Source: Jerzy Gorecki/Pixabay
So picture this: You get a text from your “friend” Jo, whom you’ve worked with for years. Jo says she can’t hang out with you on Friday because she’s going out of town this weekend. Fair enough. But then imagine your surprise when you find yourself driving by your favorite watering hole to see Jo parking her car and meeting some other friends in the front foyer. Your heart sinks. Your mind immediately goes into a tailspin as you start to recreate, mentally, what you might have possibly done to be snubbed so badly by Jo in this case. Not only did Jo lie to you, but Jo made it clear that she’d rather hang out with others than with you. Jo is giving you clear signals that she does not value you as a friend.
You see Jo at work on Monday morning, and you walk into her office and close the door. You can’t help yourself. You tell her all about your experience and how hurt you are by it. Jo seems to have been caught a bit off guard. She mutters something about plans having changed at the last minute and says she didn’t mean anything by it toward you. While her pretext, which may or may not be true, was designed as something of an apology, you find yourself having a hard time accepting that apology. In short, you find it hard to forgive her.
After a few minutes of this, you awkwardly head to your office and call your sister, who is always there for you to vent to. You tell her the whole story and she is clearly angry on your behalf.
As a life rule, you always try to see the bright side of others and you really wantˆ to forgive Jo. But it seems like it may well be a difficult undertaking.
Fast-forward three months: You and Jo are barely making eye contact in the hallways at work. And you have blocked each other on social media. Part of you still wants to forgive her. However, every time you even think about forgiving her, you find yourself simply unable to do it.
Forgiveness is not always the easiest thing for humans to do.
Forgiveness as a Complex Emotion
One reason forgiveness is often more difficult than we expect it to be pertains to the fact that forgiveness is a largely emotional act (see Worthington & Scherer, 2004). And one of the core features of human psychology pertains to the fact that our emotional worlds often act quite independently from our cognitive worlds (see Montgomery & Ritchey, 2010). This is partly why people often do things they regret when they are angry. And why people who value their marriages engage in acts of infidelity. And why sometimes it takes people years to get over the loss of a loved one. In each of these aforementioned cases, at a cognitive level, most people would not say that they consciously want any of these outcomes. Someone who berates a loved one in a moment of anger likely would never want to engage in such behavior. Someone who cheats on a beloved romantic partner, putting their entire family at risk, may well, at a conscious level, want nothing to do with engaging in infidelity or breaking up their family. And someone who can barely get out of bed in the morning after having lost a loved one five years ago probably thinks, at a conscious level, that it is time to move on. But due to their strong emotional response, they just cannot. Our emotion system often puts the reins on actions that we consciously aspire toward.
Forgiveness is similar. Consciously, we often want to be able to forgive someone. Yet emotionally, after being hurt by someone you thought you were close with and whom you thought you could safely interact with, forgiveness may be wildly difficult. This is partly why estrangements between people who are blood relatives or who used to be the best of friends are reasonably prevalent in our social worlds (see Geher et al., 2019).
Part of the reason that forgiveness can be so difficult and, at times, simply impossible, pertains to the fact that consciously wanting to forgive someone versus being emotionally able to forgive someone are often two entirely different things.
An Evolutionary Perspective on Being Overly Forgiving
From an evolutionary perspective, we can think of the emotional nature of forgiveness as having evolved to protect ourselves in often complex and treacherous social contexts (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022). Under ancestral conditions that surrounded the lion’s share of human evolutionary history, humans lived in small social groups, and they interacted with the same individuals regularly. Under such conditions, being on the outs with someone could be pretty dicey. If you live in a small, stable group of 150 or so others, you really can’t afford to be on the outs with too many folks.
For this reason, humans seemed to have evolved a suite of emotional and moral actions, such as apologizing and forgiving, that emerged to have the function of keeping people connected with others in such small-scale contexts.
That said, being overly forgiving could have an evolutionary downside. If you forgive anyone who betrays you, you could end up being something of a fool—and people will take advantage of that fact. Such an outcome would make the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction that much more difficult. For this reason, humans seem very discriminating when it comes to forgiveness (see DeJesus et al., 2021). Our emotion system evolved to protect us and to help increase our capacity to survive and reproduce (see Guitar et al., 2018). This is partly why we often see discrepancies between what we say that we want to do versus how we feel.
Bottom Line
Let’s face it: In the anecdote at the top of this post, Jo totally dissed you. And your best efforts to forgive Jo fully fell flat. Your highly evolved and sensitive emotion system essentially wouldn’t allow for it.
So if you find yourself in a situation in which you really want to forgive someone (for any number of reasons) but are just not able to do so, realize that you’re not alone, and understand that the evolutionary underpinnings of the emotional process of forgiveness are largely at the root of this. For better or worse, our emotion system evolved to protect our long-term evolutionary interests. And this is why forgiving someone who has betrayed you can often fall somewhere between difficult and downright impossible.
