At the Edge: Forgiveness and Its Abuses

Psychology has begun to discover forgiveness. That is, psychotherapists, in recent years have started to appreciate how forgiveness brings about benefits for the person who does the forgiving. This is a major new positive development within contemporary psychology. The secular psychologists, from Freud and Jung to the humanistic approaches developed by Rogers and Maslow completely ignored forgiveness. As a result, the introduction of forgiveness has been pioneered primarily by Christian psychologists of various kinds.

Briefly let us consider what goes on when we forgive someone who has hurt us. The commonest situation is that we feel anger, resentment, and even hatred toward a person who has caused us harm. Every time we remember that person, we recall the pain, we get angry again, and we rehearse the injustice, even dream of revenge. This psychological process becomes a permanent part of our life, and many become obsessed with those who have hurt them. Once such a process gets set up, it feeds our self-righteousness and turns into resentment. Often it keeps us from making positive, constructive responses to life as well as to the person who has hurt us. It creates the “pleasures” of a victim mentality and of a sense of self-pity. The benefits that come from forgiving our enemies come from letting go of this kind of internal harmful psychology.

For these very reasons, however, it is extremely hard to forgive and we do not want to do it. Furthermore, the person who has hurt you owes you an apology and redress for the injustice. To forgive, as the parable in Scripture makes clear, is like letting someone who owes you a thousand dollars off the hook. But as Scripture also makes clear, we must forgive others, or we will not be forgiven by God.

But, as is often the case, when any major new idea is introduced into a field, so also are the possibilities of its misuse. Already the abuse of forgiveness is beginning to appear in the psychological literature: the most important example is called “self-forgiveness.” Today I come across this term in many contexts, ranging from book titles to articles in popular magazines to casual conversations with psychologists. “Self-forgiveness” is especially common in Christian psychological settings. It is said that one of the things that we must do is to forgive ourselves.

What most people mean by self-forgiveness is that the self must forgive itself for the harm it has done to itself by self-hatred, unreasonable expectation of success, or through weakness that has led into abusive relationships with others. This notion of self-forgiveness is, I believe, rationally absurd and psychologically and spiritually damaging. It is rationally absurd because the criminal (the self) is not in a position to pardon himself. For a criminal to forgive himself for his crimes is either insanity or megalomania.

Let us reflect on the case of a person who hates himself for failing to meet certain standards of his own devising. For example, not making partnership in a law firm, not finding a suitable spouse and having a family, not being beautiful and slender, not getting rich. Does it make sense to forgive oneself for having intensely desired goals that one fails to meet, and then hating oneself as a result? The answer is “no.” It is not an innocent act by the person to decide what will make life successful and what will not. The standards we set for ourselves are riddled with pride and with other vices like greed, envy and anger. We become depressed that we were not able to accomplish what we wanted. We should, as Christians, rather be sorry that we have failed to do what God wanted from us. We have failed him, not ourselves. Thus, we must seek forgiveness not from ourselves, but from God, for having set up the conditions for what makes our life worthwhile.

We are also “failures” because we have judged ourselves. For example, “I am not married, therefore my life is a failure.” Marriage is a positive goal, but “judgment is the Lord’s.” Also, marriage is not the only good, and it may not be part of God’s plan for my life. In any case, we have no more right to condemn or hate ourselves than to condemn or hate others. We can be the jury — we can try to observe what we did, to recognize our mistakes and sins. But we are not to pass judgment or sentence. That belongs to God. As a result, we must seek forgiveness from God for our self-hatred which stems from pride (or narcissism, as psychologists call it).

Given this understanding, self-forgiveness becomes a denial of God. In particular, we deny that Jesus died for our sins, and instead our own narcissistic self takes the place of God by forgiving its own sins. Only in the United States could the self become such an idol that it, not God, can forgive us of our sins. (Maybe this is why the New Age Shirley MacLaine said, “When I pray, I pray to myself.”) Self-forgiveness is just the most recent example of the old American tradition of “self-salvation.”

Author

  • Paul C. Vitz

    Paul Vitz is a popular author and professor of psychology at New York University.

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