Dealing with the aftermath of betrayal and the challenge of forgiveness often comes up in my coaching work. I recently came across a fascinating book entitled: “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct” by Michael McCullough which gives great insight into why we human beings have evolved both the capacity for vengeance and forgiveness and how we can navigate our response to betrayal. I’ve spent the last few weeks devouring it and I’d love to share with you the concepts I found particularly helpful.
In my experience as a psychologist, and having sought counselling myself, part of the therapeutic process comes in understanding what constitutes a normal response to stress, loss and painful events. I have seen that great healing can come with this understanding, further deepened when we allow ourselves to have a normal human response to life’s challenges. This book helped me gain a better understanding of our desire for revenge and our motivation to forgive. If only we all had plenty of time to sit and read, so while it’s no substitute for delving into the book itself, here are some of the gems that helped the penny drop for me on the subject of forgiveness…
Revenge
According to McCullough, the desire for revenge in response to being wronged is normal and natural, and we are biologically hardwired to experience it. It commonly comes to the surface when people feel they’ve been victimised, ostracised, criticised, antagonised or a sense that one’s honour has been violated. From McCullough’s perspective, revenge serves an evolutionary purpose and it doesn’t make us a bad person for having vengeful thoughts or wishes.
McCullough goes on to say “the desire for revenge isn’t a disease to which certain unfortunate people fall prey. Instead it is a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it was adaptive in the ancestral environment in which the human species evolved.”
The capacity for revenge helped humans’ ancestors to solve social problems that threatened their survival and their ability to produce descendants. From this evolutionary perspective acts of revenge can be understood as ways to deter aggressors from aggressing a second time, warn other would-be attackers to back off, and thirdly it has an adaptive social function in coercing all members of the group to cooperate, thereby preventing social loafing.
To be clear, even though it is a normal response, it doesn’t mean we should indulge or cultivate vengeful thoughts or actions.
Forgiveness
McCullough suggests that the desire to forgive too is normal, natural and an inbuilt feature of human nature. It also serves as evolutionary purpose. Two such purposes include helping ancestral humans to get along with their genetic relatives and to establish and maintain cooperative relationships with nonrelatives.
Forgiveness is not the flip side to vengeance and as such shouldn’t be seen as the “cure” to it. According to McCullough, evolution favours the organisms that can be vengeful when it’s necessary, that can forgive when it’s necessary, and that have the insight to know the difference. So in a nutshell, revenge and forgiveness are context sensitive. Whether we are motivated to seek revenge or to forgive depends on who has harmed us, as well as the advantages and disadvantages associated with both of those options.
McCullough describes forgiveness in our close relationships as the “glue that keeps society from coming apart at the seams”. To cultivate forgiveness for a stranger or someone we are not endeared to, it helps to activate the pathways that natural selection developed for us to forgive loved ones. In his research he has found specific conditions that help activate those mechanisms – this is important news for people who would like to be able to forgive and are having a tough time with the process.
It is useful to know that we all have the capacity to forgive under certain circumstances. Before I go any further, I would like to reiterate from my previous post on forgiveness, that it is a personal choice whether we decide to forgive or not. We attempt to cultivate forgiveness for our own emotional and energetic release, our own health and wellbeing, and not that of our transgressors.
Remember too that forgiveness is distinct from reconciliation. Forgiveness can be defined as the private process whereby we get over our ill will and negative emotions, and replace those negatives with positives such as wishing the offender well. If you’ve forgiven someone, at the minimum, you have stopped wanting revenge and you wish that person well in some limited sense. Reconciliation on the other hand can be defined as a friendly reaching out to the person who has harmed you, to try and restore the fractured relationship.
This is a useful distinction to make because it highlights that you can forgive without taking the next step of reconciliation. We can free ourselves from the pain of the harm, from the discomfort of our anger at being harmed and from the pangs of desiring revenge without being a doormat and without condoning what has transpired.
What are the benefits of forgiveness (should we choose to cultivate it):
- It dispels stress, anxious tension and physiological arousal (which can wreak havoc with our health and wellbeing).
- It facilitates reconciliation when we deem a relationship is still valuable to us.
The three psychological conditions that activate the forgiveness instinct:
- Careworthiness – an empathic connection is formed, people tend to forgive when the transgressor is deemed an appropriate recipient of care and compassion. When you feel empathic towards someone your willingness to retaliate goes right down. Developing a sense of compassion, sympathy and understanding can help to us to forgive.
- Expected value – people forgive transgressors who they think will be valuable to them in the future
- Safety – people are more likely to forgive transgressors whom they perceive as unwilling and unable to harm them again.
McCullough suggests the following questions to evaluate a transgressors safety: Try to understand why the transgressor harmed you in the first place. Was the harm intentional? Could the harm have been avoided in the first place? Were there other factors at play? Could they have known that their actions would harm you or to the extent that it has? It is easier to forgive actions that were unintentional, or unavoidable, or committed without awareness of its potential consequences for others. Malicious, intentional transgressions are much harder to forgive than those for which one doesn’t blame the transgressor. Is the transgressor remorseful or showing concern for you after the offense? We are more likely to forgive a remorseful transgressor than an unremorseful one. Does the transgressor possess the desire to harm you again as well as the ability to do so?
In summary: the perception that a transgressor is safe, valuable and worthy of care can help to elicit the forgiveness instinct.
How can people communicate to us that they are safe, valuable and worthy of care?
1. Apologies. What are the elements of a good apology? (a) Acknowledging the offence and an admission of responsibility; (b) offering an explanation for why it happened; (c) communicating remorse, shame, humility and sincerity; and (d) offering reparations. The more of these features the transgressor offers, the more we perceive the act as forgiveable. Effective apologies potentially restore victim’s self-respect and dignity, show the victim that the transgressor shares the same moral values, ensure the victim knows the transgressions were not their fault, reassures the victim that the transgressor is safe, make the transgressor suffer, and suggest that the victim might get some reparation for their suffering.
2. Self-Abasing Displays and Gestures. These are facial expressions and body language that when added to verbal apologies can add weight of sincerity and make offenders seem more forgiveable.
3. Compensation. Sometimes apologies and self-abasing gestures aren’t enough, sometimes for various reasons they are not on offer. The other means of facilitating forgiveness and allowing us to move past hurt is compensation.
Things that can help us move past hurt:
- Being heard, knowing that the transgressor understands the pain and harm they have caused.
- The debasement of the transgressor that comes with an effective apology or by compensation.
- Looking for alternative reasons for the transgressor’s actions besides intentional, malicious harm.
- When we’re harmed by people we love or feel close to, or are in valuable relationships with, it is easier to favour forgiveness as a problem solving strategy. When we are harmed by strangers or enemies we tend to favour revenge. By learning how to turn people or groups we regard as strangers or enemies into people we share some kind of empathic connection with, it is easier to elicit the ability to forgive. This is where development of compassion, a feeling of non-separation, can be of helpful to us (again, not for the benefit of the transgressor but for our emotional release). Developing a practice of ‘loving kindness’ meditation for example, can be effective for this purpose.
Summary of ways to practise forgiveness according to Sonja Lyubormirsky, Positive Psychologist:
- Appreciate and reflect on an instance of when we ourselves have been forgiven or seek forgiveness for a transgression we’ve committed (write an apology letter perhaps)
- Imagining being able to forgive the transgressor, feeling empathy for them and seeing the situation through their eyes. What would you say, what emotions would you feel, what sensations would be triggered in your body?
- Write a letter of forgiveness if you feel this resonates. Don’t embark on this strategy if you don’t feel ready. Describe in detail the injury or offense caused. Detail how you were affected by it at the time and how it continues to affect you. State what you wish the other party had done instead. If and when you are ready, you can end this letter stating that you forgive them.
- Keep practising empathy – developing a feeling of sympathy, concern, compassion or even warmth for that individual. Every time a negative thought comes up, see if you can soften it with these qualities. Also, look for opportunities to practise empathy in your day. Notice when you see someone do something that you don’t understand. Consider possible reasons for this behaviour – the person’s thoughts, feelings and intentions. What factors might explain it?
- Consider charitable attributions. One way of achieving this is writing the letter that you’d like to receive from the transgressor in response to your forgiveness of them – their apology letter to you. What explanations can they offer for their conduct?
- Try to break rumination. Every time you think about the harm done or the transgressor you can trigger a cascading of the old feelings of hurt, blame, antagonisation or rage. Build some mental techniques to distract yourself and have tools to release the physical manifestations of those memories (yoga, meditative walking, relaxation exercises, breathing techniques).
- Remind yourself that forgiveness does not mean you condone what transpired, that it doesn’t have to mean reconciliation and above all else, that forgiveness is not for the benefit of the perpetrator, it is for YOU and every time you find yourself slipping into bitter thinking, turn it into a compassionate thought. Make forgiveness a habit, like you would a prayer.
Betrayal, revenge and forgiveness are clearly highly emotive topics. I hope some of the ideas I’ve shared with you here are thought provoking. I wish you all the best as you carve your path and hope that you can navigate your way through to a healthy, constructive outcome. Drop me a line if you’d like to share your thoughts and let me know if I can support you in any way.
Much love,
Suzy
References:
“Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct” by Michael McCullough.
For a great summary of positive psychology strategies to boost happiness and wellbeing, I highly recommend “The How of Happiness. A Practical Guide to Getting the Life You Want” by Sonja Lyubormirsky.