5 Key Lessons from the Study of Forgiveness

For the past 37 years, my colleagues and I have been studying the psychology of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a moral virtue, centered on goodness for others, in which a person who is offended by the injustice of others offers those others goodness in the form of kindness, respect, generosity, and even love, without excusing or necessarily reconciling or abandoning the quest for justice.

A significant focus has been to incorporate this psychology of forgiveness into psychotherapy. What have we now learned about therapy as we have incorporated forgiveness into the helping professions? In this essay, I would like to answer this question with 5 points, all with implications for how the field of psychotherapy goes about its business.

1. When our group had the distinction of being the first to publish research on the moral virtue of forgiveness, first in 1989 (Enright, Santos, & Al-Mabuk, 1989), and then the first scientific study of forgiveness therapy in 1993 (Hebl & Enright, 1993), I began to realize: Given that psychology began to develop in the 1890s, it took about 100 years before the first empirically-based study focused expressly on person-to-person forgiveness was published. Why did this take so long?

Source: KuanShu Designs, used with permission

2. I argue that it took that long for the psychological sciences to see a published work on forgiveness because traditional forms of psychotherapy long abandoned the emphasis on moral virtues, as the field of philosophy also slowly put the examination of ethics on the shelf in favor of political analyses (see, for example, Machiavelli, 1513; Hobbes, 1651) and self-determined ways of interacting with others rather than focusing on objectively real and important moral virtues that we all share, such as all striving to be fair with one another for the sake of establishing the good community (Plato, 2015/330 BC).

3. As psychology sought people’s healing from trauma, without a focus on growing in the moral virtues, the field of psychotherapy made the mistake of being technique-oriented rather than growth-oriented. This distinction is vital and so I want to be sure that you do not pass over this quickly, but instead see this and reflect seriously on it.

Here is what I mean by “technique-oriented”: If Client A comes to a psychotherapist and this client is fuming with anger over another person's unfairness, but as yet is unaware of the anger's depth, a key issue is to “make the unconscious now conscious.” Client A, in other words, breaks through denial of the deep-seated anger and now sees that, in fact, there is much anger inside.

This unveiling of the unconscious (“I am not that angry”) to consciousness (“Oh, I really am fuming”) is supposed to be curative. Yet if Client A eventually sees and experiences this deep anger or resentment, how is Client A supposed to now get rid of that anger? It will not necessarily just fade by looking at it.

As another approach, some psychotherapists would ask Client A to think in new ways about the anger. For example, a key issue would be to help this person “lower the temperature” of this internal discontent by thinking new thoughts such as, “What happened to me was not as bad as I had thought. I am catastrophizing too much.”

Yet re-thinking how one interprets the past situation will not necessarily end the anger either, as the past event is real and hurtful, and is leading to difficult-to-end anger. Even abiding with the anger, and accepting it for now, will not end the anger, especially when one is not meditating on it in this way.

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Source: KuanShu Designs, used with permission

4. Forgiveness therapy, in contrast to the above kinds of psychotherapeutic techniques, is not at all technique-oriented. Instead, forgiveness therapy asks Client A to do the hard and even long work of growing in the moral virtue of forgiveness, if and only if the client is ready, so that this client begins to see the inherent worth in the offending person, begins to see common humanity between the offender and the self, and willingly bears the pain so as not to toss that pain back to the other in a never-ending hurt-and-be-hurt pattern.

This approach to psychotherapy is radical because it deliberately does not see treatment as a set of techniques. Instead, it sees it as a long and slow process of growing in one’s humanity with the paradox of the client benefiting in a psychological way, when giving goodness to those who are not good to the client.

Source: KuanShu Designs, used with permission

5. Our research group deliberately chose to test forgiveness therapy with seriously compromised clinical populations hurt by others' injustices, such as incest survivors (Freedman & Enright, 1996), people in residential drug rehabilitation (Lin et al., 2004), and men in a maximum-security correctional institution (Yu et al., 2021). We have found the strongest mental health improvement ever published with incest survivors and people within a maximum-security correctional institution. This seems to be the case because serious trauma is not healed deeply when only techniques, especially over a short period of time, are applied with clients.

In fact, when Dr. Suzanne Freedman and I began the incest survivor study in the mid-1990s, the counsel to mental health practitioners in the published literature was this: Do not expect too much positive change in incest-survivor clients; this is the case because there are no known psychological approaches that can heal the effects of incest. Dr. Freedman proved that advice to be wrong precisely because she shifted from a technique-oriented approach to the virtues-based approach to mental health treatment.

This may seem revolutionary, especially given the norm, begun in modernism, to de-emphasize the study of ethics in philosophy and, concomitantly, to de-emphasize the growth in the moral virtues in psychotherapy. Yet such an approach of growing in moral virtue is not new, with origins in ancient Greece (Plato, 2015/330 BC) and continuing into the Medieval period (Aquinas, 1948).

There now is an emerging synthesis of the old (ancient emphasis on moral virtue) and the new (use of psychological techniques in therapy). How many mental health professionals now will embrace this synthesis and, while not abandoning the technique-oriented approaches, begin to include the growth in the moral virtues, particularly forgiveness when clients suffer from grave trauma, into their practices?