How Irrational Guilt May Hinder Forgiveness

CNN recently wrote an article, “Choosing to Forgive – or Not,” in which they presented the case studies of Bob Livingstone and Ellen Girt. Bob lived with his physically and emotionally abusive father, who stopped talking to him after he hit back. For 25 years, after his father’s death Bob was unable to forgive him. Ellen witnessed her father physically abuse her mother and has not been able to let go of her anger towards her father for his abuse, nor at her mother for taking it. As a result of her situation, Ellen has suffered from stomach problems and has difficulty trusting people.

Although both individuals were able to achieve forgiveness, as a psychiatrist, I wanted to analyze what might have hindered their ability to forgive in the first place. For 25 years, Bob blamed himself for his father’s misery and stroke. Lack of awareness over the amount of guilt he felt could have hindered forgiveness.

Although Ellen expressed anger at both her parents, I got the sense that she was angrier with her mother than her father. Many women who witness abuse are bothered by the fact that their mothers tolerated abuse and seemed helpless. Since children take cues from their parents, ironically, Ellen may have learned that it is wrong to stand up for herself. What is unclear in Ellen’s case is whether or not her father treated her better than he treated her mother. If she was treated better, Ellen would likely feel even worse about her mother’s mistreatment. She certainly seems to carry a great deal of guilt over her inability to protect her mother from her father. This is quite common among children from abusive families. Though the article does not go into detail, given her experiences, I suspect Ellen may have a history of difficult relationships with men. I wonder if all of her relationships fail because she sabotages them out of guilt for being better off than her mother.

The similarity I see between Bob Livingstone and Ellen Girt is that they both seem to feel irrationally responsible for their parent’s pain and suffering, leading to irrational guilt. It is very common for children to feel that they have “caused” their parents or siblings terrible pain just by being themselves and doing the normal things that children do. Very often children deal with this irrational feeling by attempting to rescue the parent or by becoming a victim themselves. As may be the case with Ellen’s relationships, children from abusive backgrounds may feel that they deserve to suffer as payback for having “made” their parent or sibling suffer or for not having stopped the abuse.

It is much easier to forgive a person’s actions than to forgive the feelings that those actions caused you to have about yourself. For adult survivors of abusive environments, guilt from blaming themselves for being the cause of their parents’ suffering, or for being unable to stop their parents’ suffering, makes them feel terrible about themselves. They carry this particular guilt and the negative feelings about themselves into adulthood. In such cases, an unwillingness to continue feeling guilty over having contributed to their parents’ pain, real or perceived, can hinder forgiveness. As in the case of O.J. Simpson, tremendous guilt over behavior, in his case cheating on his wife, Nicole, gets turned around and focused on the flaws and misdeeds of the other person. When, after their divorce, Nicole starts having relationships with other men, O.J. seems to turn the intense guilt he felt over betraying her into an intense hurt over her betraying him. In the same way, children who survive abusive environments may turn the guilt they feel over their irrational thoughts of hurting their parents into an intense hurt over their parents hurting them. Even though this is done in an effort to protect themselves from feeling intense guilt, this unconscious behavior makes it tremendously difficult for them to let go of this hurt and forgive their parents.

In these scenarios, to achieve forgiveness, Livingstone and Girt would need to identify the roots of their irrational guilt and release themselves from feeling responsible for their parents’ pain. Once they do this they would be able to forgive themselves for being unable to “save” their parents. After forgiving themselves, hopefully forgiveness of their parents would follow.