Forgiving Others - Why Is It So Hard?

By Alex Lickerman, Psychology Today

WHY IS FORGIVENESS HARD?

Forgiveness is hard. But why? Perhaps for the following reasons:

 1. We're reluctant to let go of our anger. As I argued in a previous post, How To Manage Anger, the second of the four main reasons people get angry is to achieve or regain control. If we still feel harmed in the now-even years after we actually were-we frequently continue to feel angry.

And it's inherently difficult, if not impossible, to forgive someone with whom we're still angry. This is true even if the predominant reason we're angry isn't due to frustration at having lost control but in outrage at the injustice committed against us. Anger-no matter what its cause-if allowed to boil without being harnessed to accomplish anything worthwhile, can cause us far more harm than good.

 2. We want to satisfy our sense of justice. Even if we're not angry, if we believe our offender doesn't deserve our forgiveness, we may find ourselves withholding it to avoid appearing to condone what they did to us.

 3. Forgiveness may feel like letting our offender off the hook without punishment. Even if we don't feel that forgiveness implies we condone the injustice committed against us, to release our anger and forgive our offender may feel like letting them get away without being punished, especially if no other punishment is forthcoming.

 4. We wish to harm as we've been harmed. An eye for an eye often feels viscerally satisfying (remember, anger must be discharged in a way that feels satisfying). If we lack the power to deliver actual harm, harboring anger may feel like a second-best option. Holding a grudge does in a certain sense feel good.

 5. They haven't apologized. The power of an apology to open the path to forgiveness can't be overestimated. Nor can the ability of withholding an apology-of the refusal to acknowledge a wrong was committed-to block it.

 6. When someone commits an injustice, we often cease to see or believe they could be capable of any good. We tend to abstract those who harm us, diminishing them from full-fledged human beings into merely "our offenders." This enables us to refuse to allow into our conception of them any room for the possibility that they have positive characteristics or have the capability to do good (much in the same way they abstracted our full-fledged humanity into some label that enabled them to harm us in the first place).

Tomorrow: The Benefits of Forgiving. 

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God bless your family and your marriage.

Jim Stephens