Forgiveness

Transgressions violate people's psychological or physical boundaries. People can deal with transgressions by seeking to reestablish justice or redress the injustice. They may do this by enacting revenge (i.e., vigilante justice) or by appealing to some formal system to reestablish societal justice—such as judicial, criminal, political, or social justice. They may seek personal justice in the form of receiving an apology or restitution, or they might turn judgment over to a divine power to bring justice about.

People might also respond to transgressions by trying to control their emotions. They might forebear the transgression. Forebearing is withstanding and perhaps suppressing anger and hatred while controlling negative emotions. People might also simply accept the transgressions and the injustice and move on with their life. Acceptance acknowledges injustice and its ill effects but reduces the future importance of the event in governing one's behavior. It releases one from emotion by giving up one's expectations for the redress of injustice. People might reduce injustice through narrative approaches by excusing or justifying transgressions against themselves. Essentially, they tell a different story about the transgression.

Finally, people might deal with injustice by forgiving. Emotional forgiveness is the emotional replacement of negative unforgiving emotions (like bitterness, resentment, and anger) by positive other-oriented emotions such as empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love. When people forgive, their negative emotions subside. They are less motivated to get revenge or avoid the transgressor, and if forgiving is complete, they might feel love, compassion, sympathy, or empathy for the transgressor. Some people grant decisional forgiveness. They decide not to seek revenge or to avoid the transgressor even though they might not have emotionally forgiven him or her. Decisional forgiveness is a sincere statement about controlling one's future behavior. Forgiveness may be initiated by reasoning, simply experiencing positive other-oriented emotions toward the transgressor, acting kindly toward the transgressor, or having the transgressor act contritely or in a way that provokes empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love.

A child can be induced to grant decisional forgiveness at very early ages. Parents can model and instruct children to foreswear avoidance and revenge through decisional forgiveness. By controlling his or her negative behavior the child might even experience changed negative emotions and motivations, thus come to emotionally forgive. But the child also might not experience emotional forgiveness in tandem with decisional forgiveness.

Robert Enright and his colleagues have conducted substantial research on the development of reasoning about forgiveness. They identified six stages of development of how people reason about forgiveness. Enright's stages, which emphasize mercy, parallel Lawrence Kohlberg's six stages of reasoning about justice. The timetables of development of reasoning about justice and mercy are also parallel.

In Enright's model, very young children think that forgiveness will help them avoid punishment (Stage 1) or get rewards (Stage 2). As children progress into middle childhood and early adolescence, they learn to grant forgiveness and perhaps experience emotional forgiveness after reasoning that considers social disapproval [Page 166]and approval for their responses to transgressions. Only in adolescence and beyond are children thought to be capable of reasoning abstractly about forgiveness. In some ways, the consideration of how children develop the capacity to reason about forgiveness is less important than whether children actually experience forgiveness after a transgression. One's capacity to forgive (for instance) at Stage 5 does not imply that one will ever actually forgive. We all know brilliant adults who are spiteful, bitter, unforgiving, and vindictive.

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