Forgiveness (Article 2)
Forgiveness vs Repentance & Repair:
Changing the Narrative
Image credit: Pixabay
A different perspective on "forgiveness" vs the culture at large
Six years ago, I was in the audience at a conference listening to the presenters - authors, academics and educators in the space of personal transformation - share research around the phenomenon of rupture and repair in parent/child relationships. As they related the reality of how every relationship experiences ruptures - particularly within the parent/child dynamic - and that repair is one of the most important components to establishing safety in the relationship, emotional security for the child, and building authentic connection, I was astonished. It was a moment of a-ha.
Wait - what? Relationships are actually about the repair after a conflict? There are families that DO that?
This was something I had never experienced in my family of origin. Those learned, unspoken "rules" from childhood on were always about swallowing the hurt, pretending all was okay and sweeping the harmful event under the rug. Time after time after time. Emotional injuries were never discussed or, if they were, it was to humiliate or belittle the experience of being injured.
Much of the pervasive culture around forgiveness carries with it those same sweep under the rug and move on sentiments, particularly around and within the family dynamic. The emphasis being on the permanence and importance of the family relationship over all else. It belies a cultural ignorance on the importance of repair and a discomfort over a profound lack of societal and interpersonal skill sets to do so. Because of this, there is an overwhelming overemphasis on forgiveness and a stark absence of focus on repair.
To illustrate this imbalance, a search on Amazon for books on forgiveness generates over 50,000 titles while one for relationship repair yields a mere 3,000 with a preponderance of those centered on romantic relationships. A search for books on the subject of making amends yields under 1,000 and most of those are around addiction recovery as part of a 12 step program. That is well over a 50 to 1 difference in cultural emphasis on forgiveness vs making amends: the burden of effort placed on the injured doing the work vs the transgressor engaging in repair.
In non-voluntary family relationships, when family members refuse to do the authentic work of repair, or any repair at all, the demands for forgiveness place the person who was wronged in difficult to navigate tensions between:
Choice vs Obligation / Heart vs Mind: In a study revealing this tension, one that was found to be unique to the family dynamic, “nearly all participants stated it would be much more difficult, and in particularly hurtful situations, impossible to forgive [an equivalent offense] in other relationships.”
Trust vs Risk: “Participants [evaluated] the role of relational closeness and distance as a way to rebuild trust lost after a relational transgression, while also diminishing the likelihood that they would be hurt again.”
Openness vs Closedness / Remembering vs Forgetting: “Even when the hurtful situation occurred years earlier, several participants mentioned that they needed to remember their previous feelings and discuss them with their family member as a path to begin the forgiveness process. For other participants, they centered closedness about the hurtful situation simply because they were uncertain how to communicate openly with their family member.” (1)
In all of these scenarios, the burden is on the person wounded within the family dynamic to navigate how and when to make relational corrections to maintain connection. There are other traditions and approaches, however, that center repair and identifying the injured person’s needs as primary in addressing hurtful exchanges or relational transgressions.
In her book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, Danya Ruttenberg details a 5-step process modeled upon the work of the philosopher Maimonides. In this approach, forgiveness is not the focus; instead the work of repair from the person who caused harm is where the obligation lies. The author makes it clear, there is no entitlement to forgiveness if there hasn’t been the work of repair.
The steps in this process are:
Naming and owning harm. “There is no repentance process without the naming of harm, without owning it. The person doing this work has to actually comprehend the harm they have caused. A person can’t repent if they don’t understand why the thing that happened is actually a big deal - why the person who has been hurt is actually hurt.”
Starting to change. “A person who hasn’t faced their problematic traits and unhealed wounds, or grappled deeply with harm caused in the past, or done the work to change processes and structures, will undoubtedly manage to find themselves in some variation of the same situation over and over. Only when a person does the work to become a different person can they, naturally and organically, make a different choice.”
Restitution and Accepting Consequences. “Those who have suffered must receive redress. Once the work of repentance has been undertaken in earnest, restitution must be made, in whatever way might be possible.”
Apology. “An apology, here, does not consist of the words ‘I’m sorry.’ A real apology is not aimed at the person who has been hurt, but rather is given in relationship with them. It requires vulnerability and empathetic listening; it demands a sincere offering of regret and sorrow for one’s actions.”
Making different choices. “The work of repentance, all the way through, is the work of transformation. The critical fifth and last stage of this process is that the perpetrator must, when faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, make a better choice.” (2)
Notice nowhere in these steps is demanding or expecting forgiveness. It is all focused on the work of the transgressor towards the person they harmed. As Ruttenberg states in her book, “All too often in our culture, forgiveness granted to an unrepentant perpetrator - or to a partially repentant perpetrator, or one whose inner work is unclear but who can write a compelling social media post expressing regret - is conflated with absolution.”
Instead, the extension of an apology doesn’t necessitate the receiver to accept it. There must be an evaluation of sincerity and comprehension of harm inflicted. The acceptance of an apology does not equal forgiveness - particularly in the absence of repair or amends. The granting of forgiveness does not equal reconciliation, and reconciliation does not necessarily equal a return to the same level of trust and emotional intimacy as before the transgressions occurred. We each have the right to determine what role forgiveness plays, on what terms, or not at all, in our respective situations with our estranged family members. There is no role for forgiveness to be prescripted, expected or demanded by external parties as part of our personal healing processes. Releasing ourselves of the pressure to forgive and deciding on our own what role it plays, or not, can free us to focus on more productive aspects of our healing.
As Harriet Lerner writes in her book, Why Won’t You Apologize, “Whether we have experienced a small hurt or a big betrayal, we don’t need to forgive the actions of an unapologetic offender to find peace of mind. We do need, over time, to dissipate its emotional charge. We need to accept the reality that sometimes the wrongdoer is unreachable and unrepentant - and we have a choice as to whether we continue to carry the wrongdoing on our shoulders or not. The conflating of letting go with forgiveness confounds much of what’s written about the necessity to forgive.” (3)
Our healing journeys are our own to build and navigate; not for anyone else - or the culture at large - to dictate. We evaluate what we feel is necessary for our rebuilding of inner peace and stability as well as how we each care to approach breaking the cycles of dysfunction that led to our estrangements. Turning the tables from perpetrator-absolving forgiveness towards injured-centered repair is one aspect we can choose to take forward in our own lives, regardless of what our transgressors decide to do, or not, around engaging in that work themselves.
For myself, part of my healing process is seeking and learning how to do things differently than what I experienced in my family of origin, and then putting that into action. I have turned that a-ha moment into an approach and guiding philosophy with my family of creation that is incorporated into all of our dynamics with each other - never perfectly and always a process, but a constant guiding principle no less. A manifestation of that is a custom-made plaque that hangs prominently in our house and reads:
It hangs just beneath our “LOVE” painting with its letters comprised of my son's hand and footprints.
As Ruttenberg conveys in her book, “the reason to do repentance work is not because you are BAD BAD BAD until you DO THESE THINGS but because we should care about each other, about taking care of each other, about making sure we’re all OK.”
It is an act of love and caring to ensure that wounds inflicted, even inadvertently, are tended to fully and satisfactorily, and it is the responsibility of the person - or persons - who inflicted those wounds to put in that effort, attention and authentic labor to do so.
For more on these different perspectives on repair vs forgiveness, the books cited in this article and referenced below are highly recommended. The next article in this series will focus on the alternatives to forgiveness for our own healing.
[Please note: The educational columnist is not a licensed mental health professional. The articles under this series are written from a peer to peer perspective.]
Sources:
Carr, Kristen & Wong, Tiffany. “Forgiveness isn’t a simple process: It’s a vast undertaking. Negotiating and communicating forgiveness is nonvoluntary family relationships.” Journal of Family Communication. DOI: 10.1080/15267431.629970
Ruttenberg, Danya. On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. 2022. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-08070-1051-8
Lerner, Harriet. Why Won’t You Apologize: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts. 2017. Touchstone. ISBN 978-1-5011-2961-2
Comments