Since the first empirically based study on person-to-person forgiveness was published in the social sciences (Enright et al., 1989), thousands of articles have been published on the topic.
Because the psychological exploration of forgiveness is still relatively new, there has been disagreement and debate on what, exactly, forgiveness is and whether it is an appropriate response in the mental health professions for people hurt by the injustices of others.
In the spirit of this continuing debate, I would like to offer my response to a recent post, “Why Forgiveness Is Not Required in Trauma Recovery.”
My intent is: If people who are traumatized or who are therapists read the essay, they may be discouraged from trying forgiveness. This would be most unfortunate if they rejected it because of incorrect information.
To help therapists and clients make as informed a decision as possible, I want to counter what appears to be misunderstandings about what forgiveness actually is and what encompasses forgiveness therapy.
Five points for your consideration
1. The author stated: “Forgiveness diminishes harms and wrongs, which can inhibit safety.” This is not correct. When people begin to truly forgive, they realize that what happened to them was unfair, is unfair, and always will be unfair.
To forgive is not to excuse the wrong, but to stand firm in the truth that this was an injustice (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2015). Thus, the one considering forgiveness has a rational understanding that the one who did the harm could do so again.
2. As a moral virtue, forgiveness never ever should be forced onto anyone. On this point, I agree with the author. Instead, people should be drawn to forgiveness by their own free will. That is the case for all moral virtues. For example, in the case of altruism, we do not put pressure on people to be altruistic, hovering over them and insisting that they must give money to the poor.
The criticism by the author on this point needs to center, not on forgiveness, but instead on the person who pressures the unjustly injured person to forgive. The wrong here is within the person who is putting on the pressure, not on forgiveness itself.
As my colleague, Chontay Glenn, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Michigan-Flint, who suffered the trauma of sexual abuse, has said to me: “No one can be forced into forgiveness anyway because it is an internal response to an injustice....it is the healing of one’s own soul against an injustice.” READ MORE...
