The Violence of Unforgiveness (Forgiveness III)

We have to understand, too, that unforgiveness is also a violence, one that we do both to ourselves and to the one whom we refuse to forgive. Jesus’ message is that refusing to forgive will, in fact, kill you—body, soul, and spirit.[1]

This link between unforgiveness and death in the body has been confirmed by science. Diseases, and especially cancer, have been linked to a refusal to forgive.[2] Unforgiveness creates emotional stress and our bodies go into “high alert” to compensate. Imagine walking through the woods and hearing a bear in the bushes. Your body tenses and releases chemicals to make you alert and to lend you speed so that you can flee. Once the danger passes—say you run a quarter-mile and discover the bear didn’t follow you—your body will stand down. Your breath will return to normal. The chemical rush will recede. This is how our bodies are meant to function: periodic exertion from which we naturally recover.

Betrayal and emotional pain cause a similar stress reaction. Our bodies become aware that there is some perceived threat, not to our bodies but to our souls. Just as if it were responding to a bear, the body produces excess cortisol and adrenaline to help us deal with the situation. The problem is that if we don’t find a way to release the pain, we can stay in a heightened sense of alert which becomes a long-term exertion. Over time, this runs a body down, lowering its defenses, making it susceptible to a number of diseases. In other words, emotional responses have physical impacts, and the refusal to forgive or process negative emotions can literally make us sick. 

Like salt, painful emotions purify and season us so that we are transformed. A life spent trying to avoid pain at any cost becomes no life at all. But pain is also meant to drain—through grief and lament—into the ocean of sorrow beneath our feet. If an emotional response ceases to move through us and instead gets lodged inside us, we get stuck with it. Imagine a steam engine building up pressure with no release valve. The pressure will find its way out. If pain never empties into a purifying catharsis (a process often catalyzed by forgiveness) it produces a tremendous amount of pressure that will ultimately make its way out, usually in ways we don’t like and can’t seem to control. Pain will manifest as anger or bitterness or some behavior that provides temporary relief but ends up holding us hostage. It will find its way out as we snap at those people who are closest to us or rage at the person who cut us off on the freeway. It will show up in addictions—to buying or drinking or watching pornography or eating an extra cupcake when we know we should stop—as we seek to soothe our festering emotions. 

Indeed, chronic rage, depression, and patterns of addictive, destructive behavior are always connected to an unhealed emotional wound, either one that we aren’t aware of or one that we are aware of but about which we refuse to release forgiveness. Some people drink themselves into a stupor because they came from a dysfunctional family and they don’t yet recognize it; others drink themselves into a stupor because they recognize how dysfunctional their parents were but can’t or won’t forgive them for it.[3] Our lives can even look good from the outside while the interior rots, like a house with a good paint job and a crumbling foundation.  

The problem with unforgiveness is that anything we judge and refuse to forgive tends to show up again in our own lives. Consider it a law of the spiritual universe, like gravity. It’s no coincidence that many children of alcoholics who judge and hate the behavior of their parents often end up struggling with alcohol themselves, or that a philandering son tends to follow a pattern set by an unfaithful father.

Can you identify any patterns in your life that you hate yet which seem to repeat? “Compulsivity addiction” is the phenomenon of returning to a behavior time and again, repeating patterns over and over in an attempt to find freedom.[4] I was, for example, repeatedly with women in a way that drew them into relationship, and then I left them betrayed, hurt, and understandably angry. This happened over and over, even though I hated the pattern and felt great guilt and shame about it. It’s a strange truth of our humanity: we recreate brokenness because we are looking for wholeness. The serial womanizer is actually looking for real intimacy. “The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.”[5] We are often blind to our violence because our emotional need is so powerful. We are like bulls rampaging through a China shop, trying to get to the red cape, oblivious to the breaking glass. 

In my own story, while it’s no excuse for my behavior, I was actually driven by a desire to find something good and healthy and right. Nevertheless, if we are held in the grip of unforgiveness, as I was, even our best attempts to find freedom will fail, cut off as they are from the life of God. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] Cf. Matthew 6:15.

[2] See The Forgiveness Project: The Startling Discovery of How to Overcome Cancer, Find Health, and Achieve Peace by Michael S. Barry. Kregel Publications. Grand Rapids, MI, 2011. 

[3] To use an example from the hedonistic side of the spectrum. Of course, the example could also be of someone being overly rigid/religious, from the moralistic side. And while drinking “into a stupor” is a conspicuous behavior, our hedonism or moralism tends to be more subtly masked, such that even we ourselves are blind to it.

[4] See “Impaired Decision-making, Impulsivity, and Compulsivity: Addictions’ Effect on the Cerebral Cortex” by Horvath, Misra, et al. https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/impaired-decision-making-impulsivity-and-compulsivity-addictions-effect-on-the-cerebral-cortex/ [January 31, 2018].

[5] Marshall, Bruce. The World, The Flesh, and Father Smith. Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, MA, 1945. Page 108. (Often attributed to G.K. Chesterton, but see https://www.chesterton.org/other-quotations/ [July 17, 2017])