When to Forgive

Michelle’s parents couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t forgive her brother. They conceded there might have been a few “boys will be boys” indiscretions along the way. Her brother struggled with how to show his love. That was why, when he and Michelle were children, he would occasionally sodomize her with screwdrivers.

It also explained why, when Michelle was six and her brother was twelve, he set her on fire using gasoline from the lawnmower and a book of matches he’d stolen from the gas station up the street. Thirty years later, all Michelle could remember of that day was the smell of burnt hair.

They even agreed that those were only two abusive experiences of many that took place during her childhood and, in somewhat subtler form, throughout her early adult years.

Still, they couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let things go. People change, and he was an adult now. Besides, they pointed out, he was her brother. She was making everything about herself. Holding a grudge was selfish. It was hard on them to have two separate holiday celebrations every year.

Seeing their point, Michelle sent her brother an email explaining her feelings and disappointment. He wrote back the next day. He was “feeling generous,” he said. He would be willing to let bygones be bygones if she would drop the issue. He would be the bigger person.

Michelle didn’t write back. She could forgive his past cruelty, but she couldn’t overlook his sense of entitlement and lack of growth. To cave under those conditions and act like nothing had happened would have felt like a personal affront. She wasn’t ready to forgive.

Forgiveness is having something of a moment. As it should—Americans are nothing if not a proud people (to put it delicately). Particularly in these hyper-partisan, angry times, encouraging Americans to hold on to their resentment is about as wise as leaving a handle of Popov on the kitchen counter in your alcoholic uncle’s one-bedroom.

Indeed, forgiveness can be good for a society (and arguably the United States more than many), but it can also be good for individuals. You often hear people talk like that: they forgive because they don’t want to be angry people. They forgive because they don’t want to experience the drain of being bitter and frustrated. They forgive because forgiving is often a better way to live. Philosophers call these “prudential” reasons to forgive, and they’re not nothing.

While it can be hard to measure something as subjective as forgiveness, a lengthy history of research has linked it to improved cardiovascular and stress responses along with a variety of other physical and psychological benefits. Who would have guessed: not being a terminally angry person turns out to be good for you.

Still, some commentators have questioned the single-minded celebration of forgiveness. They point out that while the prudential reasons for forgiveness have merit, forgiving shouldn’t just be a type of therapy. One should have good, principled reasons to forgive based on things like the scale of the offense, whether the offender appears contrite, and how blameworthy the offender was in the first place.

Fair enough. Most are likely to agree that some people deserve forgiveness more than others and some offenses are more forgivable than others. Holding a grudge at thirty because when we were twelve my best friend told me my haircut looked stupid would reflect worse on me than on him. On the other hand, a reasonable argument can be made that forgiving my adult friend for developing a premeditated plan to remove my head before making fun of my haircut should probably be a higher bar to clear when it comes to forgiveness.

Furthermore, putting principle aside, holding a grudge could yield long-term returns that outweigh the costs of resentment. After running the numbers, it might turn out that distancing yourself from a long-term abusive relationship will be better for you over time than forgiving (if doing such on command is even possible) and experiencing the prudential benefits of forgiveness. As the song goes: “You gotta know when to hold ‘em [and] know when to fold ‘em.” Sometimes you’re better off cutting your losses.

As Michelle’s case suggests, the choice not to forgive can help preserve one’s self-respect. Forgiving (or at least giving the appearance of forgiveness) just to accommodate an abusive sibling and pollyannish parents can torpedo one’s self-regard. Being an angry person might not bring the best out of you, but being a self-resenting doormat might not be so fantastic for your character, either. This is probably doubly true when the abuse has happened along the vectors of common lines of social oppression.

Ultimately, the upshot of this seems to be that we need more complex thinking on forgiveness. Philosophers often frame the opposite of forgiveness as “resentment,” which is typically considered a form of anger (though interestingly doesn’t seem to have been theorized as such until the Modern era). Resentment and anger raise their own complexities, but the more fundamental issue here might be that there are reactions besides—and between—anger and clemency. Before recommending people forgive, we might need to get a little clearer on what forms of forgiveness are out there first.

But forgiveness is complex, and perhaps we should forgive ourselves for allowing a bit of imprecision to creep into our thinking on forgiveness. After all, self-forgiveness might be the hardest form of the act to sort out.

Or, as Michelle later said in a meeting with her therapist: “I don’t hate my brother, but to forgive him would be to collude in producing a false reality. If I did that, then I might have forgiven him, but I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”

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Note: the character “Michelle” is a composite modeled on “Sandy” from Jeanne Safer’s Forgiving and Not Forgiving.