Empathy helps forgiveness
The results were so startling — and apparently clear-cut — that they prompted the researchers to re-evaluate whether they’d measured true self-forgiveness at all. And it turned out they hadn’t. Instead, they’d captured both those who had struggled with genuine self-forgiveness and those who had engaged in what they termed “pseudo-self-forgiveness.” The difference? True self-forgiveness requires that you go through a period of feeling crummy, experiencing guilt and regret, and engaging in an arduous process of potentially uncomfortable self-examination. It involves acknowledging your wrongdoing and accepting responsibility for it. And finally, it means that you adjust your behaviour so that you don’t make the same mistake again and, where possible, that you take steps to repair the harm you caused. In pseudo-self-forgiveness, you let yourself off the hook without any of that messy work in the middle: You bypass accepting responsibility (often blaming the victim for what happened), fail to acknowledge the harmful consequences of your actions (by minimizing them or blaming the victim) and skip the self-examination and reparations. Jerks, it turns out, forgive themselves easily because they rarely blame themselves to begin with. For the rest of us, the journey is tougher.
Forgiving others, forgiving yourself
“I’m not sure if what I’m going through is self-forgiveness, acceptance or just not feeling guilty anymore!” says Marie Jansen*, 46, with the wry laugh of someone whose journey is ongoing. Jansen grew up in a strict religious community in Saskatchewan, isolated enough that she didn’t know anyone outside her religious group until she was 15. Her father deserted the family when she was young, and her mother struggled to raise her children on her own. “She was a great mom,” says Jansen now. “She showed me a lot more affection that she ever got and because of the love I got from her, I turned out to be an okay adult.” When Jansen turned her back on her orthodox faith in her twenties, her mother worried that her daughter’s soul would be barred from heaven. For 20 years — through Jansen’s marriage and the birth of her own children — the family maintained an “uneasy truce,” with Jansen simply avoiding the topic of religion — and politics and culture and society and just about anything else potentially disagreeable — when she was with her family. “They’re rural, conservative and religiously orthodox. I’m urban and liberal. It wasn’t easy!” she says. Then, when Jansen adopted even more liberal religious practices in her mid-forties — she joined a Unitarian church — her mother and extended family refused to share religious holidays like Christmas and Easter with her. The impasse has lasted more than a year now.
“They need me to believe what they believe, and I need to be true to myself,” says Jansen. Still, it wasn’t until she found a way to stop being angry with her family — “I realized that they don’t mean me harm. They want to see me in heaven” — that she found self-forgiveness as well. “Forgiving them has made it easier to forgive myself.”
Yet, what is she forgiving herself for? For having her own beliefs? Jansen says that’s not it: She’s forgiving herself for not being able to single-handedly make it all better, for not being the perfect daughter who can find a way to keep even a false peace in her fractured family. “It’s hard not being accepted by my mom, because I love her.” But even though forgiving her family and herself hasn’t magically resolved their impasse, Jansen feels at peace. “Instead of feeling like an injured little girl, I feel like a grown-up woman who knows what she believes. I would like it to be better, but I’m not going to waste my days in anger.”
