Although your memories of being hurt may linger, forgiveness allows you to continue moving forward. But prioritizing compassion and empathy can make it easier to notice the good things and give them more weight than the bad. If something positive did come out of the betrayal, you already have some practice finding the flower amongst the rubble, so to speak. You can make your own meaning and find your own good, no matter what life brings.
Forgiveness can teach you a lot about compassion, but continuing to work on self-growth and strengthening your feelings of empathy toward others can help you cope with difficult circumstances in the future.
Just as good physical health can help you weather illness and injury, good mental health can help you remain strong in the face of emotional duress. You may never get an explanation or an apology. Letting bitterness and resentment maintain a hold over you only gives them power. Instead of letting the past hold you back, use what you learned from the experience to take steps to protect yourself from future pain. Practicing forgiveness and taking action to live your best life can help you find joy and peace.
Sure, it can seem unfair. After all, they hurt you. But forgiveness can help you move past these feelings and find peace. Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy. Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health.
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Mental Health. Why bother? Are you ready? But many people, I suspect, wrestle with the relationship between forgiveness and punishment. If you are thinking about becoming a forgiveness researcher, you might be intimidated to learn how many different ways there are to measure forgiveness.
There seem to be as many forgiveness scales as there are forgiveness researchers. I have picked two scales to discuss because these scales have been well-validated.
Both of them focus on interpersonal forgiveness. This questionnaire asks you to imagine yourself in five different situations where someone harms you, and to rate in each case how likely you would be to forgive the person. Your pattern of forgiveness across the five situations probably gives some important clues about your general willingness to forgive other people, or your dispositional forgiveness.
Berry and his collaborators presented some good evidence that their scale measures people's general tendencies to forgive. Across the various studies that they did to develop and validate this scale, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , the evidence suggested that people who were disinclined to forgive were more likely to be prone to anger, anxiety, and other negative emotions.
Furthermore, there seemed to be a small, positive relationship between willingness to forgive in these situations and the personality trait of agreeableness. Agreeable people are more good-natured, so this may suggest that forgiving people are also likely to be high in empathy, compassion, and trust. Initial work on the scale was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This scale, like the TNTF, focuses on forgiveness in relationships between people.
However, the TRIM asks participants to remember a specific offense in which someone harmed them. And, unlike the TNTF, which simply asks people's likelihood of forgiving, the TRIM asks people several questions about their motives for revenge and for avoiding the perpetrator. The authors explained, "When an offended relationship partner reports that he or she has not forgiven a close relationship partner for a hurtful action, the offended partner's perception of the offense is stimulating relationship-destructive levels of the two motivational states; that is, a high motivation to avoid contact with the offending partner and b high motivation to seek revenge or see harm come to the offending partner.
One of the ways these investigators validated the TRIM scale was to examine how the scale predicts qualities of people's relationships. It is likely that tendencies to forgive have important implications for personal relationships, and their study supported this.
People's revenge and avoidance motivations TRIM scores were predictive of their relationship satisfaction. People who tended to forgive reported greater relationship quality, and also greater commitment to relationships. The authors summarized that "these findings gave some encouraging support for our conceptualization of forgiving as a motivational transformation that occurs more readily in satisfactory, committed relationships.
Work on the TRIM scale suggests that being more forgiving is associated with greater relationship satisfaction. Is forgiveness associated with better physical health as well? It seems possible that a lack of forgiveness--a tendency to maintain anger and resentment, to ruminate--could have damaging effects on physical health: and this is just what Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet and her colleagues at Hope College in Michigan have shown.
Writing in Psychological Science , these investigators reported a study on the physiological effects of forgiveness versus holding a grudge. Witvliet and her co-investigators theorized that forgiveness "may free the wounded person from a prison of hurt and vengeful emotion, yielding both emotional and physical benefits, including reduced stress, less negative emotion, fewer cardiovascular problems, and improved immune system performance.
Unforgiving memories and mental imagery might produce negative facial expressions and increased cardiovascular and sympathetic reactivity, much as other negative and arousing emotions e. To test this important hypothesis, these researchers had 70 Hope College undergraduates remember a time in which they were hurt or mistreated by someone else.
Over the course of the study, the participant rehearsed either forgiving that person or being unforgiving. Participants were told that being forgiving consisted of empathizing with the offender, and being forgiving involved letting go of negative emotions toward the offender and cultivating conciliatory ones. Being unforgiving consisted of rehearsing the hurt and holding a grudge. Participants were encouraged to focus on the thoughts, feelings, and physical responses that would accompany each response.
During the study, the participants remembered offenses that included rejections, lies, and insults from their friends, romantic partners, and family members. During the two-hour study, participants' psychophysiological responses, emotional responses, and facial expressions were recorded. The results powerfully showed that forgiveness was associated with a healthier profile of emotional and physiological reactions, compared to unforgiveness.
During the unforgiveness periods, participants reported feeling more negative, aroused, angry and sad, and less in control. In contrast, when asked to try to be forgiving, participants reported feeling more empathy and did report feeling more forgiveness.
Physiological measurements showed that during unforgiveness, participants showed greater corrugator EMG activity, which is a measure of tension in the brow area of the face - perhaps indicative of negative emotions.
Skin conductance levels were lower in the forgiveness periods, indicating less sympathetic nervous system arousal. Arterial blood pressure was also higher during the unforgiveness periods. Many of theses changes persisted into the recovery period of the study. In all, the emotional and physiological data suggest that a sustained pattern of unforgiveness over time could result in poorer health because of the negative psychophysiological states that accompany unforgiveness.
Witvliet and colleagues believe that "although it is unlikely that the brief unforgiving trials in this study would have a clinically significant effect on health, we believe that the effects obtained in this study provide a conservative measure of effects that naturally occur during unforgiving responses to real-life offenders.
I have been discussing forgiveness in the context of interpersonal relationships, and I have been promoting the relationship and health benefits of forgiveness. But the question of the desirability of forgiveness is relevant in many other contexts.
Is forgiveness also possible or healthy in extreme cases, such as with respect to genocide? Even to people outside the victim group, the idea that survivors should forgive following genocide is an affront, an anathema. Nevertheless, forgiving is necessary and desirable. Rabbi Elliott Dorff explained that in Judaism, the offender is often required to repent before he can be forgiven, as this shows that the offender is sincere and wants to be reinstated into the community.
In the context of the Holocaust, many Jews believe that there is no repentance that can possibly make up for what happened, and hence believe that forgiveness is impossible. Think of forgiveness more about how it can change your life — by bringing you peace, happiness, and emotional and spiritual healing.
Forgiveness can take away the power the other person continues to wield in your life. The first step is to honestly assess and acknowledge the wrongs you've done and how they have affected others. Avoid judging yourself too harshly. If you're truly sorry for something you've said or done, consider admitting it to those you've harmed. Speak of your sincere sorrow or regret, and ask for forgiveness — without making excuses.
Remember, however, you can't force someone to forgive you. Others need to move to forgiveness in their own time. Whatever happens, commit to treating others with compassion, empathy and respect. There is a problem with information submitted for this request. Sign up for free, and stay up-to-date on research advancements, health tips and current health topics, like COVID, plus expert advice on managing your health.
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