Ask Dr. Forgiveness
The eleventh of 15 criticisms that I so characteristically see on-line is this: The self-help advice suggests that forgiving is a quick-fix, accomplished so quickly as to be a superficial and misguided way of healing from trauma.
Research consistently shows that to forgive a person for a very deep injustice that has resulted in the effects of trauma takes patience, struggle, and time. This science shows that to forgive a person for such deep injustices is definitely not a quick fix. The problem here is in the advice of quickness and not something inherent in forgiveness itself.
The twelfth of 15 criticisms about forgiveness that I so frequently see is that it is impossible to even understand or define forgiveness because there are so many different definitions of it in the published literature.
This problem is not inherent in forgiveness itself, but instead is a problem with those who write about forgiveness without deeply understanding what it is. As the ancient Greeks, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, remind us, there is an objective essence (or an unchanging set of characteristics) which typifies each moral virtue. Forgiveness is what it is across historical time and across cultures and, yes, there can be individual and cultural variations in how this essence is expressed. Just because there is a ritual, for example, in Sierra Leone on the West Coast of Africa, in which a community gathers at night around a large bonfire as people forgive one another, does not mean that what forgiveness is there differs in essence from what forgiveness is in a one-on-one forgiveness therapy session in the United States. Those who think about and then write about forgiveness, according to Aristotle, can use their rational faculties to understand, even if imperfectly, what forgiveness is and is not. To forgive is to be good to those who are not good to the forgiver and this goodness includes the motivation to be good to the offending person, the cognitions of goodness toward the person, positive affect, and, when possible, positive behaviors toward that person.
The thirteenth of 15 criticisms that I so characteristically see on-line about forgiveness is this: Forgiving is a sign of disrespecting the offending person because it does not give that person the chance to repent and change behavior.
You can forgive and then support the person in repenting and changing behavior. There is no rule of human behavior that states that a person cannot repent once you initiate forgiveness toward that person.
The fourteenth of 15 criticisms I see about forgiveness is this: The more people ask you to forgive, the more fuzzy you get about what is right and wrong. For example, if parents keep asking Sally to forgive her brother Sam for continually hitting her, eventually Sally may come to think that it is perfectly all right for Sam to keep hitting.
In our experience, true forgiveness helps people see the injustice more clearly, not more opaquely. As people break denial, examine what happened, and allow for a period of anger, they begin to label the other’s behavior as “wrong” or “unfair.”
The fifteenth of 15 criticisms I see about forgiveness is this: Forgiveness will lead to the opening of every jail cell door and letting out dangerous criminals. Therefore, forgiveness is a danger to society.
This argument confuses forgiveness and legal pardon. A person can forgive and see that it is important that a person, who remains a danger to society, stays in a correctional institution.
