Contending With Pseudo Forgiveness
My ex was beautiful on the day she was born and could have turned a statue’s head as she walked down the street. She was intelligent and charming. Her sense of humor was offbeat and irreverent, and she made me laugh more than anyone I’d ever dated.
But she couldn’t apologize to save her life. If she had driven drunk and slammed her car into someone’s house, she wouldn’t have been able to say sorry. She’d have grit her teeth as steam streamed out of her ears before she fainted from the tension.
There’s an insufferable narcissism to non-apologizers and it’s actually a clinical symptom of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I don’t fully understand the resistance as I’ve never had an issue saying I’m sorry for mistakes. It feels like the right thing to do. But man.
I was with the aforementioned woman for far longer than I should have been, and the lack of apologizing undermined the relationship more than anything else. I only wish I’d been more cognizant of that fact and communicated it better. We weren’t meant to be together. But she needed to be called out.
Unresolved disputes are common cracks for resentment and it leads to a breakdown between friends, family, and partners. The problem is ancient by any measure. In the fifth century, the famed Buddhist sage, Buddhaghosa wrote that by giving in to your anger and refusing to forgive, “You are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember … and so first burns himself.”
Even when you get an apology from someone like my ex, it can still feel quite unpleasant. In her case, the only apology I got was a modified one, “I’m sorry, but if you hadn’t done XYZ then…” I walked away wishing she hadn’t even bothered, as it just left me even saltier.
Romantic relationships are a great place to study forgiveness because it involves two people who aren’t related, and who have committed to spending long spans of time together despite facing inevitable hurdles. Before examining two forms of artificial forgiveness, it’s worth examining the proper means of forgiving.
Four means of absolution
Psychology professor, Dr. Pavica Sheldon, led a study identifying four successful strategies used to resolve conflicts: discussion, explicit forgiveness, non-verbal forgiveness, and minimization (when the offense is downplayed as unimportant and the forgiver chooses to disregard it).
They exist on a spectrum. Discussion is best for more egregious offenses. For example, my ex lost her temper and spiked my laptop like a football. There was a follow up conversation about this and she agreed to pay for a replacement and apologized.
Minimization is for the smaller offenses, such as when you know someone’s mistake wasn’t ill intended. Cases where it’s easy to wave off and say, “No big deal.” Explicit forgiveness is self-explanatory. Non-verbal is shown through affection and is common with our species’ closest relatives. Chimpanzees will often groom each other mere minutes after having violent fights with each other (thereby promoting social cohesion).
The above are all reasonable ways of moving on and forgiving when done in the right context.
The problems begin with conditional forgiveness, which is when you attach tasks in order for someone to rectify the situation. I was a victim of this at one point, and found myself going on this strange mission to win the good favor of another. The problem is that conditional forgiveness is toxic for both parties. Per a study by Dr. Zhaoyue Yi, the person administering the conditional forgiveness is prone to more stress and lower well-being. Why? Because it places your ability to forgive in someone else’s hands. You lose agency. You sit around waiting for someone else to prove they care enough to seek forgiveness.
Conversely, the other person now sees you dangling a carrot in their direction. They’ll feel you have power over them and it can breed resentment. The entire formula for conditional forgiveness is flawed.
When you offer unconditional forgiveness, you regain autonomy and the moral high ground to move on. It also spares both of you from getting tangled up in some prolonged situation involving power asymmetry with a friend or partner.
This comes with an important stipulation. Just as my ex was terrible at apologizing, it didn’t mean that her rare apology meant I needed to instantly forgive her. In the case of the laptop, I told her I’d forgiven her too soon because I wanted to move on. In reality, I was still shocked and upset from the whole incident. I’d lost important material on that laptop.
When you hand out forgiveness too early, it can sow resentment. And in extreme cases, forgiving too soon can even encourage more abusive behavior from the other person.
The other form of fake forgiveness
It called pseudo forgiveness. It means you move on without actually addressing the issue. You both just hope it goes away and gets better. In reality, it often comes back to eat away at one of you. Pseudo forgiveness also applies to forgiving yourself of your wrongdoings.
When I went through my divorce, I learned in hindsight that divorce wasn’t always caused by a bomb going off in the relationship. It was often a death by 1000 cuts, many of which you don’t see. One of those mistakes was the continual pushing past incidents that weren’t truly resolved. They piled up like bricks in our attic, until eventually, the structure couldn’t hold them anymore. And it’s hard not to pseudo forgive. In my case, I hated the drama and wanted things to be pleasant. But it was a mistake.
I’ve learned through therapy that some acts of forgiveness won’t always be easy, no matter how long you wait. It is as Khaled Hosseini wrote in The Kite Runner, “I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
The takeaway
Remember to avoid the two improper forms of forgiveness that undermine friendships and relationships:
- Conditional forgiveness — don’t hold people at ransom to earn your forgiveness. Have the courage to forgive them unconditionally when you are ready.
- Pseudo forgiveness — you can’t always put things behind you and wish them into the shadows of your memory.
The proper grounds for forgiveness are discussion, explicit forgiveness, non-verbal forgiveness, and minimization. Remember to reserve minimization for simple transgressions (such as someone being late when it isn’t a repeat offense) and discussions for the more severe incidents.
Most of us will be wronged many times in our lives and in ways we won’t expect. If anything, you owe it to yourself to forgive to gain peace of mind. It’s exhausting carrying around all that baggage.
