How Can I Forgive You?

The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To

Janis A. Spring

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780063219069
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063219663
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Psychology

“If you are struggling with issues of betrayal—or the challenge of whether and how to forgive—here is the most helpful and surprising book you will ever find on the subject.”—Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger

Everyone is struggling to forgive someone: an unfaithful partner, an alcoholic parent, an ungrateful child, a terrorist. This award-winning book, recently updated with a new afterword by the author, provides a radical way for hurt parties to heal themselves—without forgiving, as well as a way for offenders to earn genuine forgiveness.

Until now, we've been taught that forgiveness is good for us and that good people forgive. Dr. Janis Abrahms Spring, a gifted clinical psychologist and award-winning author of After the Affair, proposes a radical, life-affirming alternative for healing from betrayal that lets us overcome the corrosive effects of hate and get on with our lives—without forgiving. She also offers a powerful and unconventional model for earning genuine forgiveness—one that asks as much of the offender as it does of the hurt party.

Beautifully written and filled with insight, practical relationship advice, and poignant case studies, this bold and healing book offers step-by-step, concrete instructions that help us make peace with the past and with ourselves, while answering such crucial questions as these:

• How do I forgive someone who is unremorseful or dead?
• When is forgiveness cheap?
• Can I heal myself – without forgiving?
• How can the offender earn forgiveness?
• What makes for a good apology?
• How do we forgive ourselves for hurting another human being?

Part One

Cheap Forgiveness

Cheap Forgiveness is a quick and easy pardon with no processing of emotion and no coming to terms with the injury. It’s a compulsive, unconditional, unilateral attempt at peacemaking for which you ask nothing in return.

When you refuse to forgive, you hold tenaciously to your anger. When you forgive cheaply, you simply let your anger go.

When you refuse to forgive, you say “no way” to any future reconciliation. When you forgive cheaply, you seek to preserve the relationship at any cost, including your own integrity and safety.

Cheap Forgiveness is dysfunctional because it creates an illusion of closeness when nothing has been faced or resolved, and the offender has done nothing to earn it. Silencing your anguish and indignation, you fail to acknowledge or appreciate the harm that was done to you.

If you forgive too easily, you’re likely to have what personality expert Robert Emmons calls “a chronic concern to be in benevolent, harmonious relationships with others.”¹ The character trait that defines you could, in fact, be called “forgivingness.” While some people would regard “forgivingness” as a virtue—Emmons calls it “spiritual intelligence”—I would suggest that it can rob you of your freedom to respond to an injury in an authentic, self-interested way. It can also be bad for your health, as we’ll see later. When you feel compelled to forgive regardless of the circumstances, you’re offering not Genuine Forgiveness but a cut-rate substitute.

PEOPLE WHO FORGIVE TOO CHEAPLY

Cheap Forgiveness comes in several forms. You may recognize yourself in one of them.

The Conflict Avoider

This is the most common type. Overly compliant and forgiving, you tend to dismiss an injury for the sake of protecting a relationship, as mutilating as it may be. On the surface, you act as though nothing is wrong. Inside, you may be hemorrhaging.

Conflict avoiders remain in relationships without voice and without a healthy sense of entitlement. Your submissive behavior—your tendency to subjugate your needs to those of others—is often based on one of three fears.

1. You fear that the offender will retaliate with anger or violence.

If you grow up with rageful parents, you may learn to keep silent—to go along in order to get along. This pattern is likely to persist into adulthood, as it did for a patient named Marsha. “My parents’ anger was frightening,” she told me. “I remember the day my mother threw over the Ping-Pong table and my father, drunk, chased her with a gun. I locked myself in my room and couldn’t eat or sleep for days. Living with them, I learned to pick my words carefully, to lie low. I hated them both and got married at sixteen just to get out of the house. To this day I’m not good at anger. It scares me. I never even allow myself to feel anger. God knows where it goes.”

2. You fear that the offender will reject or abandon you.

You may also resort to Cheap Forgiveness because you fear being cast off by someone whom you depend on for a sense of self-worth. This “morbid dependence”² is like insulin to a diabetic. It is not optional. It is a necessary lifeline.

Kathy, a forty-seven-year-old massage therapist, is a case in point. Desperate to hold onto her husband, Jack, she left herself no space in which to negotiate her needs. “I think of myself as a love junkie,” she told me. “Why else would I stay in such a sick relationship? Jack drinks too much, he cheats on me, he lashes out at me verbally and sometimes physically. What happened last week should have been a wake-up call, but I shut off the alarm. We were on vacation, watching a video, and Jack was drinking. I asked him, ‘What do you want to do for dinner?’ and he blurted out, ‘You’ve ruined my life!’ and then slapped me and told me how much he hated me, and started in about how I was making him miss the end of the movie and how he wanted to kill me. A little over the top, wouldn’t you say? And then he started to cry and tell me he hated himself and didn’t know why he was so cruel to me. I know if I were healthy, I’d leave. But I’m stuck here, trying to be good enough for him, the way I tried to be good enough for my mother. She used to tell me, ‘If it weren’t for your younger sister, I’d have no reason to live’—that’s how much I meant to her. I guess I’m still trying to get her—someone—to love me, even if they’re as messed up as I am.”

Needing to stay connected to Jack in order to affirm her own worth, Kathy constantly made excuses for his behavior. “It’s the alcohol,” she told me once. “The alcohol makes him violent.” Or, “It’s his low self-esteem—that’s why he drinks. He projects his self-hatred on me, but he doesn’t mean to be so mean.” And shortly after he slapped her and told her how much he hated her, she told me, “We’re closer than we’ve ever been.”

Making excuses for Jack’s violent, uncontrollable behavior and deluding herself about his capacity for change kept Kathy trapped in a dangerous relationship. But without Jack she was without a self, and that felt more terrifying than his degrading words or his physical abuse.

3. You fear that by speaking up for yourself, you may harm the offender.

Another reason for Cheap Forgiveness is your fear that you’ll wound the offender if you confront him with the truth. Overprotective of his feelings and dismissive of your own, you exaggerate his fragility and your capacity to cause harm.

A patient named Peggy was driven by this concern for others. For seventeen years, she satisfied her husband Ted’s need for sexual novelty and tolerated his voyeuristic obsession with pornography. She allowed him to see what he called a “sexual enhancement counselor” naked in the woman’s office. She agreed once to group sex with neighbors. “This way I’ll have no reason to cheat on you or leave you,” he told her.

One day, Ted asked Peggy to dress up like a hooker, go to a bar, and try to pick up other men while he looked on. Reluctantly, she played along. She never actually left the bar with anyone, but in the following days and weeks she found herself feeling increasingly depressed and disgusted with herself. She was still determined to forgive Ted, though, as she always had forgiven him, and went in search of confirmation from her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Rose. “I stayed with your father all these years to keep the family together, and I would like your sympathy and support,” Peggy told her.

Rose’s cold response was a rude awakening. “I’m almost thirty,” she said. “Don’t lay this on me. Whatever you’re doing is for your sake, not mine. Do you really want me to be grateful that you sacrificed your life for me, that you gave up your happiness for mine? That’s a gift I don’t need, thank you. Is this what you’ve wanted to teach me all these years—that I should stay in a marriage and try to make it work, no matter how awful my partner treats me? Is that the lesson I’m supposed to come away with?”

Shaken by her daughter’s response, Peggy entered therapy and began to question why she failed to draw a line—why she felt so desperate to keep Ted happy that she would sacrifice every shred of self-respect for him. “Do I tolerate too much?” she asked me. “Why don’t I speak up about what matters to me?”

Delving into her past, Peggy answered her own questions. “My parents separated when I was ten,” she told me. “It was a bitter divorce that tore the family apart. And I got caught in the middle. They asked me which one I wanted to live with. I knew my mother would never forgive me if I left her, so I chose her, but it killed my relationship with my father. Frankly, it killed my relationship with my mother, too. I vowed that when I grew up I’d create a different climate for my own family. I swore my marriage would be different. . . .”

Peggy’s idea that she needed to preserve her marriage for her daughter’s sake, or for some greater good, no longer made sense to her—if it ever had. “Rose is grown up and has a life of her own,” Peggy told me. “My vow to create a loving home is ridiculous—I can’t make a good marriage alone.”

I’d like to give this story a happy ending, but Peggy decided to drop out of therapy rather than tolerate the anxiety caused by her growing self-awareness. She’s still with Ted, forgiving his behavior too easily, too cheaply. The coping patterns she learned in early childhood are too deeply ingrained for her to give them up—a reminder that having insights into our self-defeating patterns doesn’t mean we have the will or the courage to change them.

Of course, something might still happen to give Peggy the clarity and conviction she needs to exorcise her devils and act on her own behalf. But first she would have to learn the value of a healthy selfishness and retire from her role as peacemaker.

The propensity to forgive may be shaped not just by interactions with parents, as it was for Peggy, but by conformity to popular social and religious beliefs, such as, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” and “Forgive and you shall be forgiven.” These lessons get wired into us at a young age and influence our behavior as adults. What we’re often not taught is what to do with our anger or with other unruly emotions that surface when someone tries to hurt us. No one tells us what Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan found in her research with adolescent girls—that when we stop speaking up about violations in our relationships, we lose not only our voice, we lose ourselves.³

The Passive-Aggressor

If you’re a conflict avoider, you readily forgive others at your own expense. If you’re a passive-aggressor, you’re also quick to forgive—subjugating your needs, silencing your voice, and conveying the false impression that all is well. Inside, though, you’re probably not resigned but defiant and bitter, and busy sabotaging the peace you paid for with your shallow, deceptive words of forgiveness.

Operating indirectly, even subversively, you rebel through sins of omission. Instead of protesting your mistreatment openly and directly, you detach and get even in underhanded ways, effectively frustrating others by ignoring their requests and withdrawing from them physically and emotionally. Your decision to act forgivingly is manipulative; it’s your way of getting even, feeling powerful, in control, on top. Though you may pretend to turn the other cheek, privately you seek an eye for an eye. As psychologist Scott Wetzler writes, “The passive-aggressive man may pretend to be sweet or compliant, but beneath his superficial demeanor lies a different core. He’s angry, petty, envious, and selfish.”⁴

Passive-aggressive types tend to develop covert patterns of relating in their early years. If your parents reproached you for challenging their authority, you may learn to give lip service to what others ask of you, while secretly defying them and getting your own way. If your parents humiliated you for showing vulnerability—crying, asking for help—you may as an adult be terrified of becoming dependent on anyone but yourself. Believing that a relationship is nothing more than a power game, you may keep your moves to yourself and reveal nothing about your inner workings. You may confuse cooperation with submission,⁵ and attachment with loss of control.

Dan is a good example of a passive-aggressive peacemaker who masks his hostility. He and his wife, Emily, spent four years trying to conceive a child using infertility drugs. Finally they succeeded with in vitro fertilization, and Emily gave birth to a healthy boy. As Dan explained it to me, Emily then cut him out of her life and transferred all her attention to their son. Dan retaliated by turning his attention to his young office assistant.

A year later, in therapy, Dan acknowledged how testy and diminished he felt when the baby was born. “The angrier I got, the quieter I got,” he told me. “Last Mother’s Day I told Emily I had confused the date and scheduled a golf game with an old college buddy. The ‘buddy,’ of course, was the girl I was seeing. I promised I’d be home by three, but walked in at six, apologized, gave Emily a big hug and some roses, and proceeded to fall asleep in front of the TV.”

Like a conflict avoider, Dan achieved only the illusion of peace—at a very dear price. Afraid of being overpowered or canceled out, he asserted himself in the only way that felt safe to him—by being secretly oppositional. Today, like most compulsive peacekeepers, he continues to struggle to be himself in relationships, but lacking both the strength of character and the interpersonal skills to negotiate conflict, he doesn’t know how. He smiles, but secretly he seethes. On the surface, he forgives everything; underneath, he forgives nothing.

The passive-aggressor’s pattern of making peace is to give with one hand and take with the other. Outwardly he humbles himself and accepts blame; inwardly he feels innocent and gloats over the success of his ruse. “My father and I engaged in a battle of wills,” a patient named Jim told me. “But I learned to beat him at his game. Whatever I did, he demanded an apology. Once when I came home late he stormed up to me and said, ‘Are you sorry? Tell me you’re sorry!’ He kept at it. Finally I told him, ‘I am . . .’ and then whispered silently under my breath, ‘not.’ That ‘not’ became the magic word, my way of being, my way of surviving that tyrant.”

The Self-Sacrificer

The self-sacrificer is someone who, by conviction, puts others first. He enjoys acting with a generous heart and tries not to bear grudges. He may try to emulate saintly qualities of mercy and forgiveness, usually valuing other people’s needs more than his own. In contrast to the conflict avoider, who often feels subjugated and conscripted into making peace, the self-sacrificer feasts on forgiveness.

As Jeffrey Young and his colleagues poi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Is Forgiveness Good for You?
• Part One: Cheap Forgiveness
• Part Two: Refusing to Forgive
• Part Three: Acceptance
• Part Four: Genuine Forgiveness
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: How the Offender’s Childhood Wounds Shaped the Way He Treated You
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors
• Praise
• Also by Janis Abrahms Spring, PhD, with Michael Spring
• Copyright
• About the Publisher