Abstract
Victims with traumatic histories and hatred may suspect that forgiveness is an impossible illusion and resign themselves to an existence in a harsh, hostile world in which one is destined to live chronically by one’s sword; such a stance undermines constructive vision, hinders learning from experience, and obstructs healing and renewal. It is therefore crucial to enable the unfolding of a culture of forgiveness as an essential element woven into the process of reconciliation with oneself and others. In the framework of this dynamic the process of mourning all losses is of crucial importance, in order to restore the capacity to believe and to enable a dialogue to unfold.
1. Introductory Remarks
In writing about the culture of forgiveness and reconciliation processes, the essential idea was to describe them within the dynamics of deep narcissistic wounds, the sequence of confrontation with trauma and the mourning of loss, thereby allowing forgiveness and possibly even reconciliation to occur.
All the clinical subjects I will discuss have remained in the environment where they were born, but those environments have acquired new features due to the punishing atmosphere of war and its aftermath in the psychotherapeutic frame of reference. Therefore I have followed the developmental line of my experiences with the tragic consequences of the events of war.
Psychosocial help and psychotherapeutic processes, always bearing in mind the therapeutic aim of creating the space for the culture of forgiveness to develop, opens possibilities for reconciliation within oneself and with others. I recommend that these (therapeutic) processes should be accompanied by the parallel task of mourning of loss and unattained wishes.
In the book the text is subdivided in three chapters:
To live with enemies and the ‘impossible’ task to think on forgiveness;
Mourning and forgiveness as part of a healing process;
On the culture of forgiveness as essential for reconciliation.
2. Enemies, Conflicts and Armed Clashes
To speak about ongoing hostilities is quite a complex and difficult task, as is the necessity of co-existing with enemies of all kinds. It is always possible to ask ourselves, time and again, whether there can be a space for the mutually exchangeable and recognizable phenomena we call reality, and how do we enter a space filled with prejudices, judgmental positions and cultural stereotypes that obstruct curiosity and questioning, very often providing space for aggressive and destructive expressions.
Clinical Example 1
A Dream: Enemy Soldiers are Running after Him
In the group setting, one war veteran was in deep silence for most of the session. Then, he found the courage to share with the group a dream from the night before. He was in the woods, alone, feeling fearful and insecure. In the middle of the woods, there was a phone boothe. The phone was ringing. He knew it was a call for him. Then, he was surrounded by 10 Chetniks (enemy soldiers). He started to behead them, one by one. Later, 10 of their heads were on spits. . .
The picture was in accordance with a tradition dating back to centuries of Turkish occupation, when this type of treatment of enemies and traitors was customary. In dream space, it remained alive—as did so many transgenerationally transmitted notions, pictures, attitudes, as well as the long-dreamed fulfillment of the need for revenge regarding the many family members that perished, or were killed during wars or the repression that followed.
Such expressions block the ‘unlearning’ processes, so that new knowledge and insights are unable to enter the situation. Thus, ghosts of the past and present often occupy a place where open-mindedness would serve much better.
Clinical Example 2
Mirroring of War Experiences in a Group Setting: The Dream of a Female Soldier
In a session of group psychotherapy for war veterans, a female group member told us about her dream. In that dream, there was a football stadium filled with spectators. There was a football match. She turned with her face outwards, towards the stadium, and she knew, she was looking with something like the third eye, and what was going on behind her back. When she turned herself towards the stadium, a strange scene appeared: all players of both teams were spread out—dead—on the grass. The organizers did not do anything, and the public left their seats in silence.
Commenting spontaneously on her dream, she said that after waking up, she felt confused and angry—confused by such a scene and angry because nobody was apparently doing anything to address the situation.
It was obvious enough that the dream reflected the attitudes of the international community toward the war in Croatia. The interpretation was that the dream reflected intuitions and perceptions that were very common in Croatia—at a time when circumstances favoured the war conflict to start and develop (a kind of social dreaming). The group had some difficulty in accepting this kind of understanding, because it seemed that some members, at a level of the development of the group process, could not fully follow the symbolic way of expressing emotions and facts, especially through a dream.
In Europe, the 20th-century was marked by two world wars, clashes of two totalitarian ideologies, and the rise and fall of empires. It was believed that the lesson about unleashed human aggression had been learned and that another war in Europe was highly improbable. The former Soviet bloc and the former Czechoslovakia dissolved without a bullet shot. Nonetheless, Europe had to pass through another war experience during the final decade of the 20th-century: the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia. The unimaginable had become a reality.
3. Reactions of People under extremely Stressful Conditions
‘War is the woe of human nature,’ wrote Marin Držić (1979: 10), a Renaissance writer from Dubrovnik. At the end of the 20th-century, the Croatian population had to pass through another woe of this kind, after having endured two world wars and three entirely different political and social systems.
In trying to understand post-traumatic stress more fully, I would like to quote a proposal expounded by Joseph et al. (1997): ‘A traumatic event presents an individual with stimulus information which, as perceived at the time, gives rise to extreme emotional arousal but interferes with immediate processing’. Representations of these events/stimuli are retained in the memory, due to their personal salience and the difficulty they present for easy assimilation with other stored representations.
Clinical Example 3
Dramatic Confrontation and the Transgenerational Transmission of Recollections and Emotions
Another vignette from the end of the first year of group therapy with war veterans illustrates the struggle to master evil.
In the group, many personal stories unfolded, which were dramatic in content, covering episodes from periods of war, personal persecution, as persecution of parents and grandparents. One of the most dramatic was told by Domagoj, who spent four years in the war. During one battle, he left his unit to protect it from another side, and he crawled through a minefield to come to the machine-gun nest. The commander of the enemy position happened to be his school friend; they even sat on the same bench. He killed them all. There were six people. The school friend said, ‘You don’t want to kill me,’ and he answered, ‘You will be the first! You wouldn’t spare me, either.’ During his telling of the story, his ticks became sudden jerks, and he remained highly tense, like everybody else.
In the group, feelings of mistrust towards Serbs sprang out, with their misdeeds carried out on various family members. There were statements made, such as ‘all of them are alike’. There was an atmosphere of bitterness and disgust.
The group moved in the direction of the opening story—not just anxiety provoking—but direct, aggressive feelings connected to family stories about killing family members and previous generations being killed by Serbs. Living with all these stories, many of them were ashamed that their family members were ‘killed like sheep’ and were longing for revenge.
Intergenerational transmission of wounds covering aggressive feelings showed unusual strength and resilience when attempts were made to confront and interpret them.
One group member recollected the killing of a Chetnik on the Orthodox Christmas. He said that since then, for Christmas or other festivities, the episode came to his mind. He said that he did not feel pity for him (and he was blushing), asking what he (the enemy soldier) was searching for on soil that was not his, and on his Christmas. If it were on any other day, his destiny would be the same.
There was silence in the group. The therapist commented about shadows being spread over holiday atmospheres after that event. The war veteran said, ‘I don’t know why, but it is somehow that way. There were others I have killed on the front line, but this one especially remained in my memory.’
It seemed like the rude, aggressive feelings and heavy anxiety were finding ways to start the mourning processes. The group was able to speak more openly about sadness—not only about feelings of emptiness and boredom. Episodes like this one indicated that sadness could be approached and felt, but still not named.
4. (Therapeutic) Mirroring of Traumatic Hatred
After having suffered severe traumas and being deeply wounded by them, the essential question arises as to how to understand, approach and help healing processes to start and develop?
In the book some clinical vignettes illustrate different dimensions of the wounds of warfare and its long shadows that influence the entire human personality and society.
First, some intriguing thoughts:
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) in his work On the Pleasure of Hating (2004) wrote: Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men . . . Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal . . . Our feelings take part with our passions, rather than with our understandings. (2004: 85)
Once again we might ask the question: where are all human hatred, violence and other aggressive behaviours coming from, and what provokes and supports this way of relating to others? And, how to articulate all therapeutic procedures to enable the grieving process and the forgiving process to develop, in order to try to heal deep narcissistic wounds, destruction of self and interpersonal relations? In other words, how to reconcile with oneself and others? (Urlić, 2004: 462)
5. On the Culture of Forgiveness and the possibility for Reconciliation
To forgive means free the heart from the feeling of vengeance. (Pope John Paul II ending his first visit to Croatia, 1994) . . . there will be always the need for the process of forgiveness and reconciliation in order to repair splits that emerge in relationships: that is an inevitable fact of the human condition. (Desmond Mpilo Tutu, 2001: 201)
McCullough, Pargament, and Thoresen highlighted a fundamentally psychosocial element in forgiveness, defining it as ‘intraindividual, prosocial change toward a perceived transgressor that is situated within a specific interpersonal context (2001: 3).
The fundamentally interpersonal basis of forgiveness may be pivotal in our evolving understanding of forgiveness’ underlying dynamics. Forgiveness is generally seen as a response to unfair treatment that includes the reduction in resentment and the advent of beneficence toward the offender (Enright, 2001: 263).
Worthington and colleagues (e.g., Worthington et al., 2007) make the distinction between decisional forgiveness, in which motivations change, and emotional forgiveness, in which negative emotions are replaced with more positive, other-oriented emotions (e.g., empathy).
Some authors contend that the development of the ability to hate and to get over hating are two major accomplishments in the ego’s growth toward the mastery of aggression in relating to the object world. Hatred can lead to forgiving the trespasser, foregoing revenge and forgetting the offence. The same author also states that in addition to the work of mourning to retrieve the lost libido, the patient must do the work of hating, to liberate his aggression from continued service to the past. Forgiveness is accomplished by recovering the aggression that has been pre-empted by the desire for revenge, and redirecting it toward a new goal. The work of forgiving allows for the symbolic blending of aggression and libido into an endeavour created to replace a hated object.
With forgiveness, the blocking introject loses its significance. The goal of revenge passes. Comfort in a stronger ego affords the patient the prospect of a future free from the hatred of the past. I support the idea that freedom from hatred from the past signifies the regained ability to sublimate aggressive feelings, thus deciding for human relations to continue in a more productive and positive way.
As such, forgiveness involves both the reduction of unforgiveness and an increase of positive emotions and perspectives, such as empathy, hope, or compassion, and the restoration of the capacity to believe.
However, within the forgiveness literature, there is a three-dimensional model of dispositional forgiveness, which, aside from forgiveness of others, identifies forgiveness of onself (forgiveness regarding one’s own previous transgression against others) and forgiveness of situations (a tendency to accept and seek closure around a negative life event beyond one’s control, such as an earthquake or illness).
The human condition—together with expressions of uncontrolled human aggression, includes heightened feelings of compassion, empathy and religious beliefs and practices—that I would prefer to place in the area that human beings feel as the place for spiritual experiences. In my opinion, the spiritual should not be considered as equal to the religious and should encompass the transcendental aspects of thinking human existence.
In that frame of reference, I understand ‘spiritual’ primarily as the capacity to believe, to believe. Under the impact of uncontrolled aggression, the dialogue between a human being and the forces of the universe (that we feel inside ourselves as well), question time and again
6. The Neuroscientific Model
According to Clark, A.J. (2005: 642) neuroscientific research is developing the neurological model of forgiveness.
The cornerstone hypothesis is that, before forgiveness takes place, memories periodically arouse fear stemming from the amygdala. This fear drives a pattern of anger and fight or flight readiness. Under appropriate circumstances the frontal cortex interrupts the pattern and quells the fear response in the amygdala. The resultant relaxation of muscular tension signals to the cortex that forgiveness has occurred. In addition, the memory pathway from the rhinal cortex and hippocampus to the amygdala is inhibited. Finally, a tangible act confirms that the memories no longer stimulate the amygdala and the pattern of anger and stress do not recur.
Forgiveness may be a prerequisite for reconciliation, but it is a different process. The fact that monkeys, apes, and humans all engage in reconciliation behaviour means that it is probably over 30 million years old, preceding the evolutionary divergence of these primates. ‘Instead of looking at reconciliation as a triumph of reason over instinct, we need to begin to study the roots and universality of the psychological mechanisms involved (De Waal, 1989).’
7. Mourning of Loss
But, first, all loss must be mourned. Not only the dead, or the good enough mother. The loss of self-esteem, of certainty, of group charisma, a physical power, of the rights and privileges associated with a particular phase of life must all be acknowledged (according to Hopper, 2003). The mourning process is the most important precondition for the forgiving process to develop.
The Four Stages of Forgiving (according to Smedes, 1996):
Hurting: we feel hurt—we can only forgive people, but we cannot forgive nature or systems. Forgiving is always a personal event.
Hating: We hate—hate is our natural response to any deep and unfair pain. It is hate and not anger that needs healing.
Healing oneself: we heal ourselves—forgiving someone for hurting the first gift is a new insight. The truth about those who hurt us is that they are weak, needy, and fallible human beings.
Coming together: We come together—with truthfulness you can make an honest new beginning.
How do people forgive? According to the same author, slowly, with a little understanding, in confusion, with anger left over, a little at a time, freely or not at all, with a fundamental feeling.
According to Gruchy, ‘reconciliation begins when, without surrendering our identity, who we are, but opening up ourselves to the “other”, we enter into the space between, exchanging places with the other, in a conversation that takes us beyond ourselves (2002: 26)’.
Siassi wrote: One of the fruits of forgiveness is a ‘forgiving attitude’, which is also a developmental accomplishment allowing some people to be more forgiving than others, vis-à-vis oneself and the rest of the world. As the process of mourning carries a person from anger to sadness, the superego softens. (Siassi, 2007: 3)
I believe that to free oneself or one society from hatred and other hard feelings, the path leads through the processes of four stages:
Confrontation—mourning—forgiving—reconciliation.
To heal the undeserved wounds on personal, social and ethnic or national levels there is a path, which I understand as a five-step process, which should unfold on both sides of the conflict.
8. Conclusion
There is a five-step process that should unfold on both sides during conflict, in the frame of confrontation, mourning, forgiving, reconciliation dynamics:
1. Becoming conscious of the problem complexity (confrontation with many different realities and experiences); 2. Developing a deeper understanding of its manifest and especially latent contents (the mourning process); 3. Working through the newly gained insight; 4. Renunciation of vengeance to make forgiving possible; 5. Creating the space for reconciliatory processes to unfold, with oneself and other(s) (i.e. restoration of the capacity to believe).
The first three steps correspond to the well-known, usual psychoanalytically informed attitude and work.
The fourth and fifth steps, besides rational and emotional components, include ethical, philosophical, spiritual/religious and cultural content.
I believe that the process of reparation from traumatic experience should unfold starting from confrontation and mourning processes for suffered losses in order to promote the culture of forgiveness—leading to reconciliation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Urlić, I., Berger, M. and Berman, A. (2013, 2nd edition) Victimhood, Vengefulness, and the Culture of Forgiveness. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.