The Real Reason You Can't Forgive Him (Or Her)

We all know who has broken our hearts. But here's some fresh insight from the author of The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness on the specific reasons we struggle with letting go and moving on.

If you examine your mind with any amount of honesty, you will probably conclude that your grievances are doing you no good whatsoever. Why, then, hang on to them? 

1. The Pleasures of Resentment

There can be something delicious in holding onto a grievance, in mulling over someone else's wrongs and failings and viewing him through the lenses of condemnation. We could call this "the thrill of righteousness." Unfortunately, righteousness is the most dangerous of all weapons to wield. It's easily turned against the user. Say one of your fellow employees is regularly late for work. You find it delicious to contemplate this poor fool's tardiness and to congratulate yourself for your own punctuality. Then one day, for some reason or another, you are late for work yourself. The boss yells at you in front of everybody, including the co-worker you've been so comfortably despising. 

Sometimes, we also refuse to forgive because of our sense of justice. A recent study looked at how people differ from chimpanzees in their approach to fairness. Scientists tested this by means of the ultimatum game, which has two players: a proposer and a responder. They have to divide a quantity of goodies (which could be anything from cash to chocolates). The proposer chooses how much will go to him and how much to the responder. The responder has no choice but to take or leave the offer. 

You might expect that the responder would accept any offer, no matter how small; after all, even a little is better than nothing. That's what chimps do. But humans don't. Human responders will generally reject any offer smaller than around 20 percent—even if that means they don't get anything at all. They do this, it seems, to punish the proposer for his greed. (So, in a way, chimpanzees turn out to be more rational than humans.) 

No doubt this sense of fairness has something to do with our reluctance to forgive. We want to punish someone who's gone beyond the bounds of fairness—but unfortunately, we want to keep on punishing. At some point, this "punishment" starts to go on and on in our own heads. We rehearse the wrong that we have suffered, we stew over it, we brood and we sulk. And we do this even when the offender is nowhere in sight. Again, the punishment is turned against the punisher. 

2. Our Need for (Treacherous) Armor

Possibly the most important reason that we hold on to grievances is that we believe they offer something to us. And what they offer, or appear to offer, is protection. Think about it. To be free of grievances is to be innocent. And if you go around with your innocence exposed, you believe all the buzzards of life will suddenly swarm upon you to pick your bones white. Your grievances are like the hard face you wear when you're making your way through a bad neighborhood. They are your shield. 

There is a grain of truth to this idea. All of us, as living beings, have a basic need to preserve ourselves. We react—sometimes violently—to anything that threatens our survival. Fear and anger are common types of this kind of reaction. These responses are useful up to a point, but there is a problem: They continue long after the threat has passed. We often carry this fear and anger with us for a long time afterward—possibly years, or even decades—long after the emotions have outlived their value. These retained feelings can take the form of grievances and resentments. They do not help us survive. They are debilitating. 

In fact, your grievances are your weak spot, the open wounds that anyone can prod to put you on the ground in an instant. 

3. Our Grievance Identities

Let me approach this reason by telling a story. This took place during my micro-career as a financial adviser. One day, we were all shepherded into a day�long seminar, and asked to think of a symbol for ourselves. My boss then went around the room and asked the 40 or 50 participants to think of personal symbols for themselves. About half could think of nothing more original than the logos of their favorite sports teams. 

Of course, many fans genuinely identify with their teams. Up to a point, this is all harmless enough. But for many people, being a fan is not only loving your own team—it's hating the other team. Sometimes, it looks as if hating the other team is the most enjoyable part. 

So, we have a curious little dynamic going on here. You don't know who you are. Maybe, in your own mind, you're your team. You are caught up in not only its triumphs and defeats, but also in its grudges and grievances. In other words, you have identified yourself with grievances. You have become these grievances. 

4. Our Biggest Victim

You probably hold as many, or more, grievances against yourself than you do against the rest of the world combined. Usually we don't think in those terms; but, in fact, guilt and shame in most of their forms are nothing more than hostilities that we hold against ourselves. They can also take the form of regret—punishing yourself over and over for a bad decision you have made or think you have made. The grudges and resentments and hostilities that we go around with do us no good at all. We would be better off without them. To let go of these negative emotions is...to forgive. Well, then, isn't it time you get on with it? 

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Why-You-Cant-Forgive-Someone?FB=fb_omag_real_reason_cant_forgive

Forgiving Your Partner Is as Good for You as It Is for Them ...

... while sticking to punishment just punishes you both.

There are a few very human reasons that couples have a hard time forgiving each other for mistakes, big or small.

One is a deep sense of injustice, and an accompanying desire to set the scales right. Most of us keep mental ledgers in our relationships—tallies of who did what for whom, whose needs were met at which time, and how long it took the other to reciprocate. The point of the ledger is to maintain some approximate sense of equity. If one person screws up, it sets the balance of justice off, sometimes seemingly irreparably.

One way to deal with this sense of injustice is to make your partner pay—to exact some kind of emotional price. This may come by freezing the other person out, or withholding affection or even verbal contact. It may also come by treating them as a punching bag and making them suffer. For many people, such anger can persist for a very long time, and the perpetrator will have to deal gracefully and patiently with the anger and rejection until some inestimable point in the future when it dries up. The problem is that the anger doesn’t necessarily just dry up: Rage and vengeance exact their own price—on both parties—and create their own toxic patterns which often become self-perpetuating.

Another block to forgiveness is a sense of entitlement to pain. The hurt party justifiably feels hurt. And they have a right to take a bath in it, to feel it to its fullest. But again, once you get in that bath, it’s hard to get out. The water feels warm and consuming, the air outside cold and forbidding. There’s no logical endpoint, and the transition out of the pain is difficult to achieve.

The last reason I’ll mention—this list is not meant to be exhaustive—is the fear of being duped. What if our partner is not sorry enough? What if they don’t fully understand the cost of their mistake? What if we forgive them too soon, or the ease with which we forgive implicitly condones their behavior? Often people treat their partners like they would their children, operating from a principle of an apt punishment that is intended to instill an appropriate sense of remorse. This principle, however, denies that the remorse will exist without the punishment. It also presumes that punishment is the surest way to produce or receive remorse.

There's a problem with thinking of your forgiveness as a prize, offered at great personal cost to the person who wronged you when they’re adequately deserving of it. For one, it’s hard to adequately quantify “deserving.” Does it kick in after a certain amount of apologizing? Does it require various kinds of penance or finding ways to make it up to us? Does it come from the verbal expression of regret? How do we decide how much remorse is enough?

It’s also hard to be sure that we have an accurate sense of how sorry a person actually is. Mistakes often set off a chain reaction of defensiveness, a series of attacks and counter-attacks that seem to require self-defense.

And we rarely consider the ways in which forgiveness can be self-serving, helping us get more of what we want from our relationship rather than less.

One of the hardest things I have to convince couples of in therapy is that the things that would make them feel better and more satisfied are often counter-intuitive: Indulging anger, carrying resentment, and disengaging from a partner can all feel intuitive (in the sense of being true to our feelings) and in line with our interests.

But the research suggests otherwise.

Several studies have found that forgiveness is a route to healing one’s own emotional injuries, that it facilitates a process of mutual empathy, fosters relational resilience, and strengthens (rather than weakens) relationships overall (Aalgaard, Bolen, & Nugent, 2015; Meneses & Greenberg, 2015).

It’s hard to convince a wronged person that they have a responsibility to help heal a relationship from a betrayal or mistake they didn’t commit. But relationships are by definition comprised of more than one person. Their life blood is the patterns those people create and perpetuate. And each person’s self-interests become inextricably tied to the relational patterns they participate in.

The process by which forgiveness generally occurs represents the ultimate relational pattern. Shame (on the part of the injurer) seems to be key to forgiveness (Meneses & Greenberg, 2014). To disclose shame, a person needs to be vulnerable. And to be vulnerable, a relationship needs to provide conducive conditions—partners willing and able to listen deeply, understand, suspend judgment, and work on lowering their own reactivity. That is to say, vulnerability (and the disclosure of shame) seems to emerge when you have a partner, or a relationship, that provides enough safety to give you the confidence to take such an emotional risk.

Hopefully you see my point. Relationships are big circles, with each partner informing the direction of the spin at every point. An angry, hurt, and rejecting partner offers anger and hurt, which initiates a reaction to that anger and hurt, which may in turn initiate a counter-reaction to that reaction. Alternatively, an angry and hurt partner who tries to slow down, to understand more fully, creates a space for a more vulnerable reaction, perhaps a disclosure of shame, which allows the angry or hurt partner to perhaps feel empathy, which perhaps enables them to offer forgiveness and take the relationship in a more positive direction.

At least from a rational perspective, none of the blocks to forgiveness produce cycles that end well for anyone.

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/encountering-america/201512/forgiving-your-partner-is-good-you-it-is-them