On Forgiveness

Can you forgive someone who is not sorry?

This is Part 2 of my review of The Power of Parting by Eamon Dolan. Part 1 is available here. This installment is part review, part inspired by Dolan’s writing on forgiveness. Enjoy!

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My favorite chapter of The Power of Parting, written by Eamon Dolan and released last month, is “Debunking the Myths: Remaking our Lives.” Dolan opens the chapter:

“The pain estrangers¹ feel is real, but much of it is caused by myths, like the falsehood that we owe anything to abusive relatives.”

Based on the rest of the book, I don’t think Dolan would argue that people who choose cutoff don’t feel grief over the relationship itself. But I really like this chapter because it focuses on another post-cutoff source of suffering: our cultural narratives about family and relationships, which he labels as “myths.”

I was particularly taken with the section on forgiveness because Eamon Dolan hates the advice foisted on estranged people to forgive. He’s right, and someone had to say it! I hate forgiveness, too. Not the concept, of course, but the way it is weaponized.

Self-Help and Forgiveness

I have been in talk therapy for a long time, and my therapist has never pressured me to forgive anyone. But a few years ago, alongside therapy I was also consuming a lot of self-help content, reading and watching videos from a whole cadre of self-help gurus. And they all promoted content about forgiveness. One guru recommended an exercise whereby I would write out every emotional injury I’d ever experienced in childhood (yes, literally every single emotional injury I could think of). Then, according to the exercise, I should read each item out loud, pause, and say:

“I forgive you. I’m sorry. I love you. Thank you.”

Needless to say, I didn’t finish the exercise.²

“Forgiveness is for you”

Whenever I’ve wondered whether forgiveness is necessary in order to move forward with my life, the answer I’ve often gotten back from the self-help set is, “The forgiveness isn’t for them. It’s for you.”

But as Dolan rightly points out, this is a “warped, victim-blaming portrayal” of forgiveness. A psychologist he cites has this to say:

“So much of the literature on forgiveness has been written specifically for you, the hurt party, telling you what you need to do to grant forgiveness, rather than telling the offender what he needs to do to earn forgiveness.”

At this point, I let the book drop into my lap and stared into the middle distance for a minute. This is it! I thought. This is what has bothered me about all the self-help advice I’ve absorbed that insisted I would never move forward unless and until I forgave.

This emphasis on how the “hurt party” needs to facilitate forgiveness is part of what Dolan calls “The Myth of Reconciliation,” the “legend of epiphany, that come-to-Jesus moment when the miscreant sees the light.” The idea is that one person has to “be the bigger person,” reach out first, and then all will resolve from there. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve come across this idea in books, movies, and television.

It’s painful then, when you do decide to be that bigger person, reach out, talk about how you feel, ask how they feel, and reach no resolution.

How do you forgive someone who isn’t sorry? And also, how do you forgive someone who admits they intend to do the same hurtful thing to you again because they don’t think it’s hurtful?

Blame is not bitterness.

As Dolan points out, forgiveness is optional. But, according to him, blame is not. He writes that people who have suffered abuse actually do need to blame their abusers in order to move on. That doesn’t mean they need to hold a grudge or embrace bitterness. It simply means they need to have a moment where we say, “Sally hit me. It hurt,” without rushing to add, “I forgive Sally, I’m sorry, I love Sally, I thank Sally. ”

Multiple therapeutic approaches “require us to identify the source of our trauma and confront it.” That is blame—nothing more, nothing less. I really like this connection he draws because it highlights the false equivalency of blame with bitterness, resentment, or a grudge.

Forgiveness and Freedom

Dolan wraps up the section on forgiveness in a scene in his therapist’s office. He is mulling over whether forgiveness “can help free you from the control of the person who harmed you.” His therapist counters,

“Someone who treated you horribly, there’s no excuse for that. … “And forgiving them seems like just a continuation of the abuse.”

Dolan replies, “‘I’m not talking about forgiving them in person. For one thing, my parents are dead. I’m just talking about forgiving them as a way to let go of the pain they caused us.’ Here I was thinking of Buddhist tradition, which sees forgiveness as a form of compassion vital to our mental and spiritual health.”

Like Dolan, I’m also not a Buddhist. I have read some writings from Buddhist monks including Thich Nhat Hanh, but I’ve always gotten tangled up in their messages on forgiveness. Until reading this section in The Power of Parting a couple of weeks ago, I thought the issue must lie with me. After all, everyone loves Buddhism, right? I’d never questioned it, even though I don’t know much about Buddhism at all.

But Dolan’s therapist goes where I have feared to tread: she “refuse[s] to side” with the Buddha. “That feels like a rationalization,” she says.

“To ask the survivor to forgive their abuser? It’s another way of dismissing the survivor’s experience.”

“This assertion,” Dolan writes, “made me think about how quickly people—friends, family, strangers, Jesus—thrust forgiveness upon us. Why don’t they default instead to… demanding the abuser … atone?”

What about ‘acceptance’?

When I started writing this post, I thought I would end by saying that we need to stop using the word “forgiveness” and start considering the word “acceptance.” But as I’ve been writing, I’ve realized, I hate acceptance, too. Or rather, I hate how the word “acceptance” implies that once one accepts, one will never feel again—anger, sadness, grief. “Acceptance,” at least in the social media self-help world, is synonymous with The End: a static state of being “over it.” But I have never experienced acceptance like this.

In fact, my issue with both words—acceptance and forgiveness—is that too many of us conflate these concepts with “ceasing to be angry,” which really means suppressing anger, an emotion that we’re all entitled to feel. For me, it’s not forgiveness I need to focus on. Instead, the best I can do right now is to allow myself to feel anger and any other emotions as a way of acknowledging and even honoring my past, not as a way of clinging to it.

1. We really need a word for “the person who initiates the estrangement,” and I don’t think “estrangers” is the word. You can always tell when you’re dealing with an underexamined and under-researched topic when you can’t literally can’t find the words. We have the phrase “They’re estranged,” which doesn’t communicate who chose the estrangement. As the discussion evolves, I’m looking forward to evolving vocabulary as well.

2. The “I’m sorry” bit had to do with the Law of Attraction, which meant that I had to acknowledge that one way or another—perhaps in a past life!—I had done something that “at least partially” attracted the shitty situation to myself.