Tips on How to Forgive

How can you forgive?

Over the last few weeks - prompted by a question left by reader Gisela Cartmill in the comments section - I’ve been talking about forgiveness. I’ve written about forgiving yourself. And about the important wellbeing benefits that come from forgiving others.

But what I haven’t done is provide practical strategies for forgiveness.

To do that, I’ll turn back to the advice of my Yale colleague, the theologian and author Miroslav Volf. He’s thought deeply about forgiveness across time and across cultures – but he also has a powerful personal experience of what it takes to forgive a wrong.

Miroslav’s five-year-old brother died in an accident while riding as a passenger on a horse-drawn carriage. A friendly child, the boy was a favorite of the soldiers stationed in Miroslav’s hometown. They had taken him for a ride without the permission of his parents.

The child’s death was devastating for Miroslav’s family. “For my mother especially, there was a sense of rage.”

But Miroslav’s parents were both deeply steeped in the Christian tradition of forgiveness and felt that they had to somehow apply this to the terrible loss of their son.

The accident wasn’t an act of malice and the carriage driver was intensely remorseful for his part in the child’s death – but Miroslav’s mother still struggled to put aside her anger and her desire for revenge. But with a lot of effort and work, she was eventually able to forgive the driver.

“It was the most difficult things she’d ever done,” says Miroslav.

Miroslav thinks of forgiveness as a gift we can give to someone who has hurt or wronged us (“So we can say: ‘I don’t count it against you. I relate to you as if you had not done that particular wrong.’”). But in many ways, forgiveness is also a gift to ourselves – it can help us to detach from the bad thing that we experienced.

“There is a sense of release," say Miroslav. "We are fascinated, we’re captured, we’re held captive by what has happened in the past. We don’t look ahead, but in the rear-view mirror. What forgiveness does is allow us to look into a future not filtered through the past.”

It might be worth quickly considering what forgiveness isn’t:

After talking with Miroslav, here are a few tips I picked up about how to forgive most effectively:

The final tip is perhaps the most important, since it relates to the happiness that social connection and social interaction can bring us.

I find this reframing of forgiveness really inspiring. Being the victim of a hurtful act is horrible, but we can compound that harm by allowing it to overshadow our present and our future. By forgiving, we open up new possibilities not only for the person who wronged us, but for ourselves too.

As Miroslav says: “When forgiveness happens, it’s not a zero-sum game. Life becomes better when we forgive.”

Stay well and stay happy,

Laurie

I really hope you're enjoying The Science of Wellbeing, my weekly newsletter looking at the latest research on happiness. If you find the tips and insights useful, please share these articles to help spread the word.

Anyone can subscribe for free here.