there is the failure to produce the required response to the harm, which arrives as a second, more private injury: something is wrong with me that I still cannot do this.

Where forgiveness becomes spiritual bypassing

Forgiveness to me a lot is linked to spiritual bypassing. John Welwood introduced that term in 1984, in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, for the use of spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid painful feelings and unfinished psychological work.

Forgiveness sits very comfortably inside that definition. It can be genuine, arrived at slowly, and it can also be the quickest available exit from an unbearable piece of knowledge about someone you loved and needed. Both versions use identical language. From the outside they are almost impossible to tell apart, which is exactly why a group setting is the worst place to adjudicate it.

A woman who declares forgiveness before she has let herself know what was done to her loses access to her own anger, and anger is frequently the first accurate information available about what happened.

What the forgiveness research actually found

The forgiveness literature is much less reassuring than its popular version.

James McNulty, writing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2011, followed 72 newlywed couples over four years. Where a spouse reported being more likely to express forgiveness, that spouse's partner reported psychological and physical aggression that stayed relatively stable across the whole study. Where a spouse was less likely to express forgiveness, their partner's aggression declined. He called the paper The Dark Side of Forgiveness.

The finding does not say forgiveness causes aggression. It says that a reliably forgiving response can remove the one consequence that might otherwise have prompted a change in behaviour. Forgiveness given early and often is information to the other person, and not always the information you intended to send.

When forgiving costs self-respect

Laura Luchies, Eli Finkel, James McNulty and Madoka Kumashiro published four studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2010 under a title that says what they found: the doormat effect. Forgiving strengthened self-respect and self-concept clarity when the other person had signalled, through amends or disposition, that the forgiver would be safe and valued in a continued relationship. Where that signal was absent, forgiving eroded both.

So the same act produces opposite results depending on something entirely outside the forgiver's control. That is a strange basis for a moral obligation, and a stranger basis for a workshop instruction.

Compassion, starting with yourself

Maybe instead of forgiveness, what helps is compassion, and letting go of the stories. They get run together constantly, and they are not the same operation.

Compassion is understanding and kindness, directed first at yourself. Toward the woman who was there, who had the resources she had at the age she was, and who has been carrying the consequence since. Compassion requires no verdict on anybody else. It does not pardon, excuse, reconcile, or re-open a door. It is entirely yours, which is what makes it available when forgiveness is not.

It also does what the forgiveness instruction claims to do. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2012, ran four experiments on self-compassion and found that taking a kinder, more accepting stance toward personal failure increased motivation to improve, across personal weaknesses, moral transgressions and poor test performance. Research like this suggests that kindness toward yourself can make it easier to look at what you would rather not look at.

Which is the opposite of how it is usually taught. Shame is offered as the engine of change, and compassion as the reward you get afterwards.

Letting go of the story that is not serving you

The other part is letting go of the story in the head that is not serving you. Going through the same material all over again, all over again.

This gets confused with compassion constantly, and it is a different operation. Compassion is a stance toward a person. Letting go of the story is about what your attention does with a piece of material at eleven at night, for the four hundredth time, in the same order, reaching the same place.

Why the same material runs again

Edward Watkins, in a review in Psychological Bulletin in 2008, pulled apart why repetitive thought sometimes helps people recover from upsetting and traumatic events and sometimes produces depression and anxiety. One of the principles separating the two is the level of construal: abstract processing versus concrete processing. Why am I the kind of person this happens to is abstract, and it goes nowhere. What happened, in what order, and what I will do on Sunday is concrete, and it moves.

So the question is which version of thinking you are doing, not whether you think about it at all. Rehearsal dressed as processing feels like work, because it is effortful and it hurts.

Letting go here does not mean deciding the material no longer matters. It means noticing when you have entered the loop, and declining the next lap. No forgiveness is required for that. The other person is not consulted.

What I am left with

I have no position on whether forgiveness is good. I have a position on being pushed. When it comes on its own, it can come after the kindness and after the story has loosened its grip, as a byproduct rather than an achievement. Sometimes it does not arrive, and the person is well anyway.

And it is astonishing how much of what gets called forgiveness is really just the exhaustion of being asked.

References

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133-1143. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22645164/

Luchies, L. B., Finkel, E. J., McNulty, J. K., & Kumashiro, M. (2010). The doormat effect: When forgiving erodes self-respect and self-concept clarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 734-749. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20438221/

McNulty, J. K. (2011). The dark side of forgiveness: The tendency to forgive predicts continued psychological and physical aggression in marriage. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6), 770-783. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4112745/

Watkins, E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 163-206. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18298268/

Welwood, J. (1984). Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16(1), 63-73. https://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-16-84-01-063.pdf