Forgiveness

Image Credit: BenteBoe from Pixabay

Edited extract from ‘The Power of Suffering’ by David Roland (Simon & Shuster, March, 2020)

Trauma inflicted by another adds an extra dimension to our recovery. If we react in an eye for an eye manner we become what we abhor. When the action of the perpetrator is criminal, the law of the land replaces the immediate vengeful response and passes judgment and rectification in a more considered way. But, the actions of the law do not necessarily liberate those who feel wronged from feelings of personal vengeance. It is up to the person to find release. I am reminded of the story of Mary Johnson, an African American, from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mary lives in the apartment adjoining the home of 34-year-old Oshea Israel and they share a porch. She assisted him to become her neighbour. In February 1993, the then 16-year-old Oshea shot Mrs Johnson's son, Laramiun Byrd, 20, in the head after an argument at a party. Laramiun died as a result.

Mary wanted justice. "He was an animal. He deserved to be caged," she said at the time. Oshea served 17 years in jail for second-degree murder before being released.

However, before his release and ten years after the murder Mary, at her Pastor’s suggestion, began to pray for Oshea like she prayed for herself. Her Pastor said, ‘Every time his name comes up, every time you hear it within yourself, say, ‘I choose to forgive.’

Mary did this and she began to change. Oshea, maturing, also changed. In 2005, Mary contacted the Department of Corrections requesting a face-to-face meeting with Oshea. The meeting lasted two hours and they learnt a lot about each other. At the end of the meeting they hugged.

‘I instantly knew that all that hatred, the bitterness, the animosity, all that junk I had inside me for 12 years, I knew it was over with. It was done. Instantly, it was gone,’ Mary has said.

Thich Nhat Hahn, the Buddhist monk and Noble Prize nominee, has said, ‘When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity for accepting and having compassion is there.’

 ‘Unforgiveness is like cancer,’ Mary has said. ‘It will eat you from the inside out. It's not about that other person, me forgiving him does not diminish what he's done. Yes, he murdered my son - but the forgiveness is for me.’ This is a deeper level of connection with oneself, posttraumatic growth; I think. Mary and Oshea now travel the country speaking about the power of forgiveness.

Research has pointed to forgiveness of a personal transgression requiring a spiritual element, a going beyond of how we ordinarily think. Dr Fred Luskin, a psychologist and director of the Stanford University’s Forgiveness Project has said that this level of forgiveness, like Mary’s, is more common than most people would imagine and that those who have long practised a forgiving attitude are more likely to be able to forgive.

The Forgiveness Project has developed a nine-step secular training using proven psychological techniques. One of the steps is described as, ‘Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused your pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you. Forgiveness is about personal power.’

But we don’t need to experience the degree of trauma that Mary Johnson lived through to benefit from forgiveness. We can engage it in more generally. During my recovery from stroke and PTSD, I had hard feelings towards those whose actions I found harmful. But, after a time, I realised that focussing on these feelings fed more resentment and hindered my progress, sucked on my personal power.

I turned to a loving-kindness meditation drawn from Buddhist practices. First I cultivated loving-kindness for someone I easily felt love for, usually my daughters, then I focussed the loving-kindness on myself, then on a neutral person and then a difficult person. I did this practice daily for months. I didn’t understand it then, but I would now explain it as cultivating the affiliative/soothing system.

Remarkably, my resentment towards difficult people softened, without altering the details and import, in my mind, of their transgressions. It didn’t change them directly, but it changed me. This is forgiveness for oneself, I think.

Forgiveness for the other, as Thich Nhat Hahn describes it, requires seeing the other’s suffering. Early in my career my work as a prison psychologist had caused me to wonder many times, if I had grown up in the circumstances the prisoners had, would I have ended up in prison? A child or young person doesn’t get to choose their parents or their life circumstances and we don’t get to choose the upheavals that life unexpectedly throws at us but we do get to choose what we do with them.

David Roland is a committee member of Compassionate Mind Australia, and worked for over twenty years as a clinical and forensic psychologist. He is the author of ‘How I Rescued My Brain, and the upcoming title ‘The Power of Suffering’.