Why Don't We Forgive our Loved Ones as Readily as We Do Strangers?
Is It Harder to Forgive Those Who Matter?
This post was inspired by an interesting note of a fellow Substacker:
Maybe one reason is precisely because strangers are seen as “who don’t even matter” (to us) - We might care less of stranger encounters, or what a stranger’s mistake means to us.
The meaning of someone’s mistake to us, or how we see it as being matter or not, oftentimes is linked to cumulated (negative) emotions from the past, and its perceived future implications, not just how offensive or annoying it is for the moment.
With a stranger, we don’t have a past, thus there are no cumulative emotions. We also don’t expect a future with them in the picture, so there are no future implications.
Those are not the case with our loved ones.
This analysis is not to say that we should not give the grace of forgiveness to our love ones as we give to strangers.
It is to lay out some possible reasons behind why sometimes we act more harshly to our loved ones than to strangers, just so we could address these reasons in order to forgive better.
From the above analysis, two obstacles to forgiving our loved ones may be that the current offense brings up past hurt, and frustrates us with the possibility of future incidents.
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If we wouldn’t address these two obstacles, the “unforgiving” response to our loved ones would only add to the cumulated negative feelings from the past and intensify our frustration about the future.
On the other hand, the mistake might not seem to our loved ones to deserve our over-reaction (“over” because our reaction lumps the past, the current, and the future together, as if their mistake “defines them”).
So not surprisingly, they may respond negatively, and the situation escalates….
Psychologist Everett Worthington, a lifelong researcher of forgiveness and other virtues, developed a five-step process, REACH, for forgiveness:
Recall the hurt objectively, without dwelling on pain.
Empathize with the offender, understanding their perspective.
Altruistic gift of forgiveness, offering it as an act of compassion.
Commit to forgive, making the decision concrete (e.g., through writing or verbal expression).
Hold onto forgiveness, reinforcing the decision over time to prevent resentment from resurfacing.
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Notice that the first of REACH is to “Recall the hurt objectively, without dwelling on pain”.
Here the “recall” may include past hurts. Looking at them objectively means understanding that they are in the past, and what needs to be dealt with is the current.
“…without dwelling on the pain” means not to carry past pain over to the current incident.
As for the future, there is even less reason to bring it into the current reaction. We cannot hold our loved ones responsible for something they have not done!
Yes, you might feel that if they did it in the past, are doing it now, then they may do it in the future if you wouldn’t stop them by your unforgiving over-reaction.
Yet, over-reacting by lumping the past, current and future together is exactly what complicates things, making it much more difficult to deal with the current situation, let alone resolving any long term issue.
Emotionally, it may lead both parties to feel more frustrated, amplifying the negativity.
This also prevents us from moving forward to the further steps (empathy, altruism, commitment, and reinforce) in the REACH forgiveness process.
So to be more forgiving to our loved ones, let’s firstly try to refrain from linking a current event to past problems as well as to future projections.
Focusing on the current situation with objectivity, we may find forgiving our loved ones much easier.
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