www.self-construct.com

Forgiveness

The highest and most beautiful things in life

are not to be heard about,

nor read about, nor seen but,

if one will, are to be lived.

- Sören Kierkegaard

I am very, very protective of the word “forgive.” I try to speak the word only when I trust that my listener understands how I intend it to be characterized. And I pay particularly close attention to how my clients use it as they talk with me – even when, or especially when, they are tossing around the word casually. To my way of thinking, forgiveness is a peak human experience that should be cherished as such.

Forgiveness is, biochemically, one of the strongest messages we get from the cosmic designers. When someone has transgressed against us and then has sincerely apologized, we get a flood of relational chemicals that can leave us feeling expansive, tender and sentimental. This inner chemistry warms us with a naturally occurring opiate cocktail that momentarily binds us to the penitent standing before us. Out of that binding comes a natural and seemingly effortless willingness to let bygones go and to welcome caring in. Given all that, you can see how forgiveness is an unavoidable reaction to a sincere and size-appropriate apology that allows for a reattachment to occur between the two people. These moments are precious, precious, precious.

I am so protective of the act of forgiveness, in fact, that I believe that one should not endeavor to forgive absent a true apology.

Before I explain my reasoning, let me define some terms.

Transgression: When someone perpetrates a wrongdoing upon us, they have incurred a debt against the emotional equity in the relationship. If the wrongdoing is small (blocked the aisle with their shopping cart) and the relationship minimal (simply citizens of the same town), the debt is minuscule. As both the transgression and relationship grow in significance, however, so does the debt. A profound betrayal can all but bankrupt a relationship.

Apology: An apology is both the acknowledgement of the debt and also an offering of a contract spelling out the terms of the relational repayment process. Within the process of a true apology, intentions must be clarified and the offending behavior must cease. The ability to apologize authentically and completely is a crucial interpersonal skill to have, so please see that article for more details.

Forgiveness: The lovely process of forgiveness contains both spontaneous and intentional elements. The spontaneity is the result of that biochemical bath described above that is precipitated by the release from the tension we hold when we are in pain. Between the time someone injures us and they extend their attention to repairing the damage done to the relationship, we exist in the purgatory of not knowing if they are sorry or not. What relief we feel when they express their remorse. And what instinctively follows that relief is a genuine appreciation of their willingness to apologize, which in turn generates in us a willingness to move back toward them. The intentional element occurs when we set about working with them to establish the criteria for moving forward. Both elements start the healing process which creates the scar tissue that is trust.

The total package

When we forgive, we signal our readiness to participate in co-creating the contract of a true apology through cognitive, emotional and behavioral acts. In effect, we willingly engage all aspects of being human as we work with the other person to repair the relationship.

The cognitive aspect of forgiveness requires us to fully consider, from a place of unapologetic self-loyalty, whether or not a complete apology has been made, whether the contract offered sufficiently repays the debt incurred by the misbehavior and what our past experience with the perpetrator suggests about the odds of the contract being fulfilled from his or her end. If our thinking leads us to believe that any of these three elements are lacking, we need to reason our way through to what to do next. Without a complete apology, as I have been saying, we would be wise to withhold our forgiveness. If the apology contract appears insufficient, we would be wise to renegotiate. And if our history with this person causes us to doubt in their ability to honor the apology contract, we must then decide how to protect our self-loyalty while extending to them the opportunity to surprise us.

Once a cognitive assessment has been made and we decide to forgive, our emotions flavor the acceptance process. We experience and express appreciation for the integrity it took for the penitent to extend the apology, we feel reassured that the transgression has stopped and we rest assured that the other person is going to try to honor the healing process. We are also soothed by the hint supplied by the thorough apology that we will not be the only one in the future protecting the emotional equity we have gathered together. It is important to understand that, because our person has shown us the willingness to apologize, we can imagine that they will be able to extend themselves toward us in many other relationship-building endeavors. These agreeable emotions will lend warmth and gentleness to our discussions about what needs to happen next.

The behavioral part of forgiveness requires us to convey the forgiveness kindly and clearly. Perhaps more importantly we need to express our forgiveness with no strings attached because, similar to an apology, forgiveness is a contract to work on ourselves. If we are truly to forgive, we must commit to putting in as much work as necessary to set aside our anger for the rest of time. This means we must resist the temptation to revisit the old wound later, hold a grudge or otherwise dishonor the apology contract by making it difficult for the perpetrator to repay the debt. Once we forgive, crucially, we have to behave ourselves.

Thank you

The receiver of an apology has certain interpersonal obligations if they wish to craft that complete act of forgiveness. The first of which is to take a moment to let the cascade of forgiveness biochemistry wash away some of the hurt – please let the analgesic effect of an apology work, in other words. Then we need to remember how hard it is to apologize in a mistake-phobic culture. That empathic stance should lead naturally to the first thing that should come out of our mouth: thank you. But then we need to stiffen our spine in order to set ground rules for reattachment.

A point of clarification: Forgiveness does not require the victim to forget. It requires that the emotional memory be decoupled from the factual memory. You don’t forget how you suffered or why you suffered or that you suffered. You just don’t connect a painful sense of persecution to the memories. This can take some practice, especially right after a relationship wounding occurs. What you have to practice is engaging your executive functioning apparatus to soothe your emotions with a reminder that a complete apology contract is in place. It would sound something like this: "Yes, you were hurt when X happened, but that injury was acknowledged, reparation progresses and – most importantly – it's over. There is no value to you in re-experiencing the hurt." After a few sincere rounds of this reasonable discussion, your emotional centers will simmer down.

Donationship

So, why do I believe that donated forgiveness – forgiving in the absence of an apology – is neither a generous nor a wise thing to do?

Here is my reasoning:

A transgression that is not followed by an apology is an ongoing transgression in that the perpetrator has chosen to leave our wound open and unattended. What an awful thing to do to another person. This is why drivers who hit and run are treated as much more wicked than those who stop after an accident to both take responsibility and render aid. Thus, when someone hurts you, refuses to admit it and does nothing to ameliorate the injury, he or she is rejecting your basic human rights. If you donate forgiveness to a person who does this to you, you are sending this message: It’s okay with me that you hurt me and refused to help me either because I don’t matter or because you are unable to help yourself. Neither of these reasons makes sense to me.

I don’t matter: This is an egregious violation of self-loyalty. You should matter to yourself and how people treat you should matter. A life with damaged self-loyalty is a life that bewilders its way through a fog of doubts and inhibitions. A strong self-loyalty, on the other hand, privileges existential civil liberties, meaning we maintain a deeply seated self-ownership for what we are trying to achieve in our life. (It’s important to remember that self-loyalty doesn’t exclude altruism, it simply precedes it.) It boils down to this: If you are not loyal to yourself, your life will not be well implemented. If you are loyal to yourself, you will believe yourself entitled to both respect and freedom from infringement, meaning you are entitled to an apology when your rights have been violated.

You can’t help it: It’s not that this position isn’t true, it’s that it doesn’t justify a donation of forgiveness. When someone is in over their head in an interpersonal situation, causes an injury to another and then shuts down emotionally, it is certainly appropriate for us to understand, empathize and even remain in a relationship with them. But, to take them off the hook by not expecting an apology is not good for them. Unearned forgiveness injures the receiver in two ways. First, it tells them that they are incapable of rising to the challenge of crafting a complete apology. And second, when they haven’t held themselves responsible and we collude in that, we steal from them the consequences of their actions. Consequences that can, hopefully, eventually, precipitate growth on their part. When the world takes us off the hook, we usually, happily, stay off the hook. The “gift” we give with faux forgiveness is lowered expectations of the perpetrator.

All this doesn’t mean we don’t absorb lots and lots of hurt in our lifetimes when denied the healing catalyst of an apology. Of course we can recover from these incidents. Of course we can write off transgressions that people have visited upon us – especially in old relationships with abundant emotional equity. Of course we can pity those unable to muster the courage and ego strength to extend an apology and we can treat them kindly. But if we donate to another the gift of forgiveness when they have not earned it with an apology, we are sending a very bad message indeed – to them and to us.

And, finally, what kind of future relationship is possible between, say, a man who cannot hold himself accountable and the person who wants to love him? When we get excuses from a set of we-did-the-best-we-could parents or from an oops-did-you-notice-that woman rather than apologies, we are being given a warning. The brilliant Maya Angelou called it when she said: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." These folks are dangerous to care for because they have not demonstrated the ability to hold themselves accountable in order to learn from their behavior. Letting go of anger at these types of people, a wise thing to do in many instances, is not the same thing as forgiveness. Nor is trying to move past an old injury a bad idea. But in both of these cases, if the relationship is to continue, very tight boundaries need be erected to protect the victim from further injury.

Forgo

Rather than trying to reverse engineer the warmth and joy of forgiveness when you have not been honored with an apology from someone in your life who has hurt you, maybe you could just utilize another word: forgo. Perhaps you can just forgo their transgressions like one would write off a never-going-to-be-paid-back loan. What that would mean would be to understand that the perpetrator has declared emotional bankruptcy and is now a bit of a bad credit risk. While you could forgo his or her emotional equity debt and you could choose to stay in relationship with that person, you would always want to be leery of trusting him or her with too much of your heart. Doesn’t that make sense?

In sum

This I submit: forgiveness cannot occur as an act of will. It can only occur with a corrective emotional experience that provides a psychological cleansing. In other words, forgiveness follows on the heels of the gift of apology because the connectedness created by the repentant one washes the wound caused by the wrongdoing. I believe that with the grit of intentionality cleaned away and a thorough apology extended, the injury will heal automatically.

Like love, I believe that forgiveness is a sacred construct and that it is co-created when an apology meets an injury. Mistakes are human, apologies divine and forgiveness, while a joy to experience, requires some thought. A wise life incorporates these truths.

- - - - - -------------------------------------------------------- - - - - -

Unforgiven

What does it mean when you have extended a true apology and the other person refuses to accept it and forgive? When a sincere apology is rejected, it is usually because there is another, hidden transgression playing out in the mind of the person who appears unable to forgive. Unless that person is willing and able to describe what they consider to be the true debt, it will be difficult for the problems within the partnership to be corrected. (There are, of course, times when there is actually a wish on one person’s part to not have a healthy connection at all…he would rather just disdain the person who made a mistake and stay loyal to his relationship with hate. This type of person is pitiable.) When faced with a communication impasse like this, it can be effective to switch from a content-based conversation (talking about how the initial transgression is unforgivable) to a process-based conversation (talking about what is happening between the two people at this point in their relationship that is making it impossible for one person to accept the other's apology). If that strategy proves ineffective and if the relationship is important enough, outside help in the form of mediation or therapy is in order.