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Letting go of bitterness is good for your health.
Rachel Feltman
Every new year brings expectations for change and resolutions for better behavior, and the start of an entire new decade makes these pledges feel that much more hopeful. Perhaps you’ve promised yourself you’ll spend the next few weeks changing your dietary habits, or solidifying a daily gym routine. This year I’m channeling my resolution-related energy into forgiving someone who hurt me—and I’m not doing it for their benefit. I’m doing it for my own good.
If you’ve never heard it before, hear it now: Holding onto grudges is bad for your health, and just thinking about forgiving people who’ve wronged you can leave you better off. And there’s empirical evidence on how best to go about forgiving them, even if you never plan on speaking to them again—and even if you only have an hour or two to spend thinking about them.
Before we get into the evidence on how best to go about forgiving someone, let’s start with why you might want to. A key to understanding forgiveness is that the act is less about making the world a kinder one and more about helping yourself. You also don’t need to believe someone deserves your forgiveness in order to forgive them; I, for one, am confident that the person who abused me deserves no such thing. So why try to forgive?
A growing body of evidence suggests that chronic anger can take a daily toll on your cardiovascular health and immune system. Letting go of the bitterness you feel toward another person can lower your anxiety, which directly impacts both your mental and physical health. Basically, feeling bad is bad for you—especially if those feelings are due to bitter or traumatic memories that frequently come to mind unbidden.
“We know that there are considerable negative impacts of ruminating on trauma,” says Sheila Addison, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Oakland, California. “Part of what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is is really a kind of intrusive rumination, where the injuries or the trauma keep intruding on your thinking and keep you in a state of hypervigilance and alarm.”
There are a lot of ways people can minimize the impact of a past hurt, and therapy is always a good start when possible. Many techniques revolve around helping people reconsider the way they think about those painful memories and try to remove some of the unhelpful feelings of pain or blame. Trying to stop recalling the time someone humiliated you in front of friends won’t actually help you think of it less often, but you can examine why the memory causes you so much anguish and work to see it in a less painful light. There’s evidence that forgiveness can be a great way to do that.
It’s easy enough to accept that you should probably forgive your brother for breaking your favorite action figure back in elementary school. But if someone has caused you real harm, you might wonder how it could possibly be healthy to forgive. My goal for 2020 is to forgive an ex of mine I haven’t seen in several years. We were in a relationship for three years at an age when that represented a formative chunk of my young adulthood. At the time, I knew this person was manipulative and often unkind; in the wake of finally leaving them, I came to realize just how much they had relied on elaborate lies and intense coercion to keep me (and many other partners past and present) in a state of instability and anxiety. It took me a solid two years to feel like I wasn’t actively recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I no longer feel the spectre of that relationship hanging over my head—except when it comes to anger. I have not seen or spoken to my ex in more than three years, but I still think of the injustice of it all not infrequently. I understand that this bitterness doesn’t affect anyone but me, but the idea of letting go of it is still hard to grapple with.
As a survivor of abuse, the idea that I should consider forgiving my ex partner made me bristle a bit. That relationship is far enough in my past that I know I’m in no danger of reconnecting with my abuser or letting them hurt me again, but I immediately wondered how focusing on forgiveness in therapy might be harmful for someone more recently separated from (or still involved with) a genuinely dangerous person. If my therapist three years ago had counseled me to empathize with my abuser and forgive them, would I have let them right back into my life?
Robert Enright, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education who has studied forgiveness extensively, says he understands the concern. But he feels the issue is actually a semantic one.
“Most people have used the word forgiveness all their lives,” he says, but that doesn’t mean they understand what it means. “We have these really harmful coloquial ideas about what forgiveness is.”
The key, he says, is to separate the ideas of reconciliation and forgiveness from one another entirely.
Forgiveness, as Enright and his colleagues use the term, is something that is entirely your decision to practice, and the way to it is completely internal. “It’s a conscious decision to be good to people who were not good to you,” he explains, but while in some situations being “good” to a person might mean sitting down and talking with them and clearing the air, in others it might simply mean that you stop wishing them ill. It’s a virtue, Enright says, like kindness—it will inform the tone of the actions you take toward a person, but does not define what those actions must be.
The idea that forgiveness means hugging out your problems is a misunderstanding. To come back together with someone who has done you wrong is to reconcile with them, which is more about actions than feelings. “Reconciliation isn’t a virtue, it’s a negotiation tactic between two trusting parties,” Enright says. If you need to reconcile with someone to save a relationship that’s important to you, forgiveness can provide a more stable foundation for that process. But you don’t need to plan on repairing a relationship in order to benefit from forgiveness.
“You can forgive someone and still know that you can’t trust them,” Enright says. In fact, he says, in instances where the person who wronged you deserves to be brought to justice—whether you might report them to the police or simply distance you and your loved ones for your own safety—he hopes that letting go of bitterness and thinking more objectively about what’s been done can actually help make the process smoother and less painful for the survivor.
The forgiveness practices espoused by Enright and his colleagues might help rebuild trust where it is positive and healthy to do so, but seeking to let go of bitterness does not mean you have to let bad people back into your life. If someone has hurt you and wants to maintain contact or reconnect with you, you should trust your instincts—and the advice of trusted friends, family, and mental health professionals—in deciding whether or not that’s a good idea.
I don’t believe I should have forgiven my abuser in the weeks and months following my decision to leave them. My anger, sadness, and bitterness were important protective mechanisms that kept me from allowing them to harm me further. It had been more than three years when I decided I wanted to let go of those feelings and forgive.
“It’s important to let people go at their own pace, and have a lot of permission to be in the angry, hurt, outraged, and suffering kind of places they need to be in,” Addison says. “And they need to be in a place where they can distinguish between allowing some grace and taking down a boundary.”
Even for more minor offenses, Enright says, it’s important to remember that you don’t have to forgive—and it might not be the right way to deal with your emotions.
“The initial step would be this question: On a 1 to 10 scale, how much pain do you have in your heart when you think about this person and what they did? If you’re at an 8, a 9, a 10, the next question is what you’ve been doing to help with that,” he says. “A person doesn’t necessarily need forgiveness if they’ve been finding relief from talking to a friend about it or from maintaining a jogging regimen. But if they’re harboring this self-labeled pain, the question becomes, do you want to try something else?”
I’ve often compared my recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder to caring for a deep and messy wound—one that keeps healing over, but with dirt and debris still trapped inside. Healing isn’t a linear process; you keep ripping the wound open, deliberately or not, and the deeper you can dig to clear out the junk, the closer to really being okay you get. Following this analogy, I’d say I’ve got a single, festering splinter of trauma tucked somewhere too deep to reach. I’ve put in a lot of hard, bloody, and painful work to heal, and I’ve given it lots of time. I don’t want to carry that shard of filthy wood around inside me forever. Forgiveness, for me, is not a first attempt or a complete solution: It’s something I’m willing to try because I deserve to be completely free.
https://www.popsci.com/story/health/forgive-psychology-trauma/
