4 Jul 2019 by Beata Souders, MSc., PsyD candidate
Scientifically reviewed by Jo Nash, Ph.D.
What is Forgiveness? (And What It Is Not, Incl. Definitions)
Forgiveness is often defined as an individual, voluntary internal process of letting go of feelings and thoughts of resentment, bitterness, anger, and the need for vengeance and retribution toward someone who we believe has wronged us, including ourselves. Our capacity for forgiveness is a part of human nature that has evolved in the process of natural selection, and according to evolutionary science, it developed in the same way as our tendency toward revenge.
Both forgiveness and revenge are social instincts that solved problems for ancestral humans. Although both of these are fixed aspects of human nature, these capacities can be altered, which gives us hope that we can make the world a more forgiving and less vengeful place (McCullough, 2008).
“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
Forgiveness can be initiated by different means and can be a result of changes in cognition, the offender’s behavior, the victim’s behavior, willful decision, emotional experience or expression, spiritual experience, or any combination of those. Some of us are more forgiving than others, and forgiveness can be conceptualized as a personality trait or as an aspect of a more complex, enduring quality like resilience.
There are several definitions of forgiveness that emphasize different aspects of it and represent many of the existing models of understanding and approaches to forgiveness.
Decision-based Forgiveness
DiBlasio (1998) emphasizes willful decision-making and forgiveness that is based on willpower:
Decision-based forgiveness is defined as the cognitive letting go of resentment and bitterness and the need for vengeance. However, it is not always the end of emotional pain and hurt. Forgiveness here is viewed as an act of will, a choice to let go or to hold. People can separate their thoughts of resentment and bitterness from their feelings of hurt. DiBalsio’s decision-based model is about cognitive letting go of resentment and bitterness, but does not account for hurt feelings, which often persist after the choice was made.
Cognitive Forgiveness
Another cognitive definition of forgiveness is based on the perspective that sees transgressions as violations of cognitive structures, like beliefs, for example (Gordon et al., 2005). A cognitive approach to forgiveness employs standard cognitive therapy and psychodynamic therapy interventions to help people change their cognitions.
One such example is the cognitive model of Thompson, Snyder, Hoffman, and Rasmussen et al. (2005). They have proposed a definition of forgiveness as:
“The framing of a perceived transgression such that one’s responses to the transgressor, transgression, and sequelae of the transgression are transformed from negative to neutral or positive. The source of the transgression, therefore the object of forgiveness, may be oneself, another person or persons, or a situation that one views as being beyond anybody’s control like illness, fate, or a natural disaster.”
Emotional Forgiveness
Worthington (2006) defined true forgiveness as something that happens only when emotional forgiveness can occur because emotional replacement is necessary.
When emotional forgiveness is complete, the person will have replaced negative emotions associated with unforgiveness like anger, resentment, and vengefulness with positive emotions like empathy, compassion, sympathy, and altruistic love.
They argue that the change in emotional forgiveness, as it begins and moves toward completion, will be reflected most accurately by changes in emotions, not by changes in thoughts, motivations, or behavior, although those will often occur as well.
Forgiveness as a Process
Finally, Enright and Fitzgibbons (2015) believe that all three aspects of forgiveness need to change, namely cognitive, affective, and behavioral, if a person is to fully forgive.
They argue that a person must have a form of emotional readiness to forgive before they are likely to be receptive to forgiving. The process of forgiveness may take many forms and involves some of the following: cultivating acceptance and empathy, perspective taking, and benefit finding.
For example, a person may decide to rewrite the story of the transgression in a journal by using one or more of these approaches and thereby alleviate the anger and allow for emotional healing to occur (McCullough, Root, & Cohen, 2006).
What Forgiveness is Not
Forgiveness is not pardoning, condoning, excusing an offense or forgetting about it. It is also not the same as reconciliation, although that can occur as part of the forgiveness process.
Some also argue that decisional forgiveness and its many forms can sometimes be mistaken for forgiveness (Worthington & Scherer, 2004). Administration of justice, for example, can resolve conflict and set the score by taking the revenge out of the hands of an individual and by placing it in the hands of society.
True forgiveness, however, is an individual and internal process, and administration of justice is only an external solution to an internal event that rarely satisfies the complexities involved in the process.
Tolerating the situation or any form of denial and suppression of emotions that create more stress are also not effective forms of coping and forgiving. Pardoning is very much a legal concept, like the administration of justice, and also does not constitute forgiveness.
Finally, condoning, which justifies the offense, and excusing, which implies shifting the blame, are no more than forms of self-deception that encourage a deeper sense of victimhood (McCullough & Witvliet, 2002).
The Psychology of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a complex psychological construct, and researchers who study forgiveness stress different aspects of it when they formulate their theories.
While forgiveness can be understood as a situational response and as a skill that can be learned, it is also influenced to a large extent by an aspect of one’s personality and, as such, termed as trait forgiveness.
Some of us are simply more forgiving than others, and psychology attributes this to personality differences and other dispositional qualities that tend to be stable over time.
State and trait forgiveness
Big Five personality traits of neuroticism, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness, and agreeableness have been found in some studies to be linked to forgiveness. Agreeableness and neuroticism were most strongly related to forgiveness, and all of them except openness have been found to relate to an unforgiving or forgiving disposition (Worthington, 2006).
In addition to the Big Five, a number of other dispositional qualities affect forgiveness and include relatively stable beliefs, values, and attitudes. Worthington suggests that if we want to become more forgiving, we might seek to change our dispositional qualities.
To provide a target for intervention, he suggests that we start with qualities related to the self and work on the stability of our self-esteem first, followed by modifications of attitudes of pride and enhancing humility. One can also seek modification of the angry, hostile, aggressive, and vengeful affective dispositions as well as relational qualities, especially those that influence the emotional tone of a relationship (2006).
People are said to have an unforgiving disposition when they are unable to forgive across different situations and over time. Although this predisposition could be due to nature as much as nurture, an unforgiving disposition can be distinguished into two types: a grudge-holder or a vengeful person (Worthington, 2006).
Grudge-holding disposition
People with a grudge-holding disposition wish harm and misfortune on the offender and express a form of passive resistance and bitterness rather than active retaliation and direct confrontation. Grudge-holders ruminate about being a victim and, as a result, experience a lot of negative emotions, namely bitterness, resentment, hostility, hatred, anger, and fear.
Fear of being hurt, offended, and victimized dominates, followed by anger associated with pain and suffering rather than with active destruction. Finally, when topped with a sub-current of sadness, the grudge-holding disposition can lead to depression over the inability to retaliate or escape the grudge.
Vengeful disposition
People are not usually born vengeful, but those who are predisposed to hostility and anger tend to channel an unforgiving disposition toward vengeful motives. These individuals are often hyper-attuned to justice or may suffer from a narcissistic wound to their pride.
Forgiving disposition
Forgiving disposition can also come about by nature and by nurture. Worthington argues that a biological disposition toward forgiveness might be apparent soon after birth.Particularly, if forgiveness is conceptualized as a replacement of the negative emotion of unforgiveness by any of the positive and other-oriented emotions (2006).
Adult attachment model of self
Another mitigating factor that can influence one’s ability to forgive is one’s attachment style, as defined by Bowlby (1969) in his Adult Attachment Model of Self. Based on how we develop a sense of attachment to our primary caregivers as infants, those dispositions reflect important cognitive frameworks that are likely to drive interpersonal behavior in adulthood (Kachadourian, Fincham, & Davila, 2004). Studies found that insecure individuals do not accommodate when a close partner hurts them and are often less forgiving than securely attached individuals (Gaines et al., 1997; Scharfe & Bartholomew, 1995; Kachadourian et al., 2004, 2005).
Rumination has been suggested as a connector between affect and ways people respond to hurts (Berry, Worthington, O’Connor, Parrott, & Wade, 2005). Insecurely attached individuals respond intensely to threatening events and ruminate about the relationship (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2005), which in turn chronically primes the insecure working model (Kachadourian et al., 2005), to the point that any threat can and will activate it.
Sensitivity
Reactivity to sensory stimuli is related to both introversion and emotionality according to Aron and Aron (1997) and Worthington and Wade (1999). They proposed that sensitivity is a predictor of forgivingness, where sensitivity to rejection as stimuli could be an example of a personality characteristic related to unforgiveness.
Stability of self-esteem
Although Tangney, Boone, and Dearing (2005) found no significant relationship between forgiveness of others and self-esteem, Worthington suggests that stability of self-esteem might be more important to forgiveness than simple high self-regard (2006).
Ruminative style of the victim
The content of one’s thinking, and particularly repetitive types of rumination, will typically influence whether one will be more forgiving or more vengeful in their motivations, and perhaps in their actions as well. There are many types of rumination: some can be fearful or simply obsessional, while others can be about getting revenge and responding angrily. Rumination is a form of affect-laden repetitive thinking associated with automatic and intrusive thoughts about an event and its consequences for the person can interfere with the person’s daily activities.
Narcissism
Emmons (2000) has linked narcissism to an unforgiving personality and observed that relationships of those who tend to be narcissistic are characterized by entitlement and lack of empathy. Defined as self-admiration that is characterized by tendencies toward grandiose ideas, exhibitionism, and defensiveness in response to criticism, narcissism was implicated in difficulties with the cultivation of forgiveness.
Pride
A sense of pride or a high sense of ego was hypothesized by Baumeister, Exline, and Sommer (1998) to likely provoke others to transgress against them. They suggest that overly proud individuals behave in ways that invite transgressions that often involve blows to their self-esteem and pride.Other affective dispositions of negative valence that are strongly linked to unforgiveness are trait anger, trait fear, shame-and guilt-proneness, hostility, aggressiveness, and vengefulness.
On the other hand, other-oriented emotional traits, like those of trait empathy, trait sympathy, trait compassion, and traits that demonstrate altruistic love, are strongly associated with emotional forgiveness and are often involved in the very definition of it.
Particularly, the research examining trait empathy found that state empathy mediates or partially mediates the connection between apology and forgiveness (McCullough et al., 1997). Some of these are discussed below.
A Look at the Theory and Research
Although forgiveness has been an important concept in many religious and spiritual practices for millennia, it is fairly new as an object of psychological research. Nevertheless, there are already several different models of forgiveness.
Baumeister, Exline, and Sommer were the first to differentiate between intra- and interpersonal forgiveness models and proposed the process of forgiveness on a continuum of silent and hollow forgiveness on one side versus full forgiveness at the other end of the spectrum (1998).
The interpersonal models usually do not cover the experience of forgiveness as something that occurs within the person and can be better termed as interactions surrounding the transgression.
Sapolsky (Sapolsky, & Share, 2004) and de Waal (de Waal, & Pokorny, 2005), for example, created a reconciliation-based model where the focus was on reconciliation rituals.
They argued that these rituals are based on the evolutionary theory and have been effectively used to foster repair in relationships. Sapolsky and others showed that many of the reconciliation rituals throughout history were designed to lower arousal and suggested that this could lead to forgiveness.
McCullough (2001) extended the reconciliation-based model to include the intrapersonal realm and conceptualized forgiveness as an attachment-empathy system competing with ruminating justice-revenge system, but still for the purpose of governing the social process.
Hargrave and Sells’ interpersonal theory saw forgiveness as driven by exoneration and entitlement and divided it into stages, although not necessarily sequential (1997).
Insight and understanding stages were about recognition of dynamics and identifying the reasons for transgression. When occurring together, they were considered as an exoneration of the individual because in the context of family, for example, the system was responsible for the problem and no one was guilty.
The third and fourth stage, more explicitly interpersonal, were a form of allowing for compensation. Here the responses of the offender would be considered, and explicit forgiving would take place including expression of forgiveness from victim to the offender as well as the offender’s response to that forgiveness.
Rusbult’s interdependence theory model conceptualized forgiveness, particularly in a relationship, as a gut response to transgression characterized by angry emotions and vengeance motive (2005). While most people restrain the gut feeling, subsequent cognitions, emotions, and motivations move them toward pro- or anti-relationship behavior.
These behaviors were categorized into passive positive loyalty or passive negative neglect on one side and then active positive voice and active negative exit on the other.
Intrapersonal forgiveness models are exemplified by Worthington’s stress-coping model of forgiveness. His early model was based on the classical conditioning model, where his explanation of forgiveness was simply about how transgression causes emotional pain.
Here, forgiveness was defined as triggering of an emotional response where extinction of such response would be forgiving until it was triggered again.
The model originally did not acknowledge the cognitive complexity, exercise of willpower or the nuances of the situation. It had eventually evolved into a comprehensive REACH model discussed below as an example of the process of forgiveness that employs multiple methods to encourage forgiveness.
Other intrapersonal models stressing different aspects and representing competing perspectives on forgiveness are as follows:
Flanigan claims it involves predominantly cognitive processing (1992)
DiBlasio argues that decisional forgiveness is a core concept (1998)
Malcolm and Greenberg highlight affective aspects and stress emotional forgiveness (2000)
McCullough et al., conceptualize it as motivational change away from retaliation and estrangement and toward reconciliation and goodwill (1997)
and finally, Gordon, Baucom, & Snyder assign greater importance to behavior (2000).
The Process of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a process, first and foremost.
There is the intrapersonal process as in letting go of anger and interpersonal forgiveness which involves the transgressor and is not always necessary.
Recognizing that interpersonal forgiveness can be conditional and not always possible is key. Conditional forgiveness is not real forgiveness because true forgiveness is a service to oneself, it is about our own internal process.
The distinction between decisional forgiveness, which is about the external process and emotional forgiveness which is about the internal letting go is very important (Worthington, & Everett, 2006). Forgiveness also does not work well when a person feels it wasn’t their choice to forgive, and forgiveness as a choice is discussed below.
McCullough described forgiveness as a process of change. McCollough also suggests that what makes his approach of benefit-finding different to other approaches (like empathy-finding or relationship-commitment), is the positive focus.
McCullough showed that writing about the benefits of interpersonal transgressions can be an effective form of intervention as it allows for cognitive processing that facilitates forgiveness:
When our participants wrote about the benefits or potential benefits of transgressions they had recently suffered (a task that they found remarkably easy to complete), they experienced reductions in avoidance versus benevolence motivation and reductions in revenge motivation—the motivations underlying forgiveness (McCullough, Root, & Cohen, 2006).
There are several different approaches to the process of forgiveness and taking perspective has been found to be one of the most effective ways to practice forgiveness, as it allows us to connect to the transgressor as a human being (McCullough, 2008). Several studies in effective communications and couples therapy support these claims.
Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communications approach explains how defining the other side’s needs can be helpful in learning how to take another’s perspective (2003).
Similarly, John Gottman’s method of communication stresses that both sides of the story are valid and that acknowledging the other side’s perspective can also contribute to easing the process of emotional forgiveness (1999).
“Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.” William Shakespeare
The ability to forgive oneself or the forces of the universe (fate or God) is also an important part of cultivating forgiveness.
The level of acceptance a person is capable of plays a critical role in how effective the process of forgiveness will be, especially since some studies show that some instances of forgiveness may involve grieving (McCullough, 2008).
A meta-analysis by Wade, Worthington, and Meyer (2005) identified three elements that were common among all effective forgiveness interventions, irrespective of what intervention model or what theory the methods were based on:
-use of multiple methods to reduce unforgiveness,
-committing to forgiveness, and
-empathizing or experiencing positive other-oriented emotions as an antidote to unforgiveness.
Finally, Webb and colleagues defined the process of forgiveness as a coping mechanism that employs mindfulness and involves re-framing and neutralizing ill will (Webb, Phillips, Bumgarner, & Conway-Williams, 2013).They explained that “increased mindfulness might allow the tendency for unforgiveness to be recognized by the patient earlier and more readily and therefore provide an opportunity to utilize forgiveness as a coping mechanism” (2013).