In my mind, the concept of forgiveness really allows the person basically to say, I’ve done everything that I can to repair this relationship, but there’s no way to do it. This person is just going to be painfully abusive to me, and so I’m going to learn to call it a day. Now, if you call that forgiveness, I would say that’s a reasonable outcome. But to say that everything can be repaired, and everything can be fixed and forgiven, is just not reasonable given the facts.
FRIEDMAN: I mean, the whole concept of forgiveness, it seems to me, is based on the idea that somebody who’s done something wrong to you acknowledges that and says, I’m sorry, and gives you an explanation – I was going through a terrible time; I didn’t know myself; I was wicked back then; I was using drugs back then. I was irredeemably bad. I want another chance.
But before you can forgive somebody, there has to be an acknowledgement of transgression. They have to be able to say to you, you know what? I really screwed up. I did a terrible thing, and I’m so sorry. I don’t even know how I can repair it. I mean, at least that’s a starting point. But to ask somebody who is the victim of abuse to simply give a carte blanche forgiveness, is a psychologically meaningless and potentially, really harmful task to set them.
Dr. Richard Friedman for NPR. Dr. Friedman has written about so-called toxic parents himself for The New York Times. He is a psychiatrist; he is also a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.