Forgiveness Part 1: Forgiveness and Trauma

God tells us a lot about forgiveness in the Bible. Particularly, He tells us to do it, a lot. And rightly so, because forgiveness is something that reconciles people while also freeing them from bitterness and anger. It is as much for the forgiver as it is for the forgivee. But why is it so hard? Unless your name is Jesus Christ and you are the Messiah/Son of the living God then you have surely wrestled with forgiving someone. I bet you have even said the words out loud, prayed the prayer, and maybe done it face to face, but still, unforgiveness was alive and well in your heart. This has always been a mystery to me as a person trying to assist people in healing from unforgiveness and as a person who struggled with unforgiveness. As I progressed in my career as a clinical therapist I started to look at the principles of trauma and how they can be applied to unforgiveness and I found an interesting concept which may explain why forgiving someone is sometimes so hard.

Before I get into trauma or unforgiveness, I want to explain associations. If any of you have ever taken PSYCH 101 in college you have heard of associations. It is the basic concept of classical conditioning. Associations are simply a pairing between a stimulus and a bodily reaction. Jess once got food poisoning from spaghetti. The spaghetti(stimulus) got paired with the bodily reaction of pain, nausea, and the unwanted discharge of...well you get the picture. Whenever she encountered spaghetti after that she would feel nauseous and she wouldn't be able to eat it. This particular association is called taste aversion and I'm sure you all have had some experience with it. Associations like taste aversion make associations appear to be a nuisance; however, they are actually meant to help us. If a certain food made you sick, then it would be very useful if you could avoid it through taste or smell. An automatic pairing is our mind/body’s way of surviving. However, associations are not set in stone. They can be broken. When Jess's association between spaghetti and bad bad feelings was broken, we ate pasta every day for a week. How was the association broken? When the stimulus (spaghetti) presents itself and the bodily reaction (nausea) does not. Then the mind gets rid of the association as something that is not needed anymore. In Jess's case, the deliciousness of pasta overpowered the feeling of nausea and eventually extinguished it completely.

Here is an interesting thing about associations: the more extreme the stimulus, the stronger the pairing. And this brings us back to trauma. Trauma is defined as exposure to an actual or perceived threat where one could receive serious bodily harm or even lose his/her life. The association created by such an event is so powerful that a pathway is created in the brain to access that event. This is the brain’s way of avoiding that situation at all costs because experiencing the event again can kill the person. When this happens, sometimes the association stays intact even though there is no longer any danger. This is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A symptom of PTSD is reexperiencing the trauma through memories, flashbacks and vivid dreams. The traumatic event is long gone, but the association is alive and well due to the reexperiencing of trauma again and again.

I hope I didn't geek out too much back there and you are still with me because here comes the part about unforgiveness. Transgressions that lead to unforgiveness can vary in degree. And like trauma, the worse the transgression is, the greater the possibility that it can be stuck in your subconscious as an association and you can reexperience the hurt all over again when you start thinking about it. Did you ever notice how connected your memories and your feelings are? When we access a memory, that memory triggers a feeling, which leads us to access other memories/thoughts that trigger the same feelings. That’s why when you remember a happy thought you feel happy and then you remember another happy thought and before you know it someone walks by and asks you why you are staring into space smiling. But when we do that to a memory of someone who did something really bad to us, we experience the collection of memories which leads to the rush of negative emotions. And this is what leads us to get hurt all over again by that person even though we have already forgiven them. The rush of emotions strengthens the association with the memory and thus we cannot move on because that person needs to be forgiven again and again. You did all this work forgiving someone and just when you thought you were done with them, you find them hanging out in a hot tub in your subconscious. What a vicious cycle. But this cycle can be broken! We will discuss how in the next blog entry!