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One of Amanda Gregory’s fondest childhood memories is a game she played with her two brothers. They called it ‘cockroach hunting’.
This involved running to the kitchen at night, turning on the light and trying to squash the cockroaches with their bare feet before the bugs could spread.
Neither her mother nor her father bothered to clean, she recalled, and left the house filthy: the floors thick with grime and the carpets reeking of cat urine. And they rarely spoke to their children.
One day she injured her knee and her parents seemed more annoyed than concerned, she said. Eventually she learned to live with the pain. Decades later, Ms. Gregory discovered that there were bone chips in her joint, a problem that required surgery.
Growing up, none of this seemed unusual. It wasn’t until much later in life, after she became a trauma therapist in Chicago, that Ms. Gregory realized the extent to which her parents’ physical and emotional neglect had affected her. In the course of her own therapy, she began to wonder, “Do I need to forgive in order to make more progress in my recovery?”
She is one of many therapists, writers and scholars who challenge the conventional wisdom that it is always better to forgive. In the process, they redefine forgiveness while also removing the pressure to do it.
What is forgiveness?
Typically, forgiveness is understood as “replacing ill will toward the perpetrator with good will,” says Tyler J. VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Some scholars, such as Robert Enright, have gone a step further, who say forgiveness is the choice to extend kindness to those who have not been kind to you. And while it may be undeserved, he once wrote, forgiveness can foster “qualities of compassion, generosity, and even love” toward the person who wronged you.
“Imagine saying that to a trauma survivor,” Ms. Gregory said. “That’s a hard sell.”
Others, like Frederic Luskin, a researcher and director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, views forgiveness as a way to give up revenge, hatred, or resentment without the need for positive feelings; neutral feelings are fine. The ultimate goal, he said, is “to be at peace with your life.”
But is it true, as Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu of South Africa once said, that “without forgiveness, without reconciliation, we have no future”? Is forgiveness necessary to avoid bitterness and resentment?
What does forgiveness bring about?
A lot of has It has been written about why forgiveness is good for us. In many religions it is considered a virtue. Some studies suggest that forgiveness has benefits for mental health and contributes to improvement depression and anxiety. Other studies have shown that forgiveness can lower voltage, improving physical health And support for healthy sleep.
“Forgiveness is almost always helpful, but that is different from necessary,” said Dr. VanderWeele.
It’s a topic Ms. Gregory addresses in her book, due out next year, “You Don’t Have to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms.”
In it she defines forgiveness as an emotional process and not as an end point. It is through this endeavor that people experience fewer negative emotions or thoughts about the person who wronged them.
But she is quick to point out that this is not the same as reconciliation. And it does not require you to have positive feelings for the person who hurt you.
“You can forgive someone without having anything to do with them,” she said.
Rethinking what it means to forgive.
As early as 2002, Sharon Lamb, a professor of counseling psychology at UMass Boston, challenged the idea that forgiveness is therapeutic in the long term, asking whether there are cases in which it might even be harmful.
“I want people to feel their feelings and explore their feelings,” she said. “It takes time to work on that.”
Rosenna Bakari, an empowerment coach who experienced childhood sexual abuse, said pursuing forgiveness was not the way to heal. Instead, she added, it was more helpful to allow herself to feel angry and unforgiving after keeping quiet about the abuse for 40 years.
“When you ask yourself whether or not you forgive, step away from the question and ask yourself, ‘What do I need to work on to free myself?’” says Dr. Bakari, who has a doctorate in educational psychology.
Ms. Gregory said some of her clients never pursue forgiveness and “make a lot of progress in recovery.” Others tell her they have forgiven and say it feels great.
“I just don’t think it has to be a goal,” she said.
How do you know it’s time to forgive?
Susan Shapiro, an author and writing teacher in New York City, said that after a falling out with her longtime therapist and mentor, she was haunted by one question: How do people move on without getting the apology and closure they crave?
For her 2021 book, ‘The Forgness Tour’, she interviewed religious leaders and doctors, and she asked 12 other people how they had managed to move on after being wronged. (Examples include a woman whose pastor pressured her to forgive her father after he raped her when she was 13.)
“There’s this blanket forgiveness industry that just tells you to forgive everyone,” Ms. Shapiro said, referring to the countless self-help books and Ted talks who praise forgiveness. “And, interestingly enough, I discovered that sometimes it can be very self-destructive and dangerous to forgive.”
In Ms. Shapiro’s case, however, she decided to make amends with her former mentor when he finally showed remorse over their conflict. “It was just so liberating,” she said.
Forgiveness, however it is achieved, does not happen immediately, Dr. Luskin said. People need time to to grieve and “sit in the mire of unhappiness and suffering,” he added.
After years of wrestling with the question, Mrs. Gregory still hasn’t forgiven her father. She sees her mother as a product of her own difficult upbringing, and although they are not close, the two continue to attend family therapy together.
Sometimes, she added, a lot of emotional work needs to happen before forgiveness is considered. “The thing about forgiveness is that it’s messy,” Ms. Gregory said.
