9
THE ELIXIR OF FORGIVENESS
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
MY EX-PARTNER HAD BEEN MY ENEMY FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS, give or take a few yellowing calendar pages. He was, so far as I could tell, my worst (and maybe only) enemy, an arch villain in a business saga of trust betrayed, idealism tarnished, and labors lost (mine). I’ll spare you the details, but they would rate a turgid Victorian subtitle, say, “Wherein I Am Utterly Ruined.” The man’s perfidy had swept me and my family into a whirlwind of trouble, sickened me body and soul, and plunged me into a dungeon of debt. Worse, it had broken my heart.
We’d set out to create a company whose mission statement was peace, love, and understanding. The business plan was progressive to the nth degree: flattened hierarchies and stakeholder employees, with yoga breaks and maternity leaves for all. I’d given it my all and everything, shouldering the day-to-day and the night-to-night of what grew into a dysfunctional, teetering multimillion-dollar business. Dazzled by the venture’s endlessly spun potential, bamboozled by the partner’s charming-boy fecklessness, I’d stayed on until he’d taken the best and left the rest.
Our venture was going to save the world; instead it had morphed into a snake pit.
It took me years to sift through the wreckage. I knew the drill: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get over it. But somehow I couldn’t. The Japanese have an expression for that feeling of grievance unredressed: The belly is not satisfied. It had been a clear case of Man versus Weasel. I got on with my life, but my hatred of the partner lingered, like a bare bulb dangling in the soul’s basement, casting crazy shadows.
I tried all the spiritual home remedies. I told myself that my plunge to the bottom had taught me important life lessons, that my betrayer had done me a favor: I’d gone on to better things. I chewed over the notion that mean-spiritedness is its own punishment, that when you hurt another, you hurt yourself: instant karma. It was no good.
I’d sometimes catch myself idly planning a competitive venture to blow my nemesis out of the water. I dropped a disparaging word in the ear of a mutual business acquaintance in hopes of sinking his next deal. I imagined what I’d do if I ran into him on the street, flinging myself headlong on all six foot two of him, grinding his self-satisfied smile into the pavement. Thus doth resentment bring us low. Maybe I had a right to be angry, but I sensed I was paying a daily tithe to the Church of Mine Enemy, enmeshing myself in the big dumb cycle of retribution that already blights the planet. The question was: How could I stop?
I DO TRY TO BE LARGE-MINDED IN MY LIFE; THE TENACITY OF this thing was a little baffling. We all have some tendency to archive slights, indexing them for easy reference. We bank the smoldering fire of resentment so its embers need just a few twigs to kindle back into flame. More than likely, right now you can conjure up some big, painful humiliation. Such memories have a weird persistence; they leap all too readily to hand. The expression nursing a grudge is apt: We keep it on life support just to have the comfort of its brain-dead company. We imagine how sweet revenge would be (though we suspect it’d leave a bitter aftertaste).
Is there some evolutionary circuit that craves a settling of scores? Primates address social dilemmas through reciprocity: returning good for good, but also bad for bad, mandating a close accounting of favors and harms. Apes have been observed waiting for weeks or months before finding an opportunity to retaliate against a rival. Like us they seem to have an implacable recall for insults and a strong instinct to right the scales.
“It’s your amygdala talking,” a neurobiologist told me, referring to the ancient, almond-sized brain structure that primes our fight-or-flight responses. The amygdala is key (along with the nearby hippocampus) to the storage of long-term memory of emotional trauma. It is the likely home office of Grudge Enterprises and its wholly owned subsidiary Revenge Unlimited. It has recently been discovered that the amygdala is hardwired to the brain’s center of higher reasoning, the neocortex, as well as to the visual cortex, suggesting that it is the culprit in our vivid recall of past slights and an unindicted coconspirator in the plotting of payback. Whatever the cause, surveys in several countries show that some 90 percent of men and more than 80 percent of women have had “fantasies about killing people they don’t like, especially romantic rivals, stepparents, and people who have humiliated them in public.”
A grudge, then, is no run-of-the-mill thought sprinting briefly through the mind. It digs in for the long haul, setting up housekeeping in a well-fortified bunker. We construct such a redoubt at our own peril; the maintenance costs are exorbitant. Says the Dhammapada: “In those who harbor such thoughts as ‘he reviled me, he beat me, he overpowered me, he robbed me,’” “anger is never stilled.”
Didn’t I know it: Forgiving my enemy seemed like a primordial spiritual challenge. But I’d read about people who had faced it under far direr circumstances. Tibetan lama Garchen Rinpoche was jailed and tortured by the Chinese for twenty years yet had somehow, improbably, only strengthened his powers of forgiveness. “Ordinarily, if your enemy harms you, you will feel anger,” he said. “This makes your mind like water frozen into ice by the cold. In order to melt it, we need sunlight, which is the cultivation of compassion.”
I knew it was past time to let the sunshine in. I hadn’t set eyes on my ex-partner since the previous century. The Berlin Wall had crumbled into chunks of graffiti-sprayed concrete; the late Pope Paul had apologized for anti-Semitism and kissed the chief rabbi’s cheek; warring subcontinents had made peace. I had to forgive my enemy, but I knew I’d need his help.
I sat down and wrote him a letter: “Dear—, Scrolling through my mental PDA, your name still comes up in red letters. I’d like to strive for some forgiveness, after all this time. Would you be willing to join me in an experiment in reconciliation? Who knows, it might be for the greater good.”
I was a little surprised when he promptly wrote back: “I am sorry to hear that you still harbor resentment toward me. I certainly feel nothing of the sort toward you. I would welcome the opportunity to see you. Time is a sparse commodity these days, but I would be happy to meet for a couple of hours. Kind regards.”
His letter positively glowed with decency. What was he up to? Clearly, he wasn’t going to acknowledge what had transpired. Translation of his “sorry to hear”: “Whatever you think happened, didn’t.” Had he vetted this billet-doux with his lawyer? Still, I’d asked him, and he’d offered (making clear his time, as ever, was more precious than rubies). It would be small of me not to take him up on it.
As I planned my trip, I mulled it all over. If I forgave him without getting an apology, would I just be excusing his misdeeds? “Forgiving the unrepentant,” says a Japanese proverb, “is like drawing pictures on water.” It’s so much easier when someone shows contrition, but what if he never did? I realized it wouldn’t matter. I was persuaded by a remark I once heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu make: “To forgive is the highest form of self-interest. I need to forgive you so that my anger and resentment and lust for revenge don’t corrode my being.” I was corroding in my prison of ill-feeling. If I depended on my enemy to say he was sorry, he was my jailer. I resolved that no matter what happened between us, I would filch the key and set myself free.
I upped the odds of success by prepping a little for our meeting. I’d asked the advice of an international negotiator who was passing through town, a woman who’d gotten even Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis to sit down and forgive each other in the wake of genocidal horror. I’d been embarrassed to bother her with my petty grievance, but she’d waved off my objections. It’s always the same story, she’d told me, whether broken friendships, marriages on the rocks, businesses gone sour, or war’s grim remains of the day. The heart shuts down, encapsulating the injury. There’s the denial of the other’s human decency, the refusal to empathize, the memory button set on endless replay, the cosseting of grudges, the craving for revenge. The solution—to acknowledge your own pain, put yourself in the enemy’s place, and try to let go—was wrenching, painstaking, but it was the only way out of the box.
She had assigned me a simple exercise. First, to lay out all my grievances, focusing more on my emotions than any litany of circumstance. I was surprised to find that much of my discontent stemmed from blaming myself. I’d felt deeply ashamed: I’d been a fool, a tool, a footstool of someone else’s ambitions. I’d felt guilty that I’d dragged my family across the country for a fistful of funny money. I could also see that the intricate ways I’d been disappointed, all of which had seemed so unerringly personal, aimed straight at my heart, were just archetypal human pathos. Seduced, betrayed, abandoned? Reeling from your losses? Heart stuck in a rut? Welcome to Life 101.
A few months later, I showed up at my enemy’s fortress, a small, sandblasted brick office building set in a stand of trees by an ambling city creek. “He said noon,” his assistant told me, “but... [sigh of affectionate exasperation for the Great Man who signs your checks]...with him you never know.”
Finally, the ex-partner strode in. I felt a surge of adrenaline. But at last I was face to face with the bad hombre who’d stolen my water, left me to the buzzards, and rode off with his saddlebags jingling with gold —our gold.
We sat across a table from each other, feeling that time-machine shock of twentieth reunions, each face a little older. I’d invited a mutual friend, a seasoned mediator, to give us some basic ground rules. I could talk as long as I liked; my adversary would listen. Then we’d switch. Finally, if we wished, we could talk together. Our friend would sit there, “holding the space.” She asked us to take a few minutes in silence, then say a few words. I remembered I had resolved to ask him something that wasn’t purely hostage to the past. And I was genuinely curious: Why had he agreed to meet with me?
“Because I knew it was important to you,” he replied, “and I believe in healing. If I could make things better, I decided I would do it—to see what I could do for you, to strengthen my own understanding.”
His answer—a perfect answer—threw me. He’d always been adept at dissimulating, talking the talk, a master at disarming in order to later stab you in the back. But if he were such an ogre, why was he even sitting here? After all this time, with all my painstakingly stockpiled bitterness, I was suddenly on the verge of tears.
“What I want to do,” I said, my voice shaking a little, “is just tell you my side of the story.”
As I spilled it all out, he listened, nodding occasionally: the shambles his hubris had made of everyone’s lives, the fallout of his broken promises for me and the people I loved. When I became ill, he had dismissed me with a pittance. But it was his lack of caring that was most wounding. Without so much as a get-well card or a thanks for the memories, he’d acted as if I had fallen off the edge of the Earth.
As I talked and he took it in, I saw flickers of empathy in his eyes, glints of comprehension, not a spark of malice. But I detected something else: a blankness, as if it wasn’t all quite registering. I was suddenly hit with an unwelcome thought: What if all of it, so utterly consequential to me, had been just a blip on his radar? What if he hadn’t lost any sleep over it because it hadn’t much mattered? What if—and this possibility was the most humiliating—he didn’t even remember?
When his turn came to speak, he said as much. He did recall that some promises were made, but he couldn’t quite place the details. He recalled I’d fallen ill, but not that he’d used the opportunity to dropkick me into the end zone. He was surprised to hear I’d been hospitalized not twenty minutes from his house. Whatever I’d been through had gone largely unnoticed; he’d had his own problems.
These he laid out, talking in ellipses about an “enterprise misaligned with purpose” and “bad advisers” and “a certain naiveté about the business,” as if some malign imp had set about undermining the venture. Because of this occult force, “misunderstandings took place” and “things didn’t work out as intended.” It was hard to tell whether he admitted even to himself that he had used people until he used them up. When it came to his broken commitments, he talked about “the entrepreneur’s reluctance to get pinned down to entangling agreements,” and his callousness became “not having the right emotional skill-set.” He lamented his debts and the relentless squeeze-plays by his investors.
But as he elaborated, he seemed to circle closer to the heart of the matter, describing the desperation he’d felt to make the business succeed. The international negotiator had also asked me to imagine my ex-partner’s state of mind and heart, conjure his hopes and fears as if they were my own. I was amazed how closely my guesses were confirmed by what he was now telling me. “I felt I needed a life raft,” he was saying. “That I’d sink if I didn’t take care of myself. I had my family to think about.” When he talked about feeling like the Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike, I found myself involuntarily nodding. I’d often used the same analogy; I had no idea he’d felt the same way. “A person has an image of himself,” he went on, “as gentle, kind, and good. But others perceive him as arrogant, narcissistic.” He sighed almost inaudibly. “And then you find there are things about you that are shitty and insensitive.”
This rang a bell. If I were honest with myself, hadn’t I also pushed people too hard, though I would have claimed in the name of the greater good? When he talked about his own life—growing up feeling “invisible, always keeping the back door open so I’d be able to get out when my family got too crazy”—even though he’d been raised as the privileged scion of old money, I knew the feeling.
Now and again he’d come back to the issues between us. “It was hard to give you the consideration you may well have deserved. Besides,” he hastened to add, “there was a certain lack of insistence on your part.”
“You’re saying that it was up to me to keep you from stealing my lunch money?”
He looked embarrassed. “Well, no, that wouldn’t be right.”
For the first time since we’d met, he seemed to really think about it. Abruptly, he began to talk about what it had felt like to come back from the Vietnam War, disillusioned and traumatized. “I still feel anger at all the lies. But the most hurtful thing was the feeling of betrayal.” He paused. His eyes softened a little. “I can see how this would feel for you,” he said, “that kind of betrayed innocence. It sears the soul.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. I was speechless; this was how I felt. He’d reached deep down into his own feelings and pulled out a big handful of mine. That I was visibly moved seemed to draw him out further. “Look, I agree that you were not treated well. I didn’t appreciate your efforts. I feel badly. I wish I’d done a better job.” I looked at him, saying nothing. “Okay,” he sighed. “If it helps for me to say it, I will: You probably were strung along.”
He paused again. Then, out of nowhere, it came.
“And I’m sorry,” he said.
The words could have been hollow, perfunctory, but they weren’t. And suddenly it felt as if a stage set on which I’d been performing a long-running play began to recede on invisible casters, the houselights coming up, the audience stirring, starting to file out. I looked into the face of the man I’d made my personal demon. It seemed more open, warmer, more careworn; it was no longer lupine, just the face of an ordinary person, sometimes crappy, sometimes kind, contending with his own problems just like everyone. I felt something that would have been unthinkable a few hours before: a sense of empathy and more—a sort of soaring liberation I could only call forgiveness.
As we left the charmed zone of intimacy, chatting about politics, kids, people we used to know, the feeling persisted. We shook hands, briefly hugged. I thanked him for his time. “There’s always time for this,” he said softly. He left to get back to work; the business, he disclosed, wasn’t doing so well. I hadn’t missed any pot of gold, just decades of typhoon-class migraines.
As I took a cab to the train station, I began to think about my own role in the mess. Don’t the soft-boiled idealists screw things up as badly as the hard-boiled pragmatists? Hadn’t I also been hell-bent on success, inconsiderate, overwhelmed, out of my depth? How much, for that matter, had I ever thought about him? I was the talent; he was just the moneyman who signed the checks, the supernumerary who underwrote my globe-straddling contributions. I wondered how I’d missed the clues: my enemy, myself. We had been two young men out to conquer the known universe, using each other, and, God help us, brothers under the skin.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I WAS A LITTLE BEWILDERED to find that the malignant miasma of my grudge had lifted. I could no longer understand how I’d allowed such a ludicrous state of mind to take hold in the first place. I’d planted a hard little acorn of resentment, fallen asleep, and awakened in the shadow of a towering, moss-draped oak. Where had my enmity gone? I didn’t quite understand what had happened between us. He’d apologized, and I had accepted. But what is this epiphany called forgiveness? The field of psychology has tended to ignore it, treating it more like a religious mystery than a therapeutic modality. It is found in the indexes of few clinical texts. Sigmund Freud, in all his writings on healing the mind, hardly gave it a mention.
Lately, though, there’s been something of a renaissance. The pace of scientific research on forgiveness has so quickened that more than forty laboratories around the world are now drilling down to mine for ore. Social scientists talk of “grudge theory” and “forgiveness transactions,” of applying “game theoretic analyses” to the dynamics of apology. Evidence indicates that forgiveness increases self-esteem (that magic word) and decreases anxiety. In one trial men in a drug and alcohol treatment program who trained in forgiveness showed significantly less depression. And there are implications for physical health: While holding a grudge fuels anger and resentment, producing damaging stress hormones (cardiac patients who blame others for their initial heart attack are more likely to have reinfarctions), positive emotions like forgiveness lead to lowered heart rate and reduced blood pressure.
A new therapeutic subspecialty, forgiveness counseling, is making a bid for legitimacy, with volumes of theory and burgeoning self-help books in tow. A certain hyperbole has already crept in: One therapist calls forgiveness “as important to the treatment of emotional and mental disorders as the discovery of sulfa drugs and penicillin have been to the treatment of infectious diseases.” And there is the inevitable controversy. Some clergy warn of a shallow secular dispensation, a forgiveness stripped of its most challenging moral dimensions, while some psychologists accuse them of guarding an exclusive religious franchise.
Some of the confusion may pertain to different degrees of forgiveness. At its most basic, forgiveness is an act of self-healing. I would rather have been hung by my thumbs than let bygones be bygones until I realized how much my burden of resentment was hurting me. Forgiveness begins with acknowledging one’s own pain, shame, and sense of failure; healing the shattered sense of self-worth; and grieving the loss of faith in other people. To liberate ourselves from a hurt inflicted by another takes the psychological courage to open an old wound and pull out a tangled skein of issues we’d rather keep under wraps.
Many mental health counselors believe that this focus on personal healing should be where forgiveness begins and ends. In a recent poll of the profession, 66 percent said they “do not endorse activities that acknowledge and address the significance of the offender” and do not encourage empathy toward them. “The majority of respondents,” concluded the survey, “appear to view forgiveness as a gift primarily to the self alone.” One researcher quotes a woman who simply said, “Forgiving means to write the person off.”
Though understandable—why not x-out the creepazoid who messed with your life?—I wonder if healing is really possible without striving to find empathy for the offender. President Jimmy Carter once defined forgiveness as putting yourself in the position of the other person and wiping away any sort of resentment or antagonism you feel toward them. Observes one clinician: “To forgive, one must have the capacity to identify with others and view them as more than simply extensions of oneself. One must be able to feel a modicum of social interest, a willingness to admit a personal role in relationship dysfunctions, and a genuine concern and empathy for others.” Psychologist Heinz Kohut points out that a person who is too self-centered may be incapable of forgiving at all: The offending party is not seen as an individual in his own right, but as “a flaw in a narcissistically perceived reality.” There can be no I-Thou when the Thou is subtracted from the equation.
One leading forgiveness researcher, Robert Enright, believes that without this Thou in the picture, forgiveness is radically incomplete. Enright founded the University of Wisconsin’s Human Development Study Group in 1985, inaugurating the most extensive scientific investigation of forgiveness to date. He observed that a person may abandon a grudge only to be left with “detached indifference, writing off the offender as morally incompetent...and not worthy of our time.” In that case, rather than forgiveness, we “end up replacing resentment with alienation.” After a study of the existing psychological literature (along with the beliefs and the practices of the world’s religions), Enright concluded that there is a deeper level of forgiveness, a kind of spiritual transformation he calls “a willed change of heart.” He encourages his clients to strive for an attitude of “compassion, generosity, and even love” toward the offender.
It raises hackles among some social workers, who tell of domestic abuse victims counseled to forgive a perpetrator only to suffer new injury at his hands. Forgiveness horror stories make the rounds. Writes one clinician: “Some counselors have worked, as I have, with parents and grandparents who ‘forgave’ the behavior of drug-addicted youth, resulting in not only failure to treat the addiction, but, in some cases, the murder of the ‘forgiver.’” At the very least, they caution, letting go of vindictive feelings can mean relinquishing necessary self-respect and needed self-protection.
Some kind of warning label seems well advised against what could become a forgiveness fundamentalism or just a mishandled new tool on the therapeutic utility belt. But a preponderance of time-tested wisdom points to the power of forgiveness to restore relationships, to heal communities, even to kick-start something akin to unconditional love—love that is not dependent on the other person’s conforming to our expectations or being instrumental to our needs.
This sort of forgiveness is a form of mutual healing. Desmond Tutu speaks of reconciliation as a human necessity: “It is important that I do all I can to restore relationship. Because without relationship, I am nothing, I will shrivel.”
SOME YEARS BACK, IN A YOUNGER, CRAZIER TIME, I DISCOVERED that a good friend had had a brief affair with my girlfriend while I was away on a months-long business trip. The news felt like a serrated steak knife between the shoulder blades. It seemed an unforgivable breach of trust. With an icy-cold voice, I declared our relationships null and void. I refused to talk to either of them.
But to my amazement, they refused to accept my edict of banishment. My girlfriend called every other day, sending roses and handwritten letters and notes of apology. My friend, stricken, told me, “I’m just not willing to lose your friendship. Tell me what I have to do.” He didn’t wait for an answer but contrived various tokens of apology and expressions of remorse. Though I’d turned to stone, they kept up their campaign of almost daily erosion. I could see that both of them were genuinely suffering. After a while I couldn’t hold fast to my sense of outrage: It was making me feel small, even cruel. They had so empathized with me that their pain about the pain they’d caused me had made me feel for them.
Eventually, I relented. I forgave them. Our relationships were restored and grew mysteriously stronger in the broken places. My friend became, in the fullness of time, my best friend. My girlfriend and I affirmed a deeper, less contingent love; though we separated years later, we remain close. I know that if I had clung to my first wounded impulse, my life would have been incomparably poorer.
I had to wonder: What was it about being the injured party that was so paradoxically seductive? In the early days of Internet spam, marketeers discovered that people would readily open any e-mail whose subject line read “I’m So Sorry,” proving that most of us feel somebody somewhere owes us an apology. I had to acknowledge the truism that we judge most harshly those who embody our unadmitted failings. Had I ever cheated on a romantic partner? Yes. Had I ever acted on a selfish desire and hurt another in the process? Yes. Had my friends, then, been my tormentors or my scapegoats? Christ’s words on the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” is compassion’s holy formula. We all miss the mark in our blindness, ensnared by ego and self-deception; we miss it more than we care to acknowledge.
Thinking of my business nemesis, it seems that none of it was personal. Wrapped in his own private fogbank, he’d hardly even seen me. An old Buddhist fable: A ferryman is taking a rich nobleman across a river. It is a misty night; he can see barely 10 feet ahead. Suddenly, another boat glides out of the murk and rams into his prow, spilling his finely dressed fare into the water. The ferryman is furious. Cursing, enraged, he lifts his pole, readying himself to strike the other boatman as his craft sweeps past, only to see—an unmoored, empty boat.
Maybe it’s possible to forgive others’ trespasses by realizing how blindly they harm us. Like empty boats, adrift on their own currents, colliding with us by happenstance, they’re not quite all there, and neither, if we can admit it, are we.
Unless we are solitary anchorites, cartoon hermits with beards down to our toes, we live in relationship, which guarantees we will be hurt by others and inevitably will hurt them. Forgiveness, the binding of wounds, is indispensable to our lives together. To accept our own hurt, taking it in rather than projecting it out, distills the healing elixir.
Unresolved emotional pain is the great contagion of our time—perhaps of all time. This does not deny the struggle for justice: There is a world out there, and it cries out for rectification. But those who cannot sense the pain of the one who wounds them will dispense, under the banner of righteousness, a misshapen justice and create yet more enduring wrongs. I could be deep in goody-two-shoes territory, but I suspect that the final extension of forgiveness is just as Lao Tzu said: “It is the way of the Tao to recompense injury with kindness.” The spiritual consensus is too wide to ignore. As Rabbi Pinhas Ben Yair once boasted of a favored disciple, “My Raphael knows how to love the most wicked evildoers!” The other day at lunch, I even got the message from my fortune cookie: “The way to get rid of an enemy,” counseled the Peking Noodle Company, “is to make a friend.”
I’ve concluded, at least in theory, edging toward practice, the same. I’m persuaded that the theologian Paul Tillich put forth an ideal worth striving for: “Forgiveness,” he wrote, “means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable; and it means reception of those who are rejected. Forgiveness is unconditional, or it is not forgiveness at all.”
I’m inspired, but it’s still lofty enough to give me vertigo. We have all experienced that hardness of heart that makes reconciliation seem unattainable. God, I still get miffed when an acquaintance passes me in the market without a warm enough hello. I know people for whom a simple social snub has fueled a lifetime of rancor. To forge my own minor act of forgiveness had taken decades.
And aren’t there some individuals we should place beyond the pale?—the ones who’ve tromped on our insteps without a murmur of apology, who’ve screwed us in the past and, given half a chance, would stick it to us again, this time with a little more torque? And what of the rotten people, the cold-blooded calculators and hot-blooded haters, the ones we justifiably loathe? In the Greek New Testament, the term used for compassion toward one who has wronged us is splanchnizomai, from the word for “intestines” (to pour out one’s insides: forgiveness is gut-wrenching work). Sometimes it just feels impossible.
But now and again we hear of people who have forgiven the unforgivable. How do they keep their hearts open amid the buffetings of true malice? I was about to find out.