The Beginnings of Radical Compassion Part III: Forgiveness

It has been longer than I wanted it to be between articles, but combining law school midterms, job applications, and then spring break (not a real break for second career student with lots of life responsibilities) resulted in a gap. It is appropo that the next topic on my list is forgiveness, and that the first part is about forgiving myself. Years ago I would have felt like I failed when I didn't exactly follow my brilliant plan for writing these. Today I can more easily forgive myself for this and pick up where I left off. It still isn't natural for me to do so, but I have practice at it, so it is no longer as hard to do.

The third practice in radical compassion I want to talk about is forgiveness. Forgiveness is often the sticking point for people, because it involves letting go of resentments and anger both at others and at oneself. Unfortunately in forgiveness, the hardest part comes first. It is almost impossible to actually forgive and let go of anger at others until you face your own flaws honestly and forgive yourself for them. Thankfully, like the other two, forgiveness is a skill you can learn and a decision you can make. It isn’t some innate quality you either have or don’t.

Before we talk about the practice of forgiveness, it is important to discuss why it is often so difficult to forgive. Mary Therese McCarthy once said “we are the hero of our own story.” Later research in cognition, neuroscience, and psychology has shown that we often rewrite our own memories so that we are more consistent in our memories with our current version of ourselves. These show, from two different angles, exactly the problem with forgiving ourselves. To forgive ourselves we have to admit that we have changed, are changing, are inconsistent, change our minds, and our own memories are often changed to make for a more convenient self-narrative. This is why forgiveness follows humility. If you haven’t begun to practice humility, then there is no way to accept these often painful and horrifying facts about ourselves. Who wants to admit that they lie to themselves regularly, and that these lies are often unknown even to us.?

Once we can begin to forgive our own failings, we can begin to forgive others' failings as well. This presents very different challenges than forgiving ourselves. The first is that anger, especially righteous anger, often feels good, either because of the power it makes us feel, or because it is preventing us from feeling something worse. It lets us feel better than another person. It lets us point fingers and otherize another person. This feeling can be useful, briefly, to spur us to action and give us information that someone has harmed or threatened us. However, the longer we hold onto it, the longer it begins to spill over and taint things that are unrelated to the initial harm or threat.

I spoke in the article on empathy about a practice of looking at my own negative emotions and understanding what part I played in them. In forgiveness I want to expand even further on that idea. Forgiveness wasn’t a passive decision to no longer let things bother me. It was an active practice of restitution and amends for my past behaviors that I felt I needed forgiveness for. The list I had of my part in things became the basis for the things I need to fix. Sometimes this process was very formal, it was me approaching a person I had wronged and then asking them how I could make it right, then if that way of making it right was in my power and within reason, I would do so. I wasn’t making it right the way I wanted to make it right, I was making it right the way they wanted me to make it right. This was an important step in the practice of forgiveness. It is the direct practice of correcting the things in myself that I was ashamed of, felt bad about, and had hidden from others. It was the practice of taking risks and being vulnerable and most of the time having people accept it graciously.?

I will share a personal anecdote about this process. Years ago, I ran into an ex-girlfriend after not seeing her for nearly a decade. To put it mildly our relationship had been tumultuous. There were many things I had done wrong and that I knew had hurt her. There were plenty of things she did that hurt me as well, but this part of making things right wasn’t about what she did, it was about what I did. When I ran into her, I spoke briefly with her and, after asking her permission,? told her that I had been an awful person to her, told her all of the things that I did that I could remember, I asked her if there was anything I had missed, and then asked her if there was any way I could make it right. Her response wasn’t what I was hoping for. She told me the best thing I could do was never speak to her again. I responded “Ok,” and left it at that. I haven’t spoken with her since. Here is the important part of this though, by opening myself up, admitting what I had done wrong, and doing my best to make it right, I was able to reconcile the person I had been with the person I wanted to be. I could now choose not to make those same choices that had hurt someone so deeply again.

This experience had an additional effect that I wasn’t looking for. I also somehow forgave her for the ways she had harmed me. I never tried to. I didn’t set out with the intention of letting that go. Yet somehow, when I had done the work on myself, I had let that go as well. I knew how broken I had been at the time to do the things I did in that relationship, and I could imagine that she was somehow hurting as well to do the things she did. This allowed me to simply forgive her for her faults as I let go of my own. If she were to come to me tomorrow to do the same thing I did years ago with her, to make amends for her behavior towards me. I would respond differently than she did at the time. My response to her would be to have a wonderful life, and learn from those experiences so she doesn’t hurt someone else the same way again. I wouldn’t need her to never speak to me again, because I have forgiven her.?

However, this process of forgiveness, when extended out can seem like it is excusing the poor behavior of others. It is not. Even though sometimes it may seem that what people did is unforgivable, forgiveness isn’t about them, it is about letting go of the anger and hate and shame that poisons my life when I hold onto it. Sometimes, people will never change, for whatever reason they are too broken, too hurt, too raw to be able to hold anything more than their current experience and their baggage. Sometimes they need the anger and rage to protect them from the pain they would otherwise feel. Sometimes their behavior is so toxic that even though I have forgiven them, they are dangerous and toxic to my life. This ties in to our next topic, which is justice, a topic that some people think is antithetical to forgiveness. It isn’t, and in fact the modern practice of restorative justice combines the two beautifully. We will talk about this more next time, but justice is as deeply rooted in compassion as empathy, humility and forgiveness.