I forgive me

When Sheila Murphy’s* father, Jack, died six years ago, her grief was mixed with a heavy dose of self-blame. Jack was, in some ways, larger than life: A small businessman in New Brunswick, he was admired by many for his strong involvement in volunteerism at home and abroad. But with his family he could be short-tempered and critical, especially with Murphy’s mother, although his children didn’t escape unscathed, either.

“When Mom died, I’ll admit that I thought, Why did you take the good one?” says Murphy. And from that point onward, she says, she didn’t always treat her father well. She distanced herself from him, didn’t invite him to family get-togethers and had little patience for his health problems. It wasn’t until he died that she realized there might have been a better way to deal with her frustration with him than simply “shutting out a lonely old man. You think you’ll have the time to fix it later, but when they’re gone, they’re gone,” she says now.

Making amends

Like Murphy, now 45, not many of us make it to this age without some regrets about how we’ve behaved. Maybe you cheated on your mate or betrayed a friend. Maybe you fumbled through motherhood. (Okay, without question, if you’re a mother, some fumbling was involved!) Maybe you battled addiction — and in the process, did things you’d simply rather forget.

Perhaps, like Briony Tallis, the character in the award-winning novel and film Atonement, your mistakes and misjudgments caused irreparable harm. Her lie sent her sister’s boyfriend to jail and then to his death in war, an error made at 13 years old that she spent the rest of her life trying to atone for. Or, like many more of us, perhaps your failings simply made you feel as if you hadn’t lived up to your image of who you want to be: that you were petty when you strive to be generous, dishonest when you try to be truthful, an imperfect friend when you wish to be steadfast, a flawed parent when you’d rather be your child’s hero. Whatever the case, is it okay to eventually let yourself off the hook? Or is self-forgiveness just a way of dodging responsibility for your actions?

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.

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.”

Jansen’s experience of self-forgiveness after forgiving someone else is familiar to Katy Hutchison. While Hutchison isn’t religious, she slips into language that sounds almost biblical when she describes how it happens. “When you shine the light on someone else, you cast some light on yourself as well. As I looked at Ryan’s life and tried to understand why he’d made the choices he had, I also looked at my own life, the way relationships ended, the things that were left unsaid, the choices I’d made.” How could she extend empathy to him if she couldn’t extend it to herself as well, she reasoned.

At the same time, lessons from her experience as a mom deepened her understanding of self-forgiveness. “I’m fiercely proud of my kids when they fall down and then get back up again. We all fail. We’re all imperfect. It’s not the fall that’s the problem — it’s the not getting up afterwards.”

But our own imperfection can be tough to admit. “It’s hard to talk about choices I wish I hadn’t made, decisions I made badly,” says Hutchison. “But when others share that gift with me, share their failings with me, I learn so much. We connect around our brokenness — and grow through the lessons we learn by trying to do better next time.” 

Doing penance

“It’s not about saying it was okay,” says Sheila Murphy now. “Ignoring my father wasn’t okay.” As she’s grieved her father’s death, Murphy has struggled with forgiving herself — being tougher on herself, her sister tells her, than their father would be if he were alive. She’s been honest about the hurt she must have caused him, and while she can’t make it up to him now, she does what she calls “my penance” in ways that she knows would please him. His favourite charity, a local soup kitchen, has become her charity of choice. And because “he was a big believer in thank-you notes,” she prepares a thank-you basket each year for the volunteer group that offers a small bursary in her father’s name.

Most important, she says, “I’m trying to have a different relationship with my children than my dad had with us. My father would never have told me he was sorry for anything, and I want my kids to know that I can admit my faults. I don’t want them to waste time being mad at me, thinking they can’t talk to me when I’ve hurt or disappointed them. With my son, when I do something that I know has offended him, when I see that look in his eyes that says I’m not his hero anymore, I tell him I’m sorry.

“I don’t say it unless I mean it. But at least we have the practice, the track record, where we can apologize to each other.”

And maybe, through that example, she’s laying the groundwork for some self-forgiveness as well.

*Names have been changed

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of More