Forgive but don’t trust
Focus on what is good for you not what feels good to you
When someone breaks our trust, it is difficult to forgive them. Forgiveness seems like a weak position, like we are letting them get away with something. We are angry and we need to address that anger.
Or do we?
Forgiveness is not about satisfying our anger in a “productive way”, but rather letting go of being angry altogether, for our own sake not the other person’s.
True forgiveness must be a selfish act, done to benefit only you. It has nothing to do with the person who’s harmed you. And like a lot of things that are ultimately to our benefit, it doesn’t feel good.
But why? Why should we let go of anger and put up with this frustration?
The reason is that anger has a use but is not always useful. It is a defensive mechanism that we’ve inherited from our caveman ancestors. It’s meant to help us deal with threats. Not necessarily physical threats but rather social threats where our position in the social order is being undermined by the actions of another person.
Unfortunately, like most of our evolutionary survival mechanisms, anger is tactical. It often drives us down a path that gives us immediate satisfaction but at the cost of blocking us from a long term benefit.
Anger at someone else in almost all situations results in our making decisions that are not helpful and may even be actively harmful to ourselves and the people around us. Anger is meant for the simplicity of your fellow caveman stealing your food not with the complexities of modern social dynamics.
The problem is that our anger cannot be resolved because we can no longer bash our caveman colleague on the head to preserve our social position. The result is that in the modern world anger rarely has any recourse and begins to feed on itself.
When we do not forgive, the problem is not the lack of forgiveness per se, but that the lack of forgiveness gets us trapped in this angry mode.
Even if we don’t actually do anything but just feel that anger in our hearts, we can get stuck in this defensive crouch. It eats away at our energy and attention and rarely has any effect on the other person because it exists only in our own heads. It festers to the point where it turns into a permanent resentment directed at everyone and everything.
Actions that other people take in the future become colored by this anger, even when that person has done nothing to us. For example, we may not take advice that we ought to or we may avoid taking advantage of an opportunity because to do either may seem incompatible with the resentment that has become our new reality.
When we soak in anger, that becomes the filter we judge the world by. We no longer consider facts objectively but instead believe them to be true based on whether or not they help to maintain our anger.
Forgiveness is not about resolving your anger, it’s not even about feeling better at all. It means moving on in spite of your anger. Your anger doesn’t go away but you just stop feeding it by constantly thinking about your injury. You literally just let it go, stop grasping after it.
Forgiveness is really about what we focus on, not how we act.
It is about taking our focus away from our injury, perceived or real, and focusing on what benefits us. It’s not easy to do, it feels wrong to not nurse our hurt, to not plan our revenge. Forgiveness can often start off making you feel worse. The key is to focus on what is good for us instead of what feels good to us.
But does this mean that we are letting that person go with no consequence?
Not at all, if someone harms us we can’t let that go. We can’t pretend that everything is fine. It would be naïve and willfully stupid to do so in fact.
The key is to make the distinction between forgiveness and trust. Forgiveness is about letting go of the anger inside us but trust is about how we approach the external world, in particular how we approach other people.
So there is a consequence to the other person for the harm they’ve caused us: they can no longer be fully trusted. Their actions caused trust to be lost and forgiveness doesn’t magically replace that.
Again forgiveness is about what we focus on, trust informs how we actually act. We don’t accept their actions, we don’t let them harm us again, but we don’t get captured by resentment either.
But by letting go of our anger we can also objectively decide what “trust” means. Perhaps that person we forgive can still help us in certain ways. Perhaps we can still rely on their judgement in areas other than that which they betrayed us. Or perhaps we can gain social credits from other people by appearing to be calm when other people expect anger. Forgiveness gives us perspective and distance to think clearly.
A lack of forgiveness of someone who has harmed us works against our best interests, it closes us off from potential benefits in a fruitless quest to alleviate our anger. In contrast, a lack of trust in someone who has harmed us protects us from future harm from that person.
There is no good reason to not forgive someone who harms us, there is equally no good reason to fully trust them again. The combination of developing forgiveness and acting out of mistrust is how we are able to navigate the complexity of other people by focusing on what benefits us rather than on what satisfies us.
