342 - To Forgive or Not To Forgive
What is forgiveness?
“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
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.
Why forgive?
There have been studies that have shown potential health benefits linked to forgiveness, such as:
Decreased anxiety.
Less depression.
Fewer physical health symptoms like high blood pressure, heart disease, and lower mortality rates.
Higher self-esteem.
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.
Why is it so difficult to forgive?
We are taught that justice or revenge are better than forgiveness.
We think forgiveness means a lack of justice or consequences.
We might think forgiveness is weakness.
Our loved ones may hold onto anger for us and make it harder to forgive.
People may pressure us into forgiving before we are ready.
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
“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.
Transcript
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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.
Jase: Absolutely.
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?
Emily: Exactly.
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.
Jase: No.
Dedeker: No, not quite yet. It's very Christian. That's very Christ focused narrative about forgiveness.
Emily: Got it.
Jase: that idea that it means you're back to a good relationship with God because He's forgiven you and that means completely forgotten and accepts you back. It's like, okay, that's what God does. That's good. That's what you should do and here are all these articles and all these studies saying, no, actually, that's not what this is. That's actually a bad thing.
Emily: Did that screw you up as kids you two?
Dedeker: What a question.
Emily: Let me try to rephrase that.
Jase: That's a good question. No, I love that.
Emily: Did that alter the way in which you see forgiveness and create maybe narratives in your mind about it that you ultimately couldn't really do because you're a normal human person? Did you fuck you up? I don't know.
Dedeker: I think actually ironically being raised with the Christian narrative around forgiveness made me more resistant to forgiving people.
Emily: Fascinating.
Dedeker: I think total total backfire because the Christian emphasis is so much on this very unconditional forgiveness that happens very quickly also. Like you get hurt, you forgive, you forget. They're your brother in Christ again or your sister in Christ again or whatever you want to call it and everything is as it was before. Hence, I think that led me to not wanting to forgive because I wasn't ready to go that far. Two days after somebody hurt me for instance or even a year maybe even after somebody hurt me, I'm not ready to go to that extreme level necessarily.
Emily: How about you, Jase?
Dedeker: How screwed up are you, Jase?
Jase: Oh, boy. Incredibly. I think for me at first, it was more of, yes, totally, that makes sense. Turn the other cheek. That's what I'm going to do. That's great. Then it was more that later I became very disillusioned with that after seeing how shitty and harmful that can be and how it can be a way of people avoiding facing any consequences for things that they've done and of facilitating people who hurt people over and over again. Even if you're going to have compassion for that person, just forgetting what they did is not helping them either.
You're actually hurting everyone in this situation by applying this idea of like oh, totally forgive and forget. I think also now on the other hand I've been disillusioned with the idea that someone's done a bad thing, they need to be ex-communicated from their community completely and cut off from all support and they're a terrible person and they're awful and we talk about that a lot on this show too. I think on either extreme, you're not helping yourself, you're not helping that person, you're just making a net loss here.
Emily: The middle path is the way.
Jase: The middle path, yes. I think that Christian upbringing is what made me so resistant to this concept before doing this episode.
Dedeker: I don't want to get too deep into the story but in my church growing up, this happened a few years or this came to light a few years after I'd already left the church. A friend of mine basically was groomed by the youth pastor. Was groomed and essentially abused. That's all, I'm not going to go into the details of what happened because I think that's probably too upsetting and not necessary to go into right now but that's the long story short version of it. Really had to grapple a lot with this whole forgiveness thing. A lot.
Because of the fact that when it happened and when it came to light, she was still very much steeped in Christian culture in the church and was still a minor also at the same time and then finally came of age and started going to therapy and started doing a lot of her own work to actually help to process this and deal with this.
Essentially, long story short, in her writing, she also happens to be a really fantastic writer and has written publicly about a lot of this stuff, came to the same conclusions basically that I don't have to reconnect to this person and I don't need to give this person a free pass in my mind and I also don't need to forget what happened because it was so formative. What I can do is something for myself here in the way that I move forward.
I think it could have been a lot worse essentially. I know my friend had that really shoved in her face essentially of having to deal with this whole forgiveness thing. I think it's something that probably a lot of people have experienced in the Christian Church of a little bit of that forgiveness that's not actually really helpful to anybody involved. That's just there because it's dogmatic.
Jase: I think it's interesting because when you talk about forgiveness, people tend to think about it as something you do for someone else. As we've been talking about with the benefits and that it's not even for them, it's something that you're doing for yourself to stop having as much pain for yourself. Not to let them off the hook. Not to give them something. That forgiveness of someone else is a gift you can give yourself. Then in the last part of the episode, we're going to talk about self-forgiveness which is something that seems like you're just doing it for yourself but actually, you may be doing it for other people's benefit.
Dedeker: It's all swoopy swapped. We actually stumbled on this study when doing research for the relationship maintenance episode a few episodes ago. I'm going to be pulling from this 2013 study that was published in the Journal of Family Psychology titled self-forgiveness in romantic relationships: It matters to both of us. They referenced a 1997 study that found that, "Victims tend to overlook details that facilitate forgiving and embellish their memories with details that make forgiving more difficult. Whereas transgressors tend to embellish details such as extenuating circumstances that facilitate forgiving. 100% is like a human cognitive biases.
It's like we really really zero in on the ways that other people have hurt us and we really downplay the way that we've hurt other people. That's just the way that our brains work. It also says that, "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". I don't know if this is easier or harder than forgiving other people. I think it depends.
I know our brains are more trained to give ourselves a break and to give ourselves a pat on the back but there are some things where I feel like it's just a lot more sticky to have any sense of self forgiveness or letting go of any sense of like self shaming.
Jase: Something I thought was interesting here is that accepting responsibility part that you mentioned there of self-forgiveness has been hypothesized to be the key element that distinguishes genuine self-forgiveness from what they call pseudo self-forgiveness. This is interesting that in the study they did phrase what you read earlier, Dedeker, about that the victim tends to overlook details facilitating forgiveness and embellish their memories with more like resentment type things and that the transgressors tend to embellish details such as extenuating circumstances. That they said that that facilitates forgiving but they also talk about how self-forgiveness is difficult and we've experienced it being difficult.
I actually think something here that maybe they didn't look at that could be interesting is this idea that by focusing on your own extenuating circumstances of why you might've done the thing, you may actually be preventing yourself from this key step of accepting responsibility for doing something wrong, that is the key part of self-forgiveness. It's like I'm only okay if I can come up with an excuse why I did this thing and then you're constantly wrestling with it.
I know this has been my experience in times when I've learned that I've hurt someone or that I've done something bad. It's like you justify it. There was miscommunication or I didn't realize. You make a lot of excuses for yourself but you get stuck in that of feeling bad and trying to excuse yourself but then you know your excuses maybe aren't that good. Almost like you're trying to gaslight yourself into thinking that you're an okay person because this key step of being able to accept you did something bad and forgive yourself. I think that's the part that I'm like, I've been working on that for many years.
Anyway going on. Numerous studies that they looked at, show that forgiveness by the victim of a partner transgression is related to improved intimacy, improved commitment, improved relationships satisfaction and less ongoing conflict. Just to clarify, in these studies, they did cover a big range of transgressions from more minor things to more serious things but I don't think that any of the examples in these studies are like intimate partner abuse type situations. If that helps clarify these are more probably infidelity came up or breaking agreements or things like that. Just to be aware of the context.
Dedeker: I guess leaving the toilet seat up which I didn't realize was a thing that's been bugging Jase this entire time to flip all the gender norms on their heads.
Emily: I get where Jase is coming from. The seat for me and the lid for Jase, which now because you said that, Jase, I close much more often.
Dedeker: Me too actually. Now that you finally said something. I guess you did say something once then I completely disregarded it, so that's on me, I'm going to take some responsibility.
Emily: There you go.
Dedeker: That I didn't listen properly the first time you made that request.
Emily: Apparently that happened during our relationship, I don't fucking know.
Jase: Anyway, so they found that the person who was hurt forgiving the other person has these positive benefits for both people in the relationship. Similarly, in other studies, they've found that a tendency to be able to forgive the self is also positively associated with relationship satisfaction and that self-forgiveness serves as a mediator in that relationship between self-blame and depressive affect that you can go through when you're suffering in that guilt spiral. Particularly after a relationship's ended, if you're wrestling with a lot of guilt and shame for yourself about that, that self-forgiveness goes a long way toward mediating some of those feelings of depression and self-blame that come up.
Self-forgiveness, just like in our personal forgiveness, has an increase both in positive beliefs and feelings toward the self as well as a reduction of negative ones. Which I think goes against what a lot of people would associate with accepting blame, accepting that you've done something wrong, but that's the key point here, is that forgiveness, which involves that, reduces negative thoughts about the self and increases positive thoughts.
Emily: They also say, "A person is likely to improve both partner and own relationship satisfaction when he or she stops criticizing himself/herself and feeling remorseful for offenses perpetrated against the partner, but not when he or she is more benevolent or compassionate toward the self and believes he or she has grown due to the offense committed." Interesting.
Jase: Yes, that the self-forgiveness is the more important part than just being like, "Oh, I think I've grown from this," which is-- That was also like a, "Huh. Interesting, wouldn't have expected that."
Emily: Sure. I guess that makes sense, though. Because that is a very intense internal change that I think happens. Even if you're like, "Well, I've learned something," but you may not ultimately forgive yourself for that thing and still be in the same spot that you were even if you think that you've grown. I don't know, that's an interesting differentiation. Also, "Self-forgiveness is positively related to your relationship satisfaction, even after controlling for the offender's guilt feelings and perception of transgression severity."
Alrighty, that's good, higher related satisfaction in the relationship. Finally, "Given the interdependent nature of close relationships, self-forgiveness of offenses perpetrated in them is likely to be a means of caring for both the self and the other or even better, a means of taking care of the other while taking care of the self." Caring for each of you and taking care of each of you. That's cool.
Jase: Right, that by offering the self forgiveness to yourself, you're taking better care of your partner too.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Both in terms of you actually then showing that you're more likely to do better in the future and do better in the relationship, but also that their own satisfaction of your relationship will improve too.
Emily: Yes. I think that makes sense.
Jase: I'm just like, okay, here's my homework. Got to forgive the self.
Dedeker: Oh, boy. It's easier said than done, so much of this.
Jase: It is, and this is something that a lot of the articles that I found did really recommend if you're really struggling with stuff like this, seeking help. Seeking someone who can actually lead you through an intervention. The ones I read about really run the gamut from ones that's like a one session, more behavioral therapy type session, to others that's like a seven month long, 54 session program that takes you through this whole long process. I imagine it really depends on what the situation is, where you're at, how hard this is, how much strife and stress it's causing for you, there's a lot of factors there.
It is something, if listening to this episode you're like, "Oof", maybe this is the time to seek some help with that. Seek some help going through that or at the very least, looking up maybe some worksheets and resources online.
In closing, I did want to just point out that we've brought up a lot of different examples and talked about things from our own lives and people's lives that we know, and that the benefits of forgiveness and these things do apply in everything from big to small situations. To go back to Everett Worthington, who's one of the researchers we've quoted a few times in this episode, he'd been researching forgiveness for almost ten years when his mother was murdered by a burglar who broke into her house. The police were pretty confident that they identified the burglar but didn't have enough to prosecute and there was no justice that was gotten.
Based on his years of practice in researching forgiveness and learning about it, according to him, he was able to forgive the young man surprisingly quickly. Those are his words, "surprisingly quickly" he was able to do this. At the same time, you might hear that and go, "Ugh, yeah, I don't know about that," but don't be discouraged because he did say, it's not natural, he's just not naturally a forgiving person, it took a lot of practice. He also told a story about how he had a professor in grad school that gave him a B and it took him ten years to forgive that guy.
Dedeker: Oh, no.
Emily: See, there you go, freaking professors.
Jase: Right?
Dedeker: I can relate, though, I can relate. As a straight-A student, that's a real slight.
Emily: How dare they? Dedeker Winston.
Jase: I guess the lesson there is there's things to learn here but, again, don't take it to mean that if you haven't forgiven or can't or don't ever, that doesn't mean you're failing and it's like, "Oh, well this thing's small and I couldn't forgive and this thing's big and I could." It's like, that's okay, right? The point of this is to help you, to help your processing, and as far as self-forgiveness, hopefully also helping your relationships.
We're going to go record a bonus episode for our Patreons for this one, and in this, we looked at a lot of different forgiveness interventions and found one worksheet that I really like that's a short little five-page one. We're going to take a look at that and talk about that in our bonus for Patreons. For everyone out there, we would love to hear from you. On our Instagram story, we have a question which is, "What is something you would like to forgive yourself for?" I mean, that's like, the bigger question that we ask sometimes, but--
Emily: Yes. Who am I?
Jase: If you want to join in that discussion, check that out on our Instagram story. The best place to share your thoughts, if you want to talk about this episode more, is on this episode's discussion thread in our private Facebook group or Discord chat. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to patreon.com/multiamory. In addition, you can share publicly on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our episodes are edited by Mauricio Balvanera. Our social media wizard is Will McMillan. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our researcher for this episode was Em Mais. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh & Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript of this episode will be available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.