Psychologists generally define forgiveness as a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. … Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, nor does it mean condoning or excusing offenses.

What Is Forgiveness

Forgiveness typically involves:Letting go of anger or resentment you’re holding on to. Some amount of empathy towards the person who hurt you. Not necessarily reconciling or going back to the same relationship as before.

What Does It Involve

There are several reasons: Less stress, better for your mental health and self esteem. But it's difficult because we often believe forgiveness means lack of justice or weakness. And we're sometimes forced to forgive before we're ready.

Why Forgive?

Self-forgiveness can lead to the improvement of both relationship and partner satisfaction. Being more benevolent towards oneself after transgressing can promote a better relationship, and accepting responsibility for one’s wrongdoing

What About Self-Forgiveness

What is forgiveness really all about? Some see it as healing and 
restorative, and others view it as harmful and invalidating. This episode 
is covering some of the studies that have been done about forgiveness while 
we look at its benefits and potential pitfalls.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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“Psychologists generally define forgiveness as a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. … Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, nor does it mean condoning or excusing offenses.”

Carol Anderson, Reach Out Recovery

<ul><li>Letting go of anger or resentment you’re holding on to. </li><li>Some amount of empathy towards the person who hurt you. </li><li>Not necessarily reconciling or going back to the same relationship as before. </li> </ul>

There have been studies that have shown potential health benefits linked to forgiveness, such as:

<ul><li>Decreased anxiety. </li><li>Less depression. </li><li>Fewer physical health symptoms like high blood pressure, heart disease, and lower mortality rates. </li><li>Higher self-esteem. </li> </ul>

It all comes down to stress. There is nothing wrong with healthy anger or stress, but if both become very persistent and deeply rooted, they have negative effects.

<ul><li>We are taught that justice or revenge are better than forgiveness. </li><li>We think forgiveness means a lack of justice or consequences. </li><li>We might think forgiveness is weakness. </li><li>Our loved ones may hold onto anger for us and make it harder to forgive. </li><li>People may pressure us into forgiving before we are ready. </li> </ul>

Forgiveness is never required. It can have huge benefits for you, but being pressured into it often does more harm than good. It does not mean reconciliation; it is simply the release of anger or resentment.

“Self-forgiveness is the psychological process whereby an offender, acknowledging responsibility for the transgression committed, decreases self-resentment and is more benevolent toward the self.”

Stillwell and Baumeister, 1997 study

Self-forgiveness can lead to the improvement of both relationship and partner satisfaction. Being more benevolent towards oneself after transgressing can promote a better relationship, and accepting responsibility for one’s wrongdoing has been shown to be a key element in distinguishing genuine self-forgiveness from pseudo self-forgiveness.

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at <a href="mailto:info@multiamory">info@multiamory.com </a>and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about gifts and what the heck it's really all about. Forgiveness is praised and encouraged by some and is seen as damaging and invalidating by others. Today, we're going to be taking a look at some of the studies about forgiveness, looking at its benefits as well as some of the potential pitfalls. We're also going to dive into the topic of self-forgiveness which may be a secret key to self-improvement and better relationships.

Emily: I feel like that's like how you open a lot of things like this is the secret, that layer where relationships thrive.

Jase: You'll never believe, number seven, yes.

Emily: Yes. Exactly. I love it. That's good. That's not forgiveness.

Dedeker: How 66 ways of self-forgiveness can help your relationships.

Emily: Yes, exactly. We’re a Cosmo quiz now.

Jase: As the two of you know from previous episodes and probably our listeners know, whenever the topic of forgiveness comes up, I struggle with it. I struggle with what it means, then I've had suspicions that it's maybe over-glorified or not all it's cracked up to be.

That's exactly why I wanted to do this episode to try to understand what's this really all about, maybe find out if there's a difference between what bothers me when people talk about forgiveness versus what forgiveness actually is or when I hear about studies that say, it's good for your health being like, is it really though? What about it is what's going on here? That's why I wanted to do this to actually confront this thing I've struggled with not always felt great about.

Dedeker: Let's talk about our respective relationships to forgiveness before diving into this topic in earnest.

Jase: Yes. I'm curious what feelings you had about it before preparing for this episode and reading up on it and stuff. What would you think?

Emily: I think other people generally, I tend to forgive. I'm not a grudge holder really at all except for perhaps like a couple relationships where I was like, "No, bye. Don't ever talk to me again", which is not very many at all. Self-forgiveness I think is a different thing especially if it's perpetuated in relationships and by that I meanif the same issue comes up or the same thing is spoken about, remember when you did that thing and it's held over your head and then sometimes I'll feel like, oh my god, I'm the worst or something.

Dedeker: I grew up Christian. We'll talk about that a little bit later. I'm not even going to get into all the nitty gritty of that this moment, but for me, definitely after I left the Christian Church, I think there was a shift in the role that forgiveness played in my life and in my psyche. I feel like there's definitely a shift in it just was less of a concept presented to me / shoved in my face day after day after day.

I started thinking about it differently for sure. From a cultural level, I think it has morphed more into something like acceptance. We're going to label it as acceptance or radical acceptance or even shifting into, "Just let it go". Your ex boyfriend hurt you, okay, now it's time to let it go. Here's the joke for the musical theater kids is to ask like on a scale between Elsa and Javert, how good are you at letting it go? I have some days where I'm on the Elsa end of the spectrum and I have some days where I'm on the Javert end of the spectrum.

Emily: Javert literally threw himself into water. That's how much he couldn't.

Dedeker: She couldn't let it go.

Jase: Decades later.

Dedeker: I think that is interesting that because forgiveness as a concept culturally, I think does have a little bit of a negative connotation now which again, we'll unpack a little bit later that it has morphed into these maybe more palatable versions of acceptance or letting go. That it's more focused on you not holding the grudge or the benefits to you rather than the potential benefit to the other person.

Emily: Yes. I would agree with that. That it is more an internal thing. I agree with that. I agree with that sentiment.

Jase: That's what I thought was so interesting about doing this episode because I struggled with a lot of the same things that you two have brought up and looking at how the researchers and people who really spend a lot of time thinking about and studying forgiveness, how they talk about it, it is very different from what I thought and what I got culturally growing up Christian and also just the way that people use that term. That was definitely an interesting thing in putting this episode together.

Emily: Let's start with the definition as we do often on this podcast. Carol Anderson on Reach Out Recovery said, "Psychologists generally define forgiveness as a conscious deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting nor does it mean condoning or excusing offenses."

Again, there it is. It's very internal. It's an internal thing and I would argue that to forgive someone, they don't necessarily need to know that you've forgiven them. I don't know. Sometimes, especially when it's so internal, it's more of like a release of that thing getting in the way of your life potentially.

Jase: Yes. In looking at these different articles and different studies and how they defined forgiveness, and there were a bunch of different ones that we looked at for this, there were a few common properties that came up. One is that thing that was in that definition Emily read, which is that it involves letting go of anger and resentment similar to what Dedeker was talking about, about like a way of letting something go.

That's an aspect that was common in pretty much all the definitions I found. The next one is that it involves some amount of generating empathy toward the other person or the group that hurt you. Then the third is that it does not mean reconciliation or going back to the same as things were before and that was something that got emphasized over and over and over again.

That to me was like, aha, this is the part that's different from how I thought about forgiveness and I think we'll get into that a little bit more later as well. Then some areas where the definitions varied a bit was on things like how much focus is on generating positive thoughts about the other person versus just letting go of the cycle of negative resentful, angry thoughts.

Next was how much focus is on trying to empathize with the person who hurt you. Trying to imagine like maybe they might've done it because of this or they might've thought it was because of this thing that some emphasize that more than others. That wasn't really part of it very much.

Then that third part like Emily brought up is whether or not you actually need to tell anyone. Whether you need to tell the person or anyone at all that this is something you're doing. Those are the areas where they varied a little, but the traits they had in common was letting go of anger and resentment, having some amount of empathy toward that other person or at least thinking of them as a human being, essentially, who has intrinsic value as a human being, but it doesn't mean excusing what they did or going back to the way things were or it doesn't mean not having justice. That was an interesting part too. That was very different from my conception of forgiveness.

Dedeker: Yes. The more you're talking about it and looking at all these varied definitions, I'm getting this sense that culturally we very tightly associate forgiveness with, I guess, a lack of justice, with reconciliation, with things going back to the way they were before, with forgetting we have that aphorism forgive and forget. It's like they're like chained together but the reality is, they can be teased apart like you're saying that you can get justice and have a sense of justice being served and also forgive.

You maybe don't reconcile with the person and you can also forgive at the same time that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive things, which I will be honest, is a little challenging probably just because I'm the product of my culture and so these concepts are so tightly wound up also in my own mind, but it is really interesting to think about it having a little bit more space from each other.

Emily: Well, there's an additional interesting distinction made in an article by Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, and it divides forgiveness up into two subcategories. The first is decisional forgiveness, which is deciding to forego revenge and treat the other person as a human being. Wow, that use of revenge is really interesting. That's fascinating and then emotional forgiveness, which is letting go of negative emotions and replacing them with more positive other-centered emotions.

This distinction doesn't show up much in other literature even this article mentioned that they're usually connected to each other, but it's an interesting way to look at what we mean when we say forgiveness, because that revenge aspect, that to me, comes in more in our movies and media and TV. Most recently, I'm thinking of the ending of a specific video game that I feel like I shouldn't say the end of it because you two haven't played it actually, but all I'll say is, I won't say anything except for the ending grasps with this element of revenge and--

Jase: Struggles with whether or not revenge is--

Emily: Whether or not to enact revenge and the whole thing is about that, and then struggling with that near the end of the game, and it's really profound. I think that that's because when you have another human being in front of you, it's like, well, shit, they are a human and, maybe I should see them as such, and not just like my view of what occurred even if it is really bad.

Dedeker: Why do we even bother with forgiveness? Is there any compelling reason why we should bother with forgiveness? Today, there has been about a Bazillion Kajillion studies that have shown health benefits to forgiveness. All the usual good stuff like decreased anxiety, less depression, fewer physical health symptoms like high blood pressure and heart disease, lower mortality rates, higher self-esteem, all that stuff where they're like, Oh, yes, you should drink water and get enough sleep and like, these are things and it's like, yes, yes, yes.

The reason for that is because it comes down to stress. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with stress and there's also nothing inherently wrong with anger. We have to give a call back to our episode 323, where we discussed about how healthy anger is actually very important. However, we do also know from a scientific standpoint, that chronic stress does have a lot of these negative health effects, and also constantly being angry, exerts a lot of physical and mental stress. Again, like anger, having some stress in your life is actually a good thing. It's been linked to greater life satisfaction and overall quality of life but with both, if they become persistent and deeply rooted, they have a negative effect.

Emily: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. The emotional health benefits of forgiving are particularly well studied. A meta-analysis of 54 different forgiveness studies published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 2014, reliably demonstrated professionally lead forgiveness interventions to have significant positive effects on improving anxiety and depression, as well as increasing hope. That's really interesting. Like, how does one even determine increasing hope? I guess it's just they stated, like, I'm hopeful now for the future, maybe because I let go of this thing, whatever it was.

Jase: It's all existing mechanisms for testing these different traits, right? It's one of those things where it's like on scale of one to five, strongly or don't agree with this statement, and it's like a bunch of different ones that then from those they pull out the numbers and can correlate those to different feelings like depression, anxiety and hope and optimism and all those sorts of things.

Emily: I like that. These studies primarily focused on forgiveness interventions led by a professional therapist, the analysis also shows evidence that even worksheets and self-led exercises can have positive effects too. I think people who are going to want to do things online or do things themselves rather than go to a place and maybe go to therapy or go to a workshop or whatever they'll be doing it like at home online now. That's the way in which we're headed. That's nice that these self things, things done by the self can still lead to positive feedback for the person.

Jase: Yes, that's one of those things where a lot of these studies are based. They're studies for therapists and psychologists and stuff. It's based around interventions that they would do with their clients. That's what most of the research is about. However, there were some that did involve more self-led exercises and did find promising results that seems to indicate you can also get benefit from that, which I think we all on this podcast are like, yes, of course, like, that's what we do but it's just nice to see that there is also some research that's backing that up as well.

Emily: Absolutely and yes, I think when we ask ourselves, why should we even bother with forgiveness? It's a larger, broader question about what is forgiveness as a whole? Is it a thing that's positive? Is it a thing that maybe makes you weak? No, it is a positive thing. I think, it sometimes it's perceived as you're just like giving up or you're letting the other person win or whatever but no, it is, in essence, a form of love for yourself to let something go and I think a form of love and compassion for others and empathy even again, as we said if somebody did a really great wrongdoing to you.

Jase: That gets into the topic of why is it dang hard? Why is it hard? Why do we have this resistance to it? Why have I felt uncomfortable with the concept of it. There's a few main reasons that came up in the stuff that we looked at. One is that we're taught that justice or revenge are the thing you should want and I think it's interesting that you mentioned, Emily, that the word revenge jumped out to you previously when we were talking about that.

Emily: It just feels very violent. If that makes sense. I think like, Kill Bill or something. I enjoyed that movie for a lot of reasons, but it definitely is extremely violent and The Good, Bad, and the Ugly, or any of those movies.

Jase: Right, and that's exactly it. Is that we glorify revenge as a form of justice, right? When we think about vigilantes, which is like all of our superhero movies fall into that fantasy. There's all sorts of different versions of it but I think it is interesting that in the definitions that we found in the studies, there's this differentiation between letting go of revenge, but not having to let go of justice and that is this interesting distinction that I think most of us are not taught to think about.

I know I certainly have not been really taught to think of that. It's like, no, someone wronged me, I want them to pay for it. Whether that's me enacting revenge on them or some sort of justice.

Emily: Somebody else, yes.

Jase: If someone else does it, it's justice, when I do it, then it's revenge.

Dedeler: I think it really cuts to the root of what we are socialized to think of as justice like we talked about in past episodes where we've talked about transformational justice, and restorative justice and things like that. Again, we grew up in a culture where justice equals payments, equals hurting, equals somebody else being punished and when we think of justice more as how do I make this complete again, how do I help make this heal?

Again, it's a little bit different and it doesn't mean that there's no consequences, but I think it does shift that emphasis a little bit better or a little bit in a different direction and this idea that, you can have justice served in a particular way and also forgive at the same time, is really interesting.

Emily: It makes me think of the Van Jones video that we all watched. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Jase: Yes, it's a whole series.

Emily: Yes, essentially, like meeting people who've committed horrible crimes against like family members or whatever, that those crimes were done to and forgiving them, essentially.

Jase: Yes. It's allowing that conversation to happen as opposed to what the justice system does, which is anonymize everyone. that the perpetrator never has to even confront face to face with what they did and then that similarly, the person who has hurt by it never gets even an attempt at closure because it's like, oh yeah, justice, that is the closure you should need. That's all you should need.

As many people who've been hurt, that's not the closure. That's not it but that's also to say that forgiveness doesn't mean you don't also have that justice too. I do think that distinction's going to come up again and again in this because that for me was the big shift in how I'd been thinking about it. Next, why is it hard? Another one is that we think forgiveness is weakness. Emily mentioned that earlier. I think sometimes people will encourage us not to forgive because they're angry on our behalf.

Dedeker: Yes, that happened to me so many times especially with my mother. My mom will go full on mama bear on anyone who has hurt me to the extent of whether that's an ex who treated me crappy or there was just a friend who slighted me, she's just like there and angry and it's good. I think people experience that from family members, from friends, from partners, it's good. It's a good feeling but if you are ready to forgive and let go, it can also hamper that.

Jase: Yes and then on the flip side, you may have family members or friends or your church or something like that who really pressures you to forgive when you're not ready to.

Dedeker: Oh my goodness. Yes. My mom, made me listen to this audio book about radical forgiveness when I was about three weeks out from a bad breakup and I did it, I did the thing, I listened to it. I tried to go through the whole process, but it was way too early to be trying to do any radical forgiveness. Maybe that makes it not very radical forgiveness, but I'm finding out my whole [crosstalk[ on forgiveness in that case.

Emily: I'm going to give you a pass on that one, for sure. She needed to calm down but yes.

Jase: Yes. I thought this one quote here was fun about forgiveness being weakness. This is from Everett Worthington, Dr. Worthington who's been studying forgiveness for 10 years or so. When asked about people thinking that forgiveness means you're weak, his response to that was "Well,, that that person must not have tried it" I think that's pretty great to sum that one up there.

Emily: Interesting. Yes because it requires a huge amount of courage, I think, to forgive.

Jase: Yes, and introspection and practice too. It's not just like, oh yeah, listen to this audio book and then you can do it in any point, at any time, no matter where you are in your healing process.

Emily: All right. Even though we're getting into like, you should forgive people, it's a good thing. It's nice. You still are not required to forgive and as we've discussed, forgiveness can have it's own benefits great things for your health, et cetera, but being pressured into forgiving or forgiving before you're ready, it can do more harm than good. If you're finding that you aren't able to forgive someone, it doesn't mean in that you're a bad person or that you're failing somehow, you might just not be there yet in your healing process or you might never get there and that's okay.

There might be other ways that you can find to move on and to find peace in your life or it could just mean redefining forgiveness or finding something else to do entirely regarding that person. I've found that there were people in my life that did things that were harmful to me and I'm like, yes, they're not going to be in my life anymore. If forgiveness doesn't really even enter the equation, it's just like, I'm going to save myself the pain of remembering that time that they were in my life by just having them not be a part of my life or interacting with them in any way anymore.

Dedeker: I have a quote here from a Psychology Today article written by David Bedrick. The name of the article is Six Reasons Not To Forgive, Not Yet. The author discusses this range of clients that they've worked with and how it's so important to let people come to forgiveness when they're ready and that attempting to forgive too early can lead to just suppressing the anger and suppressing the hurt without actually processing it.

To quote from the article, "Forgiveness comes from within, it's not something that can be forced. Either you can do it or you can't. If you cannot, then don't think that you're a bad person or that you failed in some way. In some cases, forgiveness is just not possible. You may learn not to despise the perpetrator, but saying you forgive can be hollow if that's not what you truly feel." That's pulling out even another different color from this. Maybe you don't forgive, but you also don't hate the person that hurt you at the same time. That's also a separate aspect of this.

Jase: We do love finding neutrality on this show.

Dedeker: We love that. We love neutrality. We loves nuances. We love Nutella. We love all things.

Emily: Yes. That's bringing up a specific thing for me. I had a teacher in college who really humiliated me when I was in college to my small group of classmates. There were only like 14 of us in our class and in a physical and mental way, often. I really despised her for a long, long time and she's the person who I just don't think of anymore. I'm still friends with her on Facebook. Sometimes things come up, but I never ever interact and a lot of people love her and really deeply care about her as a teacher and I'm just not one of them and that's okay. I have moved past it but I don't know if I've forgiven that hurt.

Dedeker: On the scale between Elsa and Javert, where do you think you are?

Emily: I think I've let it go as much as I can. I'm only like 10 years removed from the situation, which is a long time, but I can feel it. I'm not there yet. I'm not total forgiveness there yet listening. If you're listening to this, then you maybe know who you're, but that's fine. I don't need to fucking forgive you.

Jase: Gosh. Yes, yes, exactly. You don't need to. Maybe you'll never get there. Maybe you will and it'll be great for you but that's your choice to make, right?

Jase: It's not something that you owe to her or to us or to anyone else, right?

Emily: Yes, thank you.

Jase: We're going to go on to talking a little bit more about forgiveness and then getting into self forgiveness as well as some ways to actually go about this but before we get to that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. Please take a moment, check them out. If you're interested in it, go visit the links and stuff because that really does go a long way to help support this show and help us keep all this content coming to everyone out there every week for free.

We're back. Something that really struck me and I mentioned this before is, how many different articles and studies really spent the time to clarify that forgiveness does not mean reconciliation or going back to the way things were?

Here's a few quotes. This one from Psychology Today. "Forgiveness is the release of resentment or anger. Forgiveness doesn't mean reconciliation. One doesn't have to return to the same relationship or accept the same harmful behaviors from an offender."

This one's from the Phoenix Counseling Collective. "The problematic narrative that gets told about forgiveness is that forgiving someone means that you have to allow the relationship to be what it was before they hurt you and that you have to forget and go back to normal. However, this is problematic because it can create dangerous situations for yourself and for others."

Emily: Also, a quote by Dr. Worthington, "Whether I forgive or don't forgive isn't going to affect whether justice is done. Forgiveness happens inside my skin." It's crawling in my skin. Okay and then National Institutes of Health says, "Care must of course be taken however, not to confuse forgiveness with a restored relationship. This could be a particularly problematic in contexts in which this would for facilitate the dynamics of prolonged intimate partner violence."

Jase: Pretty resounding sentiment there, right? That it's not that, and this is the part that was so new for me and I think it's because of that Christian upbringing, right? That the messaging that you're given about forgiveness is like forgiveness is a thing God does and you should do it too because it's just good. The forgiveness that I was at least taught that God does, is that forgiven and forget. It's like, okay, you're completely pardoned. Everything you did that's bad, is now washed away.

Emily: This must not be in the part of the Bible that we've read.

Dedeker: No, not quite yet. It's very Christian. That's very Christ focused narrative about forgiveness.

342 - To Forgive or Not To Forgive — Multiamory

What Is Forgiveness

What Does It Involve

Why Forgive?

What About Self-Forgiveness

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