How Forgiving Are You?
Forgiving others, forgiving yourself, and forgiving the things nobody did
Forgiveness gets discussed as though it were one virtue, and the research that measured it properly found three separate capacities that do not travel together. Some people can let go of what others did and never let go of what they did themselves. Some can forgive any person and remain furious at an illness, a redundancy or a year that went wrong - things nobody chose. The third one turned out to matter most for wellbeing, and it is the one almost nobody has a word for.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you usually are over time, not about the one thing you have never got over - everyone has one of those.
What it measures
The three subscales of the original measure: forgiveness of others, forgiveness of yourself, and forgiveness of situations - the illness, the accident, the bad luck that had no author. Forgiveness here means letting go of the grip, not approving of what happened.
Based on: Heartland Forgiveness Scale (Thompson et al., 2005)
Possible results
Others
Letting go of what someone did to you.
Yourself
Letting go of what you did.
Circumstances
Letting go of what nobody did.
Common questions
Does forgiving mean I have to reconcile?
No, and the research is careful about the difference. Forgiveness is internal - it is what happens to the grievance you carry - and it requires nothing from the other person and gives them nothing. Reconciliation is a relationship decision that depends on whether they have changed and whether contact is safe. You can fully forgive someone you never speak to again, and that is often the healthiest combination available.
How do I forgive something nobody did?
By noticing that the argument has no other party. A grievance against a person is at least addressed to someone; a grievance against an illness or a year is a case being made to nobody, and it costs the same energy. The move the research points at is not acceptance in the sense of approval but the end of the appeal - deciding that the question of whether it should have happened is closed, and that what remains is only the question of what to do now. People describe the moment less as peace than as relief.
Sources
- Thompson, L. Y., Snyder, C. R., Hoffman, L., Michael, S. T., Rasmussen, H. N., Billings, L. S., Heinze, L., Neufeld, J. E., Shorey, H. S., Roberts, J. C., & Roberts, D. E. (2005). Dispositional forgiveness of self, others, and situations. Journal of Personality.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, whose three-part structure has been reproduced in several countries, including validations in Spanish and European Portuguese. Two things are worth stating plainly. Forgiveness in this research means releasing the grip of a grievance - it does not mean reconciling, excusing, or staying in contact, and nothing here should be read as a suggestion that anyone ought to forgive something that is still happening to them. And the links to wellbeing are correlational: people who forgive more report less anxiety and depression, but the traffic runs both ways, and someone in a hard year will score lower on all three bars for reasons that have nothing to do with character. If the thing you cannot let go of is recent or large, that is a normal response to it, not a deficit in you.
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