Why Forgiveness Isn't Required in Trauma Recovery

Since the first empirically based study on person-to-person forgiveness was published in the social sciences (Enright et al., 1989), thousands of articles have been published on the topic.

Because the psychological exploration of forgiveness is still relatively new, there has been disagreement and debate on what, exactly, forgiveness is and whether it is an appropriate response in the mental health professions for people hurt by the injustices of others.

In the spirit of this continuing debate, I would like to offer my response to a recent post, “Why Forgiveness Is Not Required in Trauma Recovery.”

My intent is: If people who are traumatized or who are therapists read the essay, they may be discouraged from trying forgiveness. This would be most unfortunate if they rejected it because of incorrect information.

To help therapists and clients make as informed a decision as possible, I want to counter what appears to be misunderstandings about what forgiveness actually is and what encompasses forgiveness therapy.

I have five points for your consideration.

1. The author stated: “Forgiveness diminishes harms and wrongs, which can inhibit safety.” This is not correct. When people begin to truly forgive, they realize that what happened to them was unfair, is unfair, and always will be unfair.

To forgive is not to excuse the wrong, but to stand firm in the truth that this was an injustice (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2015). Thus, the one considering forgiveness has a rational understanding that the one who did the harm could do so again.

2. As a moral virtue, forgiveness never ever should be forced onto anyone. On this point, I agree with the author. Instead, people should be drawn to forgiveness by their own free will. That is the case for all moral virtues. For example, in the case of altruism, we do not put pressure on people to be altruistic, hovering over them and insisting that they must give money to the poor.

The criticism by the author on this point needs to center not on forgiveness, but instead on the person who pressures the unjustly injured person to forgive. The wrong here is within the person who is putting on the pressure, not on forgiveness itself.

As my colleague Chontay Glenn, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Michigan-Flint, who suffered the trauma of sexual abuse, has said to me: “No one can be forced into forgiveness anyway because it is an internal response to an injustice... it is the healing of one’s own soul against an injustice.”

3. Another misconception, actually a quite serious one, is the author's conflating forgiving and reconciling:

"... forgiveness often carries an expectation of ourselves and of others that there won’t be a need for much discussion about the topic going forward, and may instill a false sense of reconciliation or closure."

This implies that a person forgives and then enters back into a relationship with the one who caused the trauma. As our group has pointed out over and over again, forgiving and reconciling are very different.

Forgiveness occurs with a free-will decision to offer goodness, even from a distance, to the one who offended. A kind word about the offending person to others may suffice. In contrast, reconciliation is not a moral virtue, but instead is a negotiation strategy in which two or more people come together in mutual trust. Forgivers need to understand this distinction. One can forgive and not reconcile. As Glenn shared: “I forgave the person who sexually abused me, but I did not maintain reconciliation with him.”

4. The author implies that when you forgive, you short-circuit the processing of your own pain as you jump to a focus on the offending person: "Forgiveness focuses on the abuser instead of the survivor, and resistance often leads to blaming the survivor, perpetuating shame.”

This is not the case. In our process model of forgiveness, that process starts with what we call the uncovering phase in which the client's own symptoms are acknowledged, and one's emotional, cognitive, and behavioral wounds are carefully examined as effects of the trauma (Enright and Fitzgibbons, 2015). This can take time and never should be cut short.

5. Finally, the author criticizes forgiveness this way: “Forgiveness encourages silence and can be used as a means to avoid recovery.”

In other words, it is assumed that good forgivers cannot continue to psychologically process the trauma anymore. This is a distortion of what occurs in forgiveness therapy. Forgiveness rarely is a straight-line activity from anger to feeling good about the offending person and then to the end of the forgiveness road.

Forgiveness Essential Reads

Why We Should Learn to Forgive Ourselves

7 Reasons You May Struggle to Forgive Yourself

Instead, people can begin to feel anger again toward an offending person long after the forgiving seems complete. It is at such times that the forgiver can, through self-choice, go back to the uncovering phase and once again examine the anger or sadness or other reactions and even begin once again the forgiveness process.

As the late Lewis Smedes (1984) used to say, forgiving is for imperfect people. Further, once deeper forgiving occurs, any silence by the forgiver usually is not an indication of suppression or denial of trauma, but instead is an indication that the forgiver is set free from the burden of condemning the one who behaved badly.

The author makes an important point that forgiveness after unjust behaviors is not for everyone. My critique is not meant to suggest otherwise. I offer these critiques of the author's ideas, not to heavily criticize, but instead to protect the integrity of a genuine process of forgiveness, free of confusion of what forgiveness is and is not.

If a person, traumatized by another, rejects forgiving because of misinformation, this would be most unfortunate because it may block this client from a true and empirically verified pathway to self-chosen forgiveness and deep emotional recovery.