STORY BYWe start practicing just as soon as we get our feet under us. Our brother, sister or that kid in play group bops us or takes the blocks we were industriously stacking. We wail and, hopefully, someone makes the culprit apologize. Then comes our instruction: do not bop back—return to your block-building. (This is when we first learn to pout—or gloat.)
Apologizing is humbling but forgiveness is a whole other challenge. Learning to forgive may even require some rewiring of our evolutionary brain. Apes have been observed waiting for weeks or months to find the right opportunity to retaliate against a rival. Humans can plot and wait lifetimes.
The old amygdala, writes Marc Ian Barasch, author of Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness, “ is the likely home office of Grudge Enterprises and its wholly owned subsidiary, Revenge Unlimited.”
The almond-sized brain structure that prepares us for fight-or-flight is hardwired to the neocortex, the brain's center of higher reasoning, and to the visual cortex, suggesting, that “it is the culprit in our all-too-vivid recall of past slights, and an unindicted co-conspirator in the plotting of payback,” Barasch says.
The amygdala must be working overtime. Surveys in several countries show that 90 percent of men and over 80 percent of women have had fantasies about killing people they don't like. The favorite targets are romantic rivals, stepparents, and people who have humiliated us.
If getting back at someone is so common and apparently so hardwired, what's the point of even trying to forgive? The effort in trying must be important since every religion has teachings on the imperative of forgiveness. Clearly, civilized societies depend on people not acting out their revenge fantasies. But, as Barasch puts it, what are the personal advantages to quit “paying a daily tithe to the Church of Mine enemy, enmeshing myself in the big, dumb cycle of retribution that already blights the planet?”
“Hating is like drinking poison and expectingLet's face it, nursing wounds just feels too good to let go.
It's been said that “Hating is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Evidence is abundant that resentment and hatred literally is a poison that kills us physically. Forgiveness is looking like a powerful antidote.
There are over 40 laboratories now researching forgiveness. It turns out that true forgiveness has many benefits for health and longevity. Evidence indicates it increases self-esteem, decreases anxiety and anger, lowers heart rates, and reduces blood pressure. Researcher Kathleen Lawler concludes, “Forgiveness clearly is associated with a variety of health measures. While some of this effect may be carried by interpersonal competence, spirituality and reduction of negative affect, forgiveness adds uniquely to the prediction of health.”
In 1981, the late Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt when Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca shot him in the stomach in St. Peter's Square. Two and a half years later, the Pope, dressed in his crisp white robes, sat in a bare prison cell in Rome, knee-to-knee with his would-be assassin, and forgave him. John Paul II lived another 23 years. Ah, but that's what Popes do, we say. How do the rest of us let go of searing assaults? The truth is we do it every day all over the world.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is offering a forum for people on both sides of the apartheid atrocities to apologize to each other.
“I ask for your forgiveness,In Rwanda, where the mass killings of 1994 left 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus dead, many foot soldiers in the slaughter are facing “gacaca” trials, where the community hears their cases and often forgives those who confess.
Recently, in Gulu, Uganda, Achioli chiefs used their traditional reconciliation ceremonies to forgive the most heinous of transgressions.
Reported in the New York Times (April 18, 2005):
“Young men and women who had recently defected from the rebels lined up according to rank on a hilltop overlooking this war-scarred regional capital, with a one-legged lieutenant colonel in the lead and some adolescent privates bringing up the rear. They had killed and maimed together. They had raped and pillaged. One after the other, they stuck their bare right feet in a freshly crack egg, with the lieutenant colonel, who lost his right leg to a bomb, inserting his right crutch in the egg instead. The egg symbolizes innocent life, according to local custom, and by dabbing themselves in it the killers are restoring themselves to the way they used to be.
Next, the former fighters brushed against the branch of a Pobo tree, which symbolically cleansed them. By stepping over a pole, they were welcomed back into the community. ‘I ask for your forgiveness,’ said Charles Otim, 34, the rebel lieutenant colonel, who had been abducted by the rebels himself, at the age of 16, early in the war. ‘We have wronged you.’”
But having someone who has wronged you apologize doesn't necessarily lead to forgiveness. So what does?
“A person may give up a grudge and still be left with detached indifference. Instead of forgivness,Robert Enright has been studying that question for two decades. One of the leading forgiveness researchers and founder of the University of Wisconsin's Human Development Study Group, Enright observes that a person may give up a grudge or resentment and still be left with “detached indifference, writing off the offender as morally incompetent...and not worthy of our time.” Instead of forgiveness, we “end up replacing resentment with alienation.”
What is necessary, he concluded after studying both psychological and religious texts on the subject, is a deeper level of forgiveness that he calls “a willed change of heart.” Sounds good, but, as everyone knows, it's far from simple to will one's heart to change. Making up our minds that we no longer want to hate the transgressor is a start, but that often doesn't carry us over the threshold to forgiveness.
Just as with love or happiness, there is no one path to forgiveness. Realizing that for our own good we need to quit hating can be the motivation that sustains the work of forgiveness. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who helped found the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said: “To forgive is the highest form of self-interest. I need to forgive so that my anger and resentment and lust for revenge don't corrode my being.”
It may help the process to know that forgiveness is not the same as forgetting or atonement. Pope John Paul II did not forget Mehmet Ali Agca shot him. His body never forgot. But there can be forgiveness, which means ultimately, “I let go of trying to make you suffer like you made me. I relinquish my attachment to my hatred of you.”
One means of liberation from the curse of revenge-seeking is empathy. Remembering that there is no sentient being whose life is without suffering is a starting place. Had we suffered the same hurts and abuses as our enemy, we might or might not have chosen the same harmful actions. We, in fact, have all hurt others, perhaps unintentionally, or believing at the time that our actions were right, justified or understandable—considering the awful day, awful life, awful upbringing we had. We expect others to understand our wounds. Do we understand theirs?
So, considering the suffering of the other begins to dissolve the alienation that can freeze the life out of our own hearts.
Whatever the healing path to forgiveness you are drawn to—prayer, psychotherapy, service, group support, altruism, education—the reward will be a liberation of the mind, body, and spirit and a freeing energy to live more fully.
UPDATED: 5-27-2005
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©2000-2006 Office of Institutional Advancement, UT-Houston
Dr. Blair Justice is professor emeritus of psychology at UT School of Public Health and the author of several books. His wife, Dr. Rita Justice is a psychologist in private practice in Houston.
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