Tagged: “family”

What do I say to a partner who keeps pressuring me to forgive?  I am not a very virtuous person, he keeps telling me, if I will not forgive him.

A key question is this: Are you open to the possibility of forgiving in the future?  If so, then you can discuss with your partner that forgiving can take time.  You can clarify that your intention is to forgive, but you need a period of processing what happened, of dealing with your emotions (of sadness or anger, for example).  You should let him know that forgiveness is a choice which needs to emerge slowly for you in this case.  Even asking him for patience may reduce his pressure on you to forgive.

What is a good source for developing the family as a forgiving group?

I have an essay at the Psychology Today website that addresses this issue: Is Your Family a Forgiving Community? Here is a link to that essay:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/node/1109144/preview

My teenage son is angry, but he is oblivious to this. He does get in trouble in school and with peers, as he bullies them. How can I convince him that he is angry and needs to confront this for his own sake and for the sake of those whom he bullies in school?

A key to breaking the defense mechanism of suppression or repression of the anger is to have a quiet conversation with him in which you go over some of the specific consequences of his anger.  Help him to see, in the safety of his relationship with you, that he is getting in trouble in school and is bullying others, making them miserable.  Ask him, then, if there is anything inside of him, such as intense anger, that is causing these problems.  Eventually, these consequences will have him suffer enough so that he becomes aware of the source of his suffering, which is his anger. From there, you should see if his anger is caused by unjust treatment toward him, in which case his practicing forgiving (specifically toward those who hurt him) may lower that anger.

How can parents recapture a sense of love with their adult children if those parents never showed love as the children were growing up?

This may be an issue of self-forgiveness first so that the parents are seeing their own worth despite their imperfect parenting. Then the parents should consider asking the adult children for forgiveness as the parents now show love (in the parents’ own way and in their own time). This requires both courage and humility and may require much patience on the parents’ part as they wait for the adult children to adjust to the new pattern of love.

Shedding Light on “The Dark Side of Forgiveness”

On December 16 this year, I had an interview with Justin Ballis, writer for the London-based magazine, What the Doctors Don’t Tell You, that aims to provide evidence-based holistic solutions to illness. Mr. Ballis was one of the most informed interviewers on the topic of forgiveness whom I have ever encountered. The interview covered an impressively wide range of topics on forgiveness, one of which centered on criticisms leveled against the practice of forgiving those who hurt us. In his researching the skeptical views, Mr. Ballis came across a journal article on “the dark side of forgiveness” by Dr. James K. McNulty:

McNulty, J.K. (2011). The dark side of forgiveness: The tendency to forgive predicts continued psychological and physical aggression in marriage. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 770-783.

This discussion with Mr. Ballis got me thinking: If well-informed journalists are aware of Dr. McNulty’s article, then it is important to have a thoroughgoing critique of that work, which is flawed in many ways. So, with this in mind, here is an excerpt (chapter 14) from my book with Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, Forgiveness Therapy (American Psychological Association, 2015), in which we examine the science behind this work:

McNulty (2011) claimed to have found scientific support for the view that forgiving within marriage perpetuates injustice. Seventy-two first-married couples took part in a survey in which they responded to hypothetical situations regarding forgiveness. For example, one of the partners asks the other to mail a very important package which the other partner then forgets to do. On a 1-to-7 scale, the respondent reports the degree of forgiveness that he or she would offer to the forgetful spouse.  We have four criticisms of the study’s conclusions: a) The questionnaire was very short (five items); b) the questions were all hypothetical and not actual situations in the marriage; c) only one of the hypothetical scenarios is actually serious (an alleged affair), and d) the questionnaire simply asks the participant if he/she would forgive without ever defining the term. The forgetful spouse who failed to mail the package did not act with intent to harm. The one choosing to have an affair did. In other words, some respondents may be confusing genuine forgiveness with excusing or “letting go.”  This is a serious flaw to the work (failing to distinguish related but quite different terms) that could have been overcome by asking people what they mean when they use the word forgiveness. The findings could reflect this: Those who score high on this scale are doing the most excusing or condoning, which could make them vulnerable to further abuse. In other words, those who excuse may not seek a proper justice solution upon “forgiving.”

So, there is our critique. My conclusion? It is this: If there is a “dark side” to forgiveness, the above study is not the one to show it.

Robert