Forgiving is Damaging: 3 Popular Myths About Forgiveness You Need to Forget Now

Number three is a must-know for all people involved in a relationship

Forgive: To cease to feel resentment against (an offender)

: To grant pardon to (a person)

: To grant relief from payment (of a debt)

Those are the standard definitions attributed to forgiveness by some popular dictionaries. If an alien read those explanations, it would have assumed that forgiveness is an unconditional mechanical act you can call upon at will; that you can grant forgiveness with the ease of buying a cheeseburger.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The dictionaries are not to be blamed, though. They are essentially a collection of words from a lexicon, offering plain, objective meanings of each word, and not a psychological textbook designed to knit-pick the myriad shades in meaning. But then arrives the whole band of religious preachings that literally romanticizes the notion of forgiving, dubbing it ‘heavenly’ and ‘godly.’ See if the following quotes sound familiar.

Forgive others so that Allah will forgive you-Quran

For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you-Matthew 6 : 14

If you want to see brave, look at who forgave you- Bhagavad Gita.

Forgiveness invariably is touted as a saintly, self-sacrificial, noble act that would elevate your status. And yet instant forgiveness seldom occur, and they rarely provide the forgiver with the kind of mental rewards that is often promised.

If you are trying to forgive a person in your life, be it your abusive father or infidel partner, the unrespectful kid, or even the man who crashed your car bumper, operating with such unrealistic, stratospheric, philosophical ideas about forgiveness is a recipe for frustration. Forgiveness just won’t happen the way you expect them to be.

Here are three myths about forgiveness that you should instantly replace with their real counterparts.

Dispelling those elevated preachy notions might help you to actually forgive someone.

#1 Forgiveness provides peace

Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

This quote has achieved some legendary aphoristic reputation that it is barely challenged. And yet, it is fundamentally flawed. Unless you have been living a sedentary life in the caves of the Himalayas, forgiveness is unlikely to bring instant peace to you.

If you are able to decide whether to forgive someone, you are also at the receiving end of some wrongdoing. It is the constant prick of that betrayal, the painful reliving of the moments when you discovered the wrong, the shattering of the image you held about a particular person who makes you upset.

Therefore, being able to forgive and enjoy peace should be synonymous with being able to forget all those mistakes committed against you. Now ask yourself: how easy it is to forget?

Even if you accorded an official pardon to your cheating partner, would you be able to stop thinking about it? Even if you tell your abusive parent that you no longer hold any grudge against him, will you be truly absolved from the psychological damage the upbringing has brought upon you?

In fact, you would actually want to remember the mistakes for two reasons: (1)It allows you to take better guard against a repetition of the fault committed upon you. (2) By remembering and showing how affected you are, you send a subconscious message to the offender that it affected you lest he/she may brush aside your pain as too light.

Truth said, you could never forget the nasty incident. You are not a digital device to erase a file at the press of a button. You are a complex, emotional, sensitive being with a mind that can be broken a zillion ways.

What you can do

Knowing there is no real way to isolate yourself from unwanted memories entirely and therefore no life of eternal peace, what you can do is to stop your mind from wandering too much.

Attempt to distract yourself from the thoughts that force you to relive the trauma. Forgetting here is indeed a conscious attempt to stop the wrong train of thought, as psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes abundantly puts:

“refusing to summon up the fiery material… wilfully dropping the practice of obsessing… living in a new landscape, creating new life and new experiences to think about instead of the old ones.”

#2 Forgiving is magnanimous

Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong- Mahatma Gandhi.

There are countless tales we have grown up accustomed to that inflates the act of forgiving with an empty air of ‘self-sacrifice,’ ‘compassion’ and ‘strength of character.’

We were told that forgiving shows the innocence and perseverance of a person and that only the ‘mighty’ and ‘noble’ can do it- thus indirectly egging us to be in the league of mighty and noble.

I would never call plain forgiveness an intelligent act for a simple reason. When you are wronged, there is a decent chance that you have made significant contributions to that mistake. For instance, your cold, distant attitude towards your wife might have driven her into the arms of another man.

Upon discovering her secret affair, if you chose not to dwell on why it happened and instead grant her an instant certificate of pardon, that’s showing no courage to address the real problem. Yet, the forgiveness would elevate you to possible sainthood, thanks to popular literature that idolizes pardoning.

By forgiving, you would effectively give yourself the impression that you have moved on in life and placed the offender in eternal debt. Such feelings offer incredible high as long as you are ignorant that you have not moved ahead even an inch.

Worse, such a pardon without an emotional change attached to it can add more woes. The unresolved issues would continue to operate from the recess of your mind and might surface as sarcasm, muffled anger, resentment, or numbness towards the offender. The other person would wonder why all the veiled criticism pops up after you have been kind enough to grant pardon.

What you can do

Before you offer packets of instant forgiveness, give yourself some time to understand why the mistake happened. Are there issues to be sorted out? Perhaps the intervention of a therapist would be beneficial. Identify the core problem and attempt to resolve it before you boost your ego by showing immature magnanimity. The following quote best exemplifies the change in attitude you need to bring into the game:

You cannot solve your problems with the same attitude you used to create it- Albert Einstein.

#3 Forgiving is a one-man show

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you- Lewis B Smedes

There is an idea that forgiveness is an internal process, solely the responsibility of the offended. This is as dangerous a notion as it gets. Forgiveness is the result of an equation that involves two variables: the offended and the offender.

While it is commendable that the aggrieved party has the broad-mindedness even to pardon a mistake, the doer of the mistake has to reciprocate by earning this right through constructive and rightful actions.

If you think forgiving is a one-person show, eventually, you might experience a loss of power. Your self-esteem will be dismantled. After all, you were at the receiving end of a mistake. Nietzsche was one person who firmly believed that forgiveness was for the weak souls. He said:

Forgiveness are for those who are incapable of asserting their right to a just solution

I’m not at all convinced that it’s for the weak, but it should not be made for free.

If you are trying to reconstruct a relationship after it’s been wrecked by a betrayal, both parties will have to join hands to work on it. Unearned forgiveness would only convey an indirect message that the onus was solely on one party to do all the damage control. Clinical psychologist Robert Lovinger captures the same message in this quote:

While reconciliation is a desirable outcome, psychologically, forgiveness has to be earned.

What you can do

Instead of shouldering the responsibility of fixing the relationship, talk to the offender and voice your concerns. Make it clear where you think they faltered and how they can fix it. Only if you see an earnest effort to win forgiveness consider granting them.

True forgiveness cannot be earned until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution- Judith Lewis Herman.

The takeaway

Studies do not adequately back the popular notion that forgiveness is a beneficial act for the forgiver. Quite often, the contradictory is found to be true. A person eager to forgive might have low self-worth, indirectly conveying that he doesn’t think he has the right to proper justice. Psychiatrist Karen Horney calls this ‘morbid dependency.’

Forgiveness has to be earned through the earnest actions of the offender, who genuinely wants to play his part in dialing the clock back to normalcy.

Unearned forgiveness is no cure for intimate wounds, it merely hides them under a shroud of smiles and pleasantries and allows them to fester- Janis Abraham, Psychologist

So the next time you are wronged, don’t be ill-guided by the romantic literature that inflates the value of plain forgiveness.