Nothing in the lexicon of popular psychology triggers my inbuilt wince response quite so powerfully as the word "forgiveness". Apart from sheer cheesiness – it's hardly unique in that respect, sadly – there are several problems with the way self-help pontificators are always advising us to forgive. First, it seems like a concept best reserved for those who've undergone real trauma; I bridle, for example, at the "forgiveness guru" Colin Tipping's insistence that we all need to forgive our parents, apparently even if they were good parents – as if not resenting them sufficiently were some kind of failing. Second, declaring yourself to have forgiven someone can sometimes be the height of pomposity, even hostility. (Darkly funny Onion headline: Pope Forgives Molested Children.) Third, surely some things ought not to be forgiven? I suppose you could say the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal "harboured a grudge" against fascists, and should have practised "letting go" instead. But I'm not sure I want to follow that line of reasoning where it leads.
Yet I guess I'll have to ask forgiveness for my cynicism, because the results are in: solid research now demonstrates that those who hang on to resentments are more likely to suffer high blood pressure, clinical depression and other health problems than those capable of forgiveness. (As always, this is correlation, not proof of causation.) Brief "forgiveness interventions" – in which people are guided to call up old resentments, then consider new ways of thinking about their enemies – seem to have lasting positive effects on happiness, even when the grudges are mundane. More mundanely still, a recent study found forgiving yourself for procrastination reduces it in the future. But don't think about that too hard, or you may trigger an infinite mental loop: if you know you can always forgive yourself later, won't that encourage more procrastinating now? Or, as the comic Emo Phillips puts it: "When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me."
The psychotherapist Jeanne Safer is surely right to warn of the perils of "fake forgiveness", promulgated, in her view, by a "forgiveness lobby" led by self-styled experts and doctrinally motivated faith groups. It's easy to see how people feeling pressured to forgive could spiral into self-blame rather than true forgiveness. For forgiveness to be a real choice, not forgiving needs to be an option, too.
Yet forgiveness may be one case where the issue is simpler than it looks – and where it's the specific word, with its centuries of religious connotations, that's getting in the way. Strip away the moralising, and all the most reputable psychologists seem to mean by "forgiveness" is to stop demanding that the past should be different from how it was. "Forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past," runs one well-phrased motto, usually attributed to the actor/writer Lily Tomlin. That's not just eminently reasonable; it's the only rational way to live. It implies no moral stance, one way or the other, towards the future: it doesn't mean staying in an abusive relationship, or not prosecuting a murderer. It just means abandoning a particularly perverse form of misplaced optimism: the notion that things that have already happened might one day change for the better. They won't. The laws of physics don't work that way.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
