I do not recommend forgiveness as a form of revenge as there are better ways to achieve many of the aims of revenge and forgiveness without resorting to either.
Forgiveness as revenge is a neglected topic, and yet for anyone considering forgiveness this aspect is best not overlooked or underestimated. In many ways forgiveness commends itself as a type of revenge: it is legal, does not require violence and is generally applauded, nonetheless as revenge it is unpredictable and unlikely to satisfy.
Unlike the possible violent, direct or equivalent nature of ‘an eye for an eye’, where the debt is measurable and often paid back immediately, forgiveness is immeasurable. The beauty of forgiveness is that it can cause the injurer potentially endless suffering and/or relief.
Although bloody and violent revenge stories are very popular they represent the least common type of revenge. The most common begin with, ‘I’ll show them…’
The saying ‘The best revenge is to live a good life’ has a similar logic to the revenge of forgiveness and both have the potential benefit of masking their revenge. However this can become problematic if the forgiver has masked it from themselves, and if they have, their good (and now aimless) life might now feel like compensation.
‘The best revenge’ according to Marcus Aurelius, ‘is to be unlike him who performed the injury.’ This piece of Roman wisdom, ‘I’ll show them…’ and the revenge of living a good life are all present in forgiveness.
Those fortunate enough to live a good life or willfully say ‘I’ll show them…’ or else manage not to become like their injurer can permit themselves the little white lie of saying, ‘I don’t do revenge’.
For the pacifist, the meek, those with no stomach for violence, or those incapable of living a good life and can only dream of becoming like their injurer, for all these forgiveness might be their last resort and only means of revenge.
For the remainder of this blog I will focus on the covert element of revenge in forgiveness, the allure of forgiveness for talking therapists, and its subterranean psychology and power dynamics.
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When considering the relationship of forgiveness to psychotherapy it might help to think of forgiveness as a cuckoo.
A cuckoo is an ingenius and resourceful bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, once hatched the fledgling cuckoo destroys the resident eggs. The young cuckoo is then fully adopted by the parent birds who appear none the wiser.
For many therapists the urge to help their clients can be overwhelming, this together with the promise of forgiveness can lead them to forget their own eggs and adopt forgiveness.
Cuckoos make no attempt to disguise their identity, they do not need to, their quick adoption enables them to hide in plain sight. The parent bird is so hungry to feed its young that their nurturing instinct blinds and binds them to the interloper.
But where does forgiveness come from? And what is it about forgiveness that makes it so appealing to therapists?
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There is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness?
On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Jacques Derrida
This quote feels intuitively right. I think Derrida is referring to the traumatic, abusive and terrible acts that make forgiveness improbable and arguably impossible to most, if not all of us. Forgiveness of the unforgivable also accounts for its allure. If we are to describe some things as unforgivable, as many people do, it is reasonable to ask whether forgiveness is effective with them. Since there are people who claim it is, or claim to have done it, the question becomes, what is working in forgiveness?
The Bible has many stories of the impossible made possible, it calls them miracles, water turning into wine, the blind able to see, and forgiving the unforgivable. In this sense forgiveness is a gift from God. The logic of the impossible made possible only makes sense within a religious or secular faith community or mindset.
If forgiveness is an act of faith, whether it be faith in God, religion, yourself, an ideal or principle, the impossible made possible, or forgiveness itself, it is nonetheless always subject to doubt. When someone says they have forgiven the unforgivable it is sometimes hard to tell how much they are speaking in faith.
Regardless of a therapist’s view on faith almost all therapists share a collective belief in a certain type of miraculous or magical event.
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In his recent book On Wanting to Change Adam Phillips describes conversion as ‘magical reversal’. He suggests we moderns are sceptical of the conversion experience, and although we question the value of what he calls ‘benign personal transformation’, psychotherapists nonetheless believe in ‘malign’ conversion. We call this trauma.
Much like a convert the traumatised person experiences a radical, miraculous or magical reversal. For the traumatised person the things they once enjoyed and took for granted are now experienced as frightening, triggering and seem remote. Trauma can reverse our beliefs, change our perception of the world and of who we are, and it can even sometimes bring about personal transformation.
In a certain sense forgiveness is a magical reversal that can appear to bring about a benign personal transformation.
The forgiver hopes that forgiveness will bring about a conversion. This is hopeless since forgiveness is itself a form of conversion.
Trauma is primarily grounded in the body, whereas the conversion of forgiveness is primarily grounded in the mind: in faith, hope and meaning reversal.
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Perhaps the most famous conversion is Saul/Paul’s Road to Damascus conversion. Saul was a devout Jew who went around ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord,’ and if he found any followers of Jesus, whether man or woman, he would ‘bring them bound unto Jerusalem’. It was on one such hunting trip on the way to Damascus that Saul had his conversion.
As a result Saul changed his name to Paul and instead of persecuting the followers of Jesus he became one of them. Paul would go on to become Paul the Apostle, the chief architect of early Christianity.
Saul/Paul’s conversion was certainly traumatic, he was struck by light, blinded, and fell off his horse. In the light of ‘positive’ meaning and a renewed sense of purpose his trauma was a conversion. Conversion and trauma, or perhaps the trauma of conversion changed his perspective, it was certainly a reversal but was it a personal transformation?
Paul’s conversion did not radicalise him, he was already radical, although it did take him from one extreme to another. Saul’s passion remained and with this and Paul’s cunning he laid the foundation for forgiveness as a form of revenge.
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‘When your enemy is hungry feed him, when he is thirsty give him something to drink; for by doing so you heap burning coals on his head.’
Romans 12:20
What is most curious about this famous verse is whether Paul had any awareness of how much it revealed about his character and what it says about the extent of his conversion.
This quote might seem shocking until we consider it was written by someone schooled in the books of the Old Testament with its many stories about a vengeful and jealous God, one that was often petty and sometimes spiteful.
Perhaps Paul was speaking more about himself than about the desires of Jesus’ followers. Might this verse have more to do with his struggle to forgive himself for how he had previously persecuted those who were now his brothers and sisters? Could it have been a projection of how he felt toward himself? If not, if taken at face value, what he advocates is the maliciousness of mercy: mercy as an opportunity for revenge.
By prolonging an enemy’s life they are kept alive long enough to suffer the humiliation of mercy and the potential shame of their actions. Paul is using mercy to confront his enemies with themselves and their indebtedness to a merciful foe. Mercy has long been used this way by rulers, tyrants, kings and queens to demonstrate their power and ability to decide a person’s fate on a whim.
Violence was available to Saul but not Paul the emergent leader of a Christian cult. He had to follow Jesus who talked of the meek inheriting the earth and of turning the other cheek. Paul instead turned to the tyrants’ play-book and captured mercy in its darkest light.
Paul demonstrates his astute psychological insight while making no effort to disguise his desire for his enemies’ suffering. It also indicates how well he understood the desire of the church communities to express their ‘righteous’ anger toward their enemies. He was effectively reassuring them that their thirst for revenge would be met with a moral veneer.
If it seems like I enjoy critiquing the Church, it is because I do. I’m fascinated with how it contorts and dissembles when confronted with itself. Although Paul is a low hanging fruit it would be unfair to accuse him of his usual cunning, for here at least he does not mask his intention, instead it is as though he is enjoying his cruel fantasies.
While Paul’s conversion resulted in a reversal of belief, any personal transformation would at best seem superficial. It is perhaps ironic that Paul’s conversion was not a Road to Damascus conversion.
He was Paul skin deep and Saul to the bone.
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The offer of forgiveness or mercy can be a pretence of foregoing any pleasure taken in the injurer’s suffering, and can also be an attempt to enjoy moral superiority over them.
To deny or pretend to deny the privilege of taking pleasure in their suffering can mask an intention to induce (further) possible guilt upon the injurer. Letting the injurer think you are denying yourself the privilege of their suffering can also mask a desire that they in turn feel obliged to deny themselves the privilege of their suffering.
Perhaps the main problem with forgiveness as revenge is its improbability, it is not possible to know how the forgiven person will respond to forgiveness.
Forgiveness as a form of revenge is perhaps best suited to those who know the pleasure of delayed gratification and gambling.
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The vernacular for revenge is to ‘get your own back’, with forgiveness what is intended to be gotten back is power. With any unforgivable act or injury there is always some form of dis-empowerment and usually an abuse of power.
It is often not possible (and not as valuable) to be given back power. Very often power has to be taken back, and taking it back can itself be empowering. An eye for an eye may not be available and even when it is, it may be too risky and might not work. This is particularly so where the injurer is stronger or impervious to losing an ‘eye’.
Forgiveness offers another means for those unable or unwilling to take power back directly. The empowerment of forgiveness begins by having the courage to stand in judgement over the injurer. Taking the moral high-ground and feeling like the ‘better person’ can feel empowering.
Forgiveness may go no further than shaming the injurer (and it may not go that far) in which case the forgiver might have to content themselves with less than they hoped for. If the injurer shows remorse and attempts some form of restoration they may even become a better person. In such a case the forgiver may feel an increase in power over them insofar as their forgiveness will likely have contributed. However this is risky, it may prove too much to witness having played a part in the injurer getting better, prospering and ultimately living a good life; perhaps a better one than the forgiver.
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During the pandemic the title of an online workshop caught my attention, Forgiveness and Letting Go. The title acknowledged that forgiveness and letting go are separate things, although, as I had suspected, this was not the facilitator’s intention.
I think the facilitator believed that forgiveness is a letting go, or at least enables letting go. Even if this were the case, the ‘and’ in the title was, I think, an unconscious acknowledgment that forgiveness is not letting go.
In his introduction the facilitator repeated several times that ‘Forgiveness is not about morality,’ at another point early on he repeated, ‘I’m not saying you should forgive…’, and ‘No one is saying you should forgive…’ However these are not the messages that most people come to me with. As a psychotherapist almost everyone I see that brings up the ‘need to forgive’ has felt a pressure to forgive, whether overt or covert, internal or external and often all of these. Given this disparity between his claims and my experience I think here again was another unconscious acknowledgement of the opposite of what he was saying.
There was no mention of any other eggs although the facilitator offered two possible alternatives to forgiveness: ‘revenge and resentment’. However neither option was explored, instead they were effectively offered up as straw dogs to be dismissed. Several participants reported how they or their clients had difficulty with forgiveness which makes sense given that many reported struggling with the unforgivable. Despite this the message seemed to be there is only forgiveness or the failure to forgive. Not being willing to forgive is seen as resistance or having weak or poor character. The suggestion that one is not ‘ready’ to forgive is patronising and dismisses the choice not to forgive, it is also a projection of an unwillingness to consider any alternative.
What the workshop did well was to highlight just how much forgiveness is motivated by a desperation to let go.
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Letting go is important with any injury, hurt or betrayal, and is perhaps nowhere more important than in our most intimate relationships.
Since most unforgivable acts are committed by people we know, are related to, and often in love with, I suggest forgiveness is not the best option in an intimate relationship. The forgiver may want more from themselves than forgiveness and they might want more from their partner than to receive their forgiveness. The injurer might want more from themselves than being forgiven and they might want more from their partner than forgiveness. While ‘more’ is not always available, it is forgiveness itself that likely becomes the obstacle to more, without forgiveness more becomes the very least.
Beware that when forgiveness appears to close the distance between two people it often does so by creating internal distance.
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The expression ‘Forgive and forget’ deserves a mention.
It is better to forget than to forgive: if you can forget there is no need to forgive. However, forgetting the unforgivable cannot come from passive forgetting, unless it comes from dementia or amnesia, the healthy forgetting of important things requires active forgetting which is different.1
Once you start down the road of forgiveness it becomes harder to forget. Forgiving and forgetting are separate processes that are at odds with each other. Forgiving requires faith, while forgetting does not. Forgiving entails remembering the injury, its perpetrator and that you are not to blame. It also usually requires a daily renewal and commitment: it is a holding on. Whereas active forgetting is self overcoming and letting go.
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As a psychotherapist I see the value of forgiveness for the forgivable, however I never advocate forgiveness of the unforgivable: I prefer my own eggs.
By way of a conclusion I want to ask you the reader whether you have ever been offered and tried a therapeutic alternative to forgiveness?
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My next blog will be about a much maligned and neglected alternative to forgiveness that can potentially satisfy the urge for revenge without taking any. It is not a new idea, it is an old and mostly misunderstood and undervalued egg.
The blog will be entitled, ‘The value of hate’.
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- I wrote a chapter about ‘active forgetting’ that is primarily about the value of forgetting as a psychotherapist and for the people I work with. It also has value as an alternative to forgiveness and revenge. Learn to Forget: A Nietzschean revaluation of forgetting in psychotherapy ↩︎
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Nietzschean Psychotherapist 