Thursday, May 05, 2005
In forgiveness, consider spirituality
The ability to forgive someone depends on a number of factors, including the forgiver’s spirituality, according to researchers at an April conference on psychology and religion.
“Beliefs clearly make a difference in whether people will forgive,” said Everett L. Worthington Jr., chairman of the psychology department at Virginia Commonwealth University and director of the nonprofit A Campaign for Forgiveness Research.
“In the field of forgiveness, you could put three forgiveness researchers in a locked room, ask them to come up with a definition of forgiveness, and end up an hour later with five definitions of forgiveness,” Worthington joked in his talk.
Positive feelings such as empathy, sympathy, compassion and altruistic love can erode the negative, and these feelings can play powerful roles when religion and spirituality enter the picture, Worthington said. Religion stimulates these emotions, which in turn can “stimulate a mercy motive and a grace motive,” he said.
But understanding forgiveness and having positive attitudes about it don’t necessarily translate into practice in real-life situations, said Eadaoin K.P. Hui, a professor of education at the University of Hong Kong.
Many of the researchers pointed out that true forgiveness means more than just accepting an apology. Granting emotional forgiveness is much different than forgiving someone in order to continue the relationship, Worthington said.
Although religion ultimately influences forgiveness, the practice of forgiveness isn’t easy and the circumstances matter, the researchers said. For example, with couples experiencing marital problems and in conflicts between different societies, granting true forgiveness gets even more complicated, Worthington said.
In his talk on the difficulty of forgiveness, Paul Whittemore, a clinical psychologist from Newport Beach, California, said that forgiveness relates to how safe and secure the person who has been hurt feels. “True forgiveness requires fundamental feelings of security. We have to feel safe and be safe in order to offer forgiveness,” Whittemore said. “And getting safe is tough.”
Forgiving also involves accepting limitations, offering empathy and possessing emotional maturity, he said. “More emotionally mature people are more willing to forgive because they are less needy and, therefore, more secure,” Whittemore said.
By Alexandra R. Moses
(May 5, 2005)
Alexandra R. Moses is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.
Permalink
