Misconceptions
The Forgiveness Path Is Not a Straight Line
If you are like the rest of us, when you begin to forgive another person you will start and stop and start again a number of times before you arrive, safe, at the journey’s end, confident that you have forgiven. You will be making great progress and then have a dream about the person and wake up angry all over again. You will think you have conquered, only to meet the person who hurts you again, and there is the anger. Or, it is the holiday season and you reflect back on your life hoping for peace and instead get a piece of the person’s own anger, and once again you are angry. The forgiveness path is like this and so please be gentle with yourself.
Robert
What Finding Meaning in Suffering Is Not
When you find meaning in your life and in the suffering that you endured you are not doing any of the following:
You are not denying anger, grief, or disappointment because of what happened to you. It did happen and your negative response is what we all go through. To find meaning is not to put the pillow over your head and hope the pain goes away.
When you find meaning you are not playing games with yourself by say, “Oh well, I can just make the best of what happened to me.” Yes, you can make the best of what happened, but if this is your meaning in what you have suffered, you are not going after that woundedness inside of you. The “oh, well” approach is so passive. We need a more active approach to the pain.
When you find meaning you do not sugar-coat the injustice and distort reality by saying, “All things happen for good reasons and so I will try to see the good in what was done to me.” Let us be honest: Maybe there was not any good in the injustice itself. What you learn from it will have goodness, but the event itself? Maybe you will find no good in that injustice against you and that is all right.
Robert
For Scientists: A Critique of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory in China (EFI-Mandarin Version)
A colleague of ours recently attended a national conference in which a Master’s thesis in Canada by Hanson (2005) was extensively discussed. The author asserts that the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI) inadvertently assesses tolerance and not forgiveness in China.
The conclusion was reached by having university students rate the items regarding what the students think the scale’s intent is. The consensus was that it assesses tolerance and not forgiveness. Thus, Hanson questions the validity of the scale in the Chinese culture. We have four rebuttals to his conclusion.
First, as Hanson points out in the document, Chinese students have far more exposure to the concept of tolerance, based on Confucianism, than to forgiveness, thus possibly biasing them in that direction when making their judgements.
Second, a good scale’s intent will not be obvious to participants, otherwise social desirability can confound the results. As pointed out above, we deliberately chose items, in the initial construction of the instrument, that had no relationship with social desirability and a strong relationship with the one-item question about forgiveness.
Third, we have a study in Taiwan reported in the “in press” book entitled, Forgiveness Therapy (APA Books), which clearly shows as high a correlation as is possible (when using a one-item scale) between participants’ EFI scores and the degree to which participants have forgiven the person targeted on the EFI. Although Taiwan and China have traditional and simplified versions, respectively, of the Chinese language, these are nonetheless more similar than different and people in each of these cultures can understand one another. In other words, a study in Taiwan can help shed light on Hanson’s assertions in China.
Fourth, items on the EFI such as feeling “tender” and “caring” and seeing the other as “loving” have little to do with tolerance (a respectful putting-up-with) and much to do with forgiving. If someone were tolerating and not forgiving, he or she would not score high on these items, thus reducing the correlation between the EFI and the one-item forgiveness question.
We critique the Hanson effort here so that the unsuspecting researcher who consults his thesis is not misled by his conclusion.
Robert
Our Follow-up on “Phony Forgiveness”
Timing is amazing sometimes. We posted a blog essay yesterday (just below this one) on three reasons why quick forgiveness is not necessarily “phony forgiveness” and we then came across this story: “Parents no longer forgive shooter of teen.”
Apparently, parents of a slain youth retracted their forgiveness toward the man who shot him.
We would like to claim that their first overture of forgiveness seems very sincere based on the news story. We have to remember our second point in the earlier blog post: psychological defenses are sometimes strong when tragedy strikes. As they lessen, anger rises. Now the deep work of forgiveness might begin….in time. And one more point: Even a retraction of forgiveness is not necessarily a final word on the matter.
Robert
“Unless You Forgive the Situation”……Can One Forgive “the Situation”?
We came across this expression recently while browsing the web. The author wanted to make a point about the forgiver’s well-being by encouraging forgiveness…..of a situation.
Can a person forgive a situation? No. That is not possible. Why? Forgiveness is a moral virtue (as are justice, patience, and kindness as examples). All moral virtues are toward other people or living beings (we can be compassionate to a wounded dog, for example). Moral virtues do not point toward storms or earthquakes. Why is that? The purpose of moral virtues is to serve, to make better, to uplift in goodness. We do not serve thunderstorms or try to make earthquakes morally better. We do not uplift a dying tree in moral goodness either.
This does not mean that we do not try to restore a tree or to prevent damage from earthquakes. It does mean that our response to **situations** is of a different kind than our response to other **persons. **
Robert
