The stigma of self-forgiveness
Katy Hutchison, 47, knows a thing or two about forgiveness. The Victoria-based author of Walking After Midnight regularly speaks to groups around the world about her experience as a wife and mother who forgave Ryan Aldridge, the young man who murdered her husband, Bob. (Her work put her on More’s first 40 over 40 list last year.) It wasn’t easy, but she says she forgave her husband’s killer because she didn’t want to raise her then four-year-old twins in an atmosphere of hatred. Still, Hutchison believes that forgiving yourself can be tougher than forgiving someone else — even a killer. “It’s harder to be objective about forgiving yourself,” she says. “We get stuck and see our actions in isolation, forgetting what else is going on.”
Maybe you were a less than attentive friend because you were coping with your mother’s illness. Perhaps your marriage suffered because you were overloaded at work. Or maybe you were an imperfect boss because you weren’t experienced enough to cope better. “You can’t look back at your twenties and thirties and say ‘I should have known’ just because your 47-year-old self now knows better.”
Does forgiving yourself make you a jerk?
But isn’t that simply a way of ducking blame for the things you’ve done wrong? Philosopher Robin Dillon (yup, self-forgiveness is one of those things philosophers think about) put it bluntly in “Self-Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” her exploration of the subject in the journal Ethics. Forgiving someone else for harming you seems virtuous, but forgiving yourself for harming another seems “a self-indulgent cheat” that “betrays a failure of responsibility and a lack of self-respect.”
And at least one recent study seems to support that belief: When psychologists at George Mason University in Virginia examined the traits of people who forgive themselves, what they discovered wasn’t pretty. “People with a dispositional tendency to forgive themselves appear to be rather self-centred, insensitive, narcissistic individuals who come up short in the moral emotional domain, showing lower levels of shame, guilt and empathic responsiveness. Relatively ‘shameless,’ they feel little remorse for their transgressions, little empathy for their victims, and little concern about what others think of them.” What kind of people forgive themselves? This study, at least, suggested one answer: jerks.
