Forgiveness Part 2: Breaking the Association

In the last blog entry, I went over the application of trauma principles as it relates to forgiveness and why it is so hard to forgive. If you have no idea what that meant, don't worry. This will be much more straightforward. So how do we break this cycle of unforgiveness? If we apply the principle of extinction (explained in the last blog), it means we would need to talk or think about the person/incident without feeling the negative emotions in order to break that association. OK, well how do we do that? To gain insight into unforgiveness, I like to look at the greatest injustice in the history of the world: Jesus dying on the cross. When Jesus was on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). This is a particularly profound statement because it is an important aspect of forgiveness. Jesus was able to forgive because he understood. Understanding can be defined for our purposes as insight and awareness of other people's feelings. Specifically, the person who wronged you. Jesus understood the grave ignorance of the people crucifying him and it was his awareness of this fact that allowed him to forgive. We must apply the same concept of understanding in order to break the association between the memory of transgression and the rush of negative emotions.

Jesus naturally had understanding because he has the knowledge of everything. Unfortunately for us, we do not. Sometimes it can come easily and we have understanding for people in certain situations. But other times, especially when we have difficulty forgiving, we need to actively increase our understanding of the person or the situation. One effective way to do that is to talk to someone (perhaps a therapist!) about the transgressor in an empathetic way. This person can provide you with an objective point of view and can challenge you to think about the transgressor in a different light. When you talk about someone with the intention of gaining understanding, your compassion and empathy for that person increases. It requires some time and effort to process and talk about the person and negative experience without feeling (or minimally feeling) angry or offended. When you do, you will gain the ability to talk about a transgressor without feeling that rush of negative emotions. It may be hard to believe, but the association eventually will break and the memory of the person and what he/she did will simply become another innocuous memory.  Mind you, the person that helps you process and gain understanding will need to be wise. What is not helpful is someone who will collude in bashing the person or someone who will help you throw a pity party. They will need to have a certain level of empathy to help you see the person from different angles. In due time, this process will redirect you toward creating new thought patterns,weaken the old pattern of negative thoughts and emotions, and ultimately break the association altogether.

Let’s go through an example. Let’s say that you bought something from a stranger and you got scammed. You are a gamer and when you ordered Call of Duty, you received Call of Doodie instead and you couldn’t get your money back. That can be infuriating and you can wish all kinds of ill will toward that clever scam artist. Every time you see a Call of Duty billboard you remember how you got cheated and it makes you angry. You can’t help but wish the same thing happens to him. However, if you began to talk about the incident with an understanding friend, you guys can speculate in a compassionate and empathetic way. Maybe the scam artist just doesn’t know any better. Maybe he does but he is really down on his luck. Maybe he is desperate for money and scamming was the only thing he knew to make money fast. Maybe the scam artist comes from a broken home and is a single parent who was working 2 jobs just to pay the bills to feed his 3 kids and just got fired and didn’t have money for milk. Regardless of whether any of these speculations are actually true, talking about these possibilities allows you to talk about this person who did something awful to you in a way which does not trigger anger. The more you do it, the less powerful the association will be between the scammer and your anger. There will be new patterns of compassionate thinking the next time you look at the billboard and perhaps after lots of discussion you can think about Call of Doodie and laugh.

Unforgiveness is a bitter poison that will eat away at us if we do not do something about it. Fortunately, we are all given the ability and tools to live lives free of unforgiveness. A sign of true forgiveness is when you can think about the person, talk about, and even interact with him/her without any negativity. You have forgiven when you can freely bless them and wish them prosperity and peace. It is something we are all called to do.

But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins Matthew 6:15

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!