On Being Told To Forgive

Somebody has probably said it to you already.

Maybe kindly, from someone who loves you and cannot stand watching you carry this. Maybe from the stage, in a message about unity and moving forward. Maybe as a question with an edge on it: don't you think it's time?

And you nodded, because what else do you do, and then went home feeling worse than before, and could not entirely explain why.

Here is why. In situations like this, the word forgiveness is doing at least four different jobs at once, and most of them are not forgiveness. Untangling them takes about ten minutes and gives you back something you probably think you have failed at.

Four things it is not

Forgiveness is not saying it was acceptable. Nothing about forgiving reclassifies what happened as smaller than it was. If anything the reverse: you cannot forgive something you have not first named accurately.

Forgiveness is not trust. Trust is built from evidence over time and is withdrawn when the evidence goes. You can forgive someone completely and still never let them near your children, your money, or your church, and that is not a partial or defective forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not reconciliation. This is the big one, and it is not a fringe position. Forgiveness researchers broadly agree that forgiveness is not the same as reconciling or restoring a relationship, and is not contingent on any continued relationship with the person who caused the harm. One way to hold it: forgiveness happens inside you, reconciliation happens between people. You control the first. The second takes two, and requires that the situation be safe.

Forgiveness is not a deadline. Nobody has the standing to set one for you, and the research does not support the idea that it should be quick. More on that below.

Two different things wearing one word

Everett Worthington is a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who has spent his career on this, and who came to it partly through personal violent loss rather than only through the literature. His most useful contribution is a distinction that resolves most of the confusion.

Decisional forgiveness is a decision about behavior. It is the choice to give up revenge and retaliation, and to treat the person as a human being rather than as a target. It is a statement of intent about what you will do.

Emotional forgiveness is a change in what you feel. It is the replacement of resentment, bitterness, hostility, and fear with something else. Compassion, sympathy, or simply neutrality.

These are two different things, and the research finds they are only weakly related. You can make the decision fully and honestly and still feel nothing but anger when you see his name. That is not hypocrisy. It is the normal condition of a person who has done the first and not yet arrived at the second.

Almost all of the pressure people experience comes from this confusion. What gets asked of you from the pulpit is usually decisional. What gets measured, by you and by everyone watching, is emotional. So you make the decision, notice you still feel furious, and conclude you have failed at something you actually did.

You did not fail. You did the part that is available to be done on purpose.

The part that cannot be willed

Emotional forgiveness is not a decision. That is the whole point of separating it out.

Being told to stop resenting someone works about as well as being told to stop being cold. The feeling is downstream of things that are not under direct control: how much time has passed, whether the harm is still ongoing, whether anything has been acknowledged, whether you are safe, whether anyone believed you.

There is a finding here that is genuinely kind. In 2014, Nathaniel Wade, William Hoyt, Julia Kidwell, and Worthington published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology covering the outcome research on forgiveness interventions. They compared the major approaches and found something unexpected: once results were adjusted for the amount of time spent, no method outperformed any other.

Time in the process was the primary driver of how much forgiveness people experienced.

Read plainly, that means the main ingredient is not technique, willingness, or spiritual maturity. It is duration. If you have not gotten there, the most likely explanation is that not enough time has passed, which is not a moral fact about you.

When the word is being used as a tool

Forgiveness is a real thing that many people genuinely arrive at and are glad of. It is also, in situations like yours, the single most useful word available to someone who wants a conversation to stop.

Some signals that it is being used as a management tool rather than offered as care:

It arrives before the truth does. Calls to forgive that come before the facts are established, before anyone has been told what happened, or before the harmed person has been heard, are not about forgiveness. They are about closing the subject.

It is aimed at the wrong people. Notice who is being asked. If the congregation is being urged toward forgiveness while nobody is asking anything of the people who mishandled it, the request is functioning as crowd control.

It comes with a timeline. It has been six months. Nobody who understands forgiveness attaches a schedule to it.

It is bundled with unity. We need to forgive and move forward together as a church. Two different things joined by a conjunction, where the second is the actual request and the first is the justification.

It substitutes for accountability. If forgiveness is being discussed and consequences are not, something is being skipped.

You are allowed to notice all of this without concluding that forgiveness itself is false. Both things are true: the concept is real, and it is being used on you.

What you actually owe

Nothing on anyone else's schedule.

Not a statement. Not a conversation with him. Not a hug in the lobby. Not an announcement that you have moved on. Not the appearance of being finished so that other people can feel better about the state of the church.

If your tradition holds that forgiveness is required of you, that is between you and your tradition, and it is worth noticing that most traditions asking it are asking for something much closer to the decisional kind than the emotional kind. The demand that you feel differently on request is not usually in the text. It is in the room.

If you want to move toward it

Some people do, not because they were pressured but because carrying it is heavy and they would like to set it down. If that is you, a few things the research supports.

Do the accurate version first. Every serious forgiveness model begins with facing what actually happened rather than minimizing it. Skipping to the end produces something that collapses later.

Separate the two kinds deliberately. Decide what you will do. Then let the feelings take the time they take, and stop grading yourself on them.

Do not do it alone if it is large. The interventions with the best evidence are structured and usually involve a group or a counselor. Worthington's workbooks are freely available and are designed for people of any faith or none. That is a reasonable place to start.

Do not confuse it with going back. Deciding to release revenge does not obligate you to return to that building, that denomination, or that relationship. Keep those decisions separate, and make the safety one first.

A note for people in leadership

If you are deciding whether to preach on forgiveness this year, one thought.

Almost every congregation that has been through this hears a forgiveness message too early, usually from someone with good motives who wants the pain to stop. It reliably does damage, because it lands on people who have not yet been told the truth, and it teaches them that the institution's priority is closing the subject.

If you preach it, preach the distinctions. Decisional and emotional. Forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness and trust. Make clear that nobody is on a clock, and that forgiveness never requires anyone to be unsafe or to be silent about what was done.

And do it after accountability, not instead of it. A congregation can tell the difference, and it will remember which one it got.

When this is more than a guide can hold

• The pressure to forgive is coming from people with power over you
• You feel unsafe and are being asked to reconcile anyway
• You are being pushed toward contact with the person who harmed you
• Not sleeping, not working, drinking more than you want to be
• Any thought of harming yourself

Talking to a licensed counselor is reasonable, and a counselor outside your church is usually the right choice for this particular subject.

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Sources

• Worthington, E.L. Jr., research on decisional and emotional forgiveness and the REACH model, Virginia Commonwealth University; Worthington, Witvliet, Pietrini and Miller (2007), "Forgiveness, Health, and Well-Being," Journal of Behavioral Medicine 30(4).
• Wade, N., Hoyt, W., Kidwell, J. and Worthington, E. (2014), meta-analysis of psychotherapeutic interventions to promote forgiveness, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
• Enright, R. and Fitzgibbons, R. (2015), on forgiveness as distinct from reconciliation.

This guide is educational and is not a substitute for counseling or medical care. If you are in crisis, contact a licensed professional or call or text 988 in the United States.