As per part 1, and part 2, once again I am not a qualified psychologist, I try to qualify my assertions as assertions but occassionally I'll slip up and an assertion of opinion could be read as a statement of fact. I lack the authority to assert any hard facts about what is good for mental health. All that follows is my opinion informed by my direct personal experience, a layman's research.
In the past two posts, the main mechanism for better mental health was mindfulness, meditation. Specifically just having a brake to pull on run-away thoughts and pull oneself back into the present moment.
I know I could discuss more applications of this, but as a mental health and clinical psychology advocate I'm eager to move onto getting the most out of clinical psychology. I've decided in transitioning from personal practice (like meditation) to consultation to begin by talking about forgiveness.
Details to follow, but back when I worked in a call center, I used to entertain myself and occasionally others by pitching hypotheticals to them. One of which I particularly liked was a hypothetical in which a person had to forecast whether they would or wouldn't forgive someone that had wronged them.
Just to foreshadow my strong personal bias, I wasn't fact finding, or even polling, I was judging, assessing. In my opinion there is a correct answer to any question under any circumstances for 'would you forgive them?' and that answer is 'yes.'
Of all the people I asked, and it was certainly more than 3, 3 people answered my hypothetical correctly. My inference from this was that most people (and my sample skewed young, people under 25) don't actually grasp the concept of forgiveness, possibly because the most famous example of forgiveness in wealthy democratic countries at large, is the Christian concept of forgiveness which having brought up, I would ask you to do your best to forget.
Because to discuss the concept of forgiveness, my inclination is to begin with establishing a necessary understanding of concept of false equivocation and/or conflation. For example:
- That apples and oranges are both fruits and thus apples are basically oranges.
- That oranges and lemons are both citrus fruits and thus oranges are basically lemons.
Where I suspect people do not understand the concept of forgiveness is due to confusing or conflating forgiveness with other distinct concepts. Here is my non-exhaustive shortlist of likely suspects:
- Conflating forgiveness of an act with an endorsement/absolution of an act.
- Conflating forgiveness of a person with an ongoing obligation to the forgiven party.
- Conflating forgiveness of a person with a transaction in exchange for their responsibility and remorse.
- Conflating forgiveness of an act with weakness of character.
The overall feeling I get though, is that a common intuition is that to forgive someone is to concede some kind of power you have over them. Almost as if the following transactions take place:
Step 1: I kick you in the shin. You're injury, my bad.
Step 2: I feel bad, so some fairy gives me 1 remorse token. You feel bad, and some fairy gives you 1 forgiveness token.
Step 3: Holding a remorse token feels bad, and causes me suffering. The only way to get rid of a remorse token, is to be given it's matching forgiveness token. Creating a scenario where I have to impress upon you that I have suffered enough from my remorse for you to be satisfied and give me the forgiveness token.
Step 4: While you hold onto your forgiveness token, you have power over me, and any excess suffering I experience can be treated as profit.
Step 5: You give me your forgiveness token, relinquishing your power over me.
Thus the intuition becomes, has the person who wronged me suffered an equivalent amount to the suffering they caused me.
Where the intuition breaks down, is when I come to you and apologize for kicking you in the shin, take responsibility, demonstrate my understanding and commit to not doing so again. You tell me you aren't ready to forgive me, but perhaps in time. Then you see me the next day enjoying a frozen slushie and laughing it up with my jackass friends out the front of the local 7-Eleven.
The question then becomes, where is your power over me? Why not ask?
I tell you 'I have forgiven myself.'
This is the first allusion I will make to Gordon Livingston M.D.'s chapter title from "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart." (the book title) which is "Forgiveness is a Gift You Give Yourself." in so far as it is perfectly legitimate for you to have done something wrong, and injured somebody else and make your actions right with yourself. Your ability to forgive yourself is not contingent on others forgiving you.
When I first engaged seriously a clinical psychologist, I was in a state of distress owing to (what I didn't understand at the time) grief. I went thinking a psychologist could help me figure out why my ex-girlfriend didn't love me anymore, and how I could best persuade her to repair our relationship.
Within 5 minutes, my counsellor explained to me that I was grieving in the exact same process as if a loved one had died, but more relevant to the subject of forgiveness he outlined for me the issue of control. To my best recollection:
"She has made a decision that effects you, that you were not in control of."
To steer this back to the subject of forgiveness, and for those following along, perhaps even recalling the 'umbrella story' of Mark Horstman from part 2 - what I control is my action. What I have no control over is your reaction. Your reaction may be predictable, your reaction may even be likely given an action, but still I cannot be said to be in control of how you react.
(human behavior is not random, if you don't believe me say 'hello' to a stranger and count how many times they respond 'banana' or some equally random alternative to 'hello' 'hey' 'hi' 'good morning' etc.)
I also control my reaction to your reaction.
I invite you to pause and reflect that you probably already agree with this observation. Take the example of a girlfriend who dumps her boyfriend for the following reasons: he doesn't spend any time with her, listen to her, or communicate preferring video games. She does most of the household work, cooking and cleaning and is tired of being a mother to her boyfriend rather than a partner. He refuses to do anything about his depression, but continually employs it as an excuse for his conduct.
He reacts to being dumped in one of two ways: He goes through a brief grieving period, talks to his friends and family and solicits their input, seeks help from a counsellor, begins a program of regular sleep habits, healthy eating and exercise etc. OR He posts nude pictures she sent him in their courtship phase to an internet forum called 'rapemyslutex' along with her contact details to punish her for leaving him.
Is she responsible for which reaction he chooses?
If tempted to say, yes but she was justified in injuring him by dumping him, I will grant you it is easy when we feel an action is justified to hold people accountable for their reactions and harder when the impetus is unjustified like kicking someone in the shins, criticizing them publicly, making them feel uncomfortable etc.
But the fact is there are always going to be better and worse reactions to injury.
I wish to return now to further exploring my perceived commonly held intuition that by refraining from forgiving exercises some kind of power over someone.
I conceed, you might, but it is contingent on them valuing your esteem at all, and is proportional to how much they esteem you. Such that the people you are most likely going to have power over by withholding forgiveness are a) less likely to injure you b) less likely to do so with ill-intention and c) the people in your life you probably would want to forgive most quickly.
One of my friends, a recovering addict, put it to my liking [paraphrasing] 'you don't hold any power over them, you're giving them power over you. You're letting them live in your heart and head.' from there I came to think of the absence of forgiveness as the presence of resentment (an argument from incredulity that there could be any other likely motive for withholding forgiveness) and subsequently I visualize people who still bear resentment toward me for my conduct as maintaining a shrine to me, venerating the injury I caused them as something of import in their lives.
Oft misattributed to the Buddha, and reminscent of yesterday's post about anger:
In this regard, every injury caused to you can place you in the emotional equivalent of
escalation of commitment in that, by your reaction you have the opportunity to increase your own injury. One reliable way to do that, is to fixate on your injury at the expense of all other mental activity. The worst cases being, where the injury caused you becomes central to your identity.
What happened to you, becomes conflated (there's that word again) with who you are. This I believe is often called a '
victim mentality'.
The critic gave you a bad writeup in their review, they did not cause you to refuse to perform the night following the review resulting in your being fired by the production, resulting in you being unable to find work on another production, nor your refusal to consider another line of work and instead withdraw socially, and take to drinking alone on a regular basis. They didn't ruin your life, they criticized your performance in their review.
So hopefully having harped on enough to establish the nature of forgiveness as a gift you give yourself, I'll re-employ an analogy to grief, as per my first ever engagement of a clinical psychologist.
The goal of grieving is to reach acceptance. You've suffered a loss, and grief is a process whereby you come to accept your new life in the face of that loss.
The goal of injury then, is to reach a place where you can forgive.
Understanding these goals intellectually does not avail myself nor anyone else of a shortcut. If I was to discover my entire family died over night of carbon monoxide poisoning, I would not be able to just click my heels and say 'I know what to do, just accept this.' My brain will have to commute just how the change is going to impact my life, just what it will cost me.
So-so, I can speak the words even as a knife is being slipped into my ribs 'I forgive you' but they'll probably be a lie. Much better to say 'et tu Brutus?' and hope you survive the stabbing with the additional data to process. But it's where you want to get to, and knowing this means you can stop throwing up obstacles to arriving at the place emotionally where you can forgive, like refusing to hear any mitigating circumstances, refusing to actually quantify the extent of your injury, nor deliniating responsibility for damages between their conduct and your response.
It takes work and a counsellor can help expedite that work tremendously.
I choose this as part 3, and as preparation for engaging a clinical psychologist for the following reasons based on my experience.
1. People tend to only engage a counsellor when they are in an extreme state of distress/crisis.
Even though we are probably engaging daily in behaviors that are detrimental to our mental health and are cumulative in impact over time, in my own case and most cases, probably owing to the expense, people tend to have to have a major crisis in their life before engaging the services of a psychotherapist. Many of these crisis are in the context of relationships - with one's spouse, parents, siblings, boss, coworkers. etc.
As such, as I was, and I would predict, people are very very likely to walk in and make a complaint to the effect of 'My spouse/boss/mum/dad/sister/brother/etc. is ruining my life. Why can't they...'
I have generally always commenced a program of therapy in the context of some kind of relationship crisis. I waste so much time, speaking about the other person.
2. Your counsellor can mostly, only work with you.
This is what took me, I would guess almost 18 sessions to have click, and if I'm offering anything, it is sparing yourself the investment of time and money to take as long as I did to figure it out.
I through my 20's and early 30's was continually disappointed in love, the reason? I kept attracting women with debilitating levels of anxiety, with anxious avoidant attachment styles and behavioral traits that are consistent with borderline traits. A very scary string of love interests that followed this pattern. I said to my counsellor that I felt like I could close my eyes and throw a rock, and it would hit the woman in the crowd with a fear of abandonment.
I was in the process of criticizing a friend's choices in life, when I figured out it applied to me. I had adopted a mindset of 'if only these women would deal with their anxiety.' I also got help from my mentor Rod, who brazenly pointed out that when I realized my latest love interest had the same behavioral traits my response was to panic and cut her off without explanation.
I was pointing at her, her, and her. Before I realized I was pointing in mirrors, and I'm fairly confident this is always the case.
The moment I reframed the central problem of my love life from 'they have anxiety issues' to 'I have an attraction to anxiety issue' things got if not immediately better, immediately more constructive.
I submit though, that this is not a common intuition, nor popular in the zeitgeist. Most people adopt
this attitude particularly over the last 10 years. So often our concept of a solution is: 'if people would accommodate my problem, my problem wouldn't be a problem.'
Whereas, as Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations:
One man prays thus: How shall I be able to lie with that woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? Another thus: How shall I not lose my little son? Thou thus: How shall I not be afraid to lose him? In fine, turn thy prayers this way, and see what comes.
Your therapist has access to you, you are invested in your situation. Giving you two 'prayers' one that your psychologist will teach you how to change everyone around you. Or they could help you change your behaviors to produce different hopefully improved results.
Forgiving the people in your life causing you grief is a great way to get therapy sessions focused and invested in you.
3. Attention is a finite resource.
A potential axiom of psychology may be: 'the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior' I will touch on this more in future posts. But it is to say, the most likely person to exhibit any change in behavior and defy prediction, is the subject in counselling. If you are the patient, your parents are unlikely to change, your children are unlikely to change, your partner is unlikely to change, your boss is unlikely to change, your direct report is unlikely to change and yes, you are unlikely to change also.
But you are more likely to change than anyone else but perhaps the psychologist who if they are good, might try different approaches and strategies to produce better outcomes for you. You can improve your chances of changing, if you stop avoiding responsibility for your own mental health by blaming your antagonists.
Patients come in all stripes. How many of them do you think are likely to possess the skills and discipline and temperate to effect significant changes in any other person they know that has been persistent enough to send them to therapy?
Persisting in reiterating maybe with embellished detail the same complaints, the same anecdotes again and again uses up the following scarce resources - time, money (if a fee is involved), attention (both yours and the counsellors) and as such bearing grudges is an escalation of commitment. And possibly demonstrating a more working class form of 'The Streisand Effect'
You are living in your injury, and actually increasing it in the presence of somebody who can (if competent) help you arrest and repair this injury.
A valuable illustration of this is the parable of two monks and a woman.
[pause]
The sum total of my experience in the pursuit of better mental health, is that the first goal is to focus on what I can control. Forgiveness thus becomes a very central goal, and there's many frameworks I find useful for getting there:
- determinism - whatever happened, was what happened and it couldn't* have happened differently. (*which is not to deny the value of learning from experience, determinism isn't fatalism.) Discuss accepting the injury with your counsellor.
- The anonymous meme 'Nobody is against you, they are for themselves.' discuss a schedule of intentions and how you reevaluate the injury with your counsellor.
- The anonymous meme 'everyone is trying their best.' on this front, trying to better understand someone who has injured you via cognitive empathy is a more constructive approach to take with your counsellor. (Recently my niece bit my nephew and he asked of his father 'Why did she bite me?'
- George Orwell's quote 'The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.' where abstaining from forgiving can be seen as a weak attempt at revenge. Discuss ways to empower yourself with your counsellor, again with the aim of forgiving, not revenge.
Earlier I alluded to the Christian idea of forgiveness, which is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection, also the requirements for God's salvation. I am not enough of a scriptural scholar to really defend my case, I defer to much more informed critics like Matt Dillahunty, and defer to him that most sects of Christianity are not concerned with works but concerned with faith etc. But I'm aware because of programming like the Athiest Experience, that if you are of a religious background this can impede your ability to getting impartial dispassionate counselling. So I will through in a link to the
Secular Therapy Project if you were taken to a 'therapist' that was first and foremost a priest for gay conversion as a teenager or something.
That said, while I have friends that saved themselves from religion, I have friends that found themselves through religion, and in one case one of my most evangelical friends actually answered my forgiveness hypothetical correctly. However, recovering addicts, many of whom are not religious also pass my forgiveness test with flying colors. It seems the most reliable path to appreciating that forgiveness is the goal is the hard way.
Tomorrow I'll continue with how to achieve better mental health by getting the most out of your therapy sessions.
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