I recently had lunch with a friend of mine who remarked, “I’m not a very forgiving person. I thought that I was, but I realized that I hold onto resentments and carry on arguments in my head with people who I feel wronged me. I really hold onto grudges, and I’ve got a lot of them.” As he said this, I thought of several clients who identify forgiveness as a recurring challenge. Forgiveness is often a theme in psychotherapy, although it is rarely named as such. Many people enter therapy seeking forgiveness for themselves, or, more often, seeking to find a way of forgiving others for the wrongs they’ve experienced.
Therapists rarely directly speak of “forgiveness”, although it is a tacitly implied goal of much of the work. The word carries connotations of religious mandates, ethical and moral imperatives, and sentimental feeling; these connotations occlude the processes that characterize meaningful forgiveness. In actuality, forgiveness is very hard work—and it is work of a very high order. Forgiveness is often essential for transformation and well-being. But forgiveness is elusive.
What does it mean to forgive? In one sense, forgiveness involves a kind of letting go. But I think this is too facile an understanding. It’s been my experience that forgiveness is actually a kind of integration. Forgiveness is a process that involves putting a particular moment and situation into perspective, grounding it in time, creating space and distance so that you can see the moment’s many facets, feeling the feelings, developing an understanding of all these dynamics and their impact. More significant, I think that forgiveness involves a fundamental kind of acceptance: accepting that your sense of self is now changed, and understanding that your changed self in turn changes your relationships with to others, especially those who have wronged you. Forgiveness is so very difficult because it must emerge out of relationships where there has been an abuse of power, where relational expectations have been betrayed, and where one’s sense of self has been, in some profound way, violated.
Ultimately, forgiveness is something of a paradox: only when the traumatic violation has been worked through and a sense of self is re-established can a person let it go.
Trauma is an extraordinarily complex experience. The physical and psychic wounds inflicted by trauma often run very deep and impact virtually every aspect of the person's subsequent life. The impact may be so severe that forgiveness may seem impossible. It certainly is too much to expect that meaningful forgiveness can happen quickly. Indeed, many years of carefully attentive therapy—therapy that invites uncomfortable feelings to be felt and aired, therapy that seeks to understand the layers of impact, therapy that strengthens and supports a new sense of self as it slowly emerges—may be required before a person might be ready to even consider forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not the same experience as justice, although they share a common goal: to make right, to reconcile. And forgiveness (and justice) is very different from vengeance which is more about reconfiguring the balance of power in one’s favor and exacting a price.
Forgiveness is very hard work. Many people experience years of anger, resentment, rage, anxiety, and sadness before finding the ability let them go—if they ever do. Many of us tend to cycle back to our experiences of hurt and find ourselves, like my friend, carrying on angry conversations in our minds with those people who have wronged us. Doing so may signal that we have not been able to forgive in a meaningful way; then, there is more hard work to do.
Forgiveness takes time. It requires a readiness to change our perspective, a willingness to redefine and understand ourselves in view of what has happened to us.
The work of psychotherapy is the work of transformation. Sometimes meaningful transformation may require forgiveness. Psychotherapy can create a space for us to have our feelings—anger, betrayal, rage, sadness—work them through, develop a new perspective, and find acceptance. Sometimes—not always—therapy can help us find the ability to forgive. (Indeed, let it be said that there are times when forgiveness is not possible. Then, a different kind to transformative work is in order.) When we are able to finally experience the gift of forgiveness, our lives can be transformed, and we can develop wholeness and health.