Ask Dr. Forgiveness

What is the shortest and the longest time you have seen someone go through the forgiveness process when the injustice is very deep?  In other words, I am not talking about people who have been hurt but it is more of a passing anger and not a deeply entrenched anger from a profound injustice.

The shortest time to a successful forgiveness was observed in a scientific study of elderly women in hospice who had less than 6 months to live.  They had deep hurts from family members and some of these hurts began decades ago.  These courageous women only took 4 weeks to forgive the deep injustices, perhaps because they were trying their best to confront unresolved issues in need of resolution.  The longest I have seen is a study of female incest survivors, who took on the average over a year to forgive.  Here are the references to these two research studies:

Hansen, M. J., Enright. R. D., Baskin, T. W., & Klatt, J. (2009).  A palliative care intervention in forgiveness therapy for elderly terminally-ill cancer patients. Journal of Palliative Care, 25, 51-60.

Freedman, S. R., & Enright, R. D. (1996).  Forgiveness as an intervention goal with incest survivors.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(5), 983-992.

I hurt my husband and he is not ready to forgive me. I am ready to forgive myself.  Is it even possible to forgive oneself if the other person refuses, at least for now, to forgive?

Yes, your forgiving yourself is not dependent on the other person’s response to you.  If you have done your best toward your husband for now by having inner remorse for your actions, if you have repented by apologizing, and if you have done your best to make amends, then you have done what you can at present to seek forgiveness.  You now can move forward with forgiving yourself and also wait patiently for your husband to reduce his initial anger and become ready to forgive you.

How can I avoid displacing my anger onto others?  What is one example of a “wake-up call” for me to break a pattern of denial that I am displacing anger onto others?

Here is one exercise that might help you to break denial regarding your displacing anger onto other people: Make a list of people at whom you have been angry over the past few weeks.  Then ask yourself this question: Did this person deserve my anger because of inappropriate behavior or did I over-react?  If you see that in many of the cases, the other person, who received your anger, did nothing that warranted such a strong reaction, then you will be able to see that you are, in fact, displacing your anger.  With this insight, you can begin to lessen the displacement because you now are seeing that people do not deserve harsh correction.  Your forgiving those at whom you truly are angry also will assist you in avoiding the psychological defense of displacement.

Is shame always an effect of being treated unjustly?

Shame is that sense that others are judging you and you want to hide under the bed to avoid the scrutiny.  This is not always the case when people treat you unfairly.  Sometimes, when we are treated unfairly, people can harshly judge us by asking such a question as this: “Well, what did you do to deserve this?  You must have done something, otherwise such behavior toward you would not have occurred.”  When others are not passing judgement on you and when you have not acted unjustly toward those who were unfair to you, then shame likely will not occur.

How does a person come to understand the origins of his own anger?

I recommend that you reflect on the different injustices that have happened to you, starting in childhood, then moving to your adolescence, and then into adulthood.  Try to make a list of the persons and the injustices and then rate: a) how deep is each injustice on a 1-to-10 scale and how deeply hurt you are now by this injustice, again on a 1-to-10 scale.  Then look at this “forgiveness landscape” (which is the term I use for such an exercise in my book, The Forgiving Life).  Those injustices that are deep and remain very hurtful probably are at the heart of any abiding anger you have inside of you now.