Forgiveness is a core virtue across religious traditions the world over, but the concept seems to present a paradox. Forgetting past hurts can feel potentially catastrophic, making us vulnerable to similar offenses in the future from the original perpetrator or from others like them. But letting go may bring us peace from feelings of resentment, anger or hate. The memories of these hurts can haunt people for a lifetime, often leading to repeated violence or perpetual war, some of the worst scourges of humankind.

Duke University memory researcher, philosopher and cognitive scientist Felipe de Brigard has been studying the relationship between memory and forgiveness since the early 2000s with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. He has just won a MacArthur Foundation grant to continue pursuing that work.

Read more: “Are Some People Addicted to Revenge?”

De Brigard has specifically looked at how forgiveness and memory intersect for people living in a mountainous region near the northern coast of Colombia called Montes de María. Thousands of murders took place in this region from the 1980s through 2000, primarily at the hands of right-wing paramilitary forces. But because of how Colombia’s transitional justice and reconciliation process has proceeded, many of the paramilitary soldiers who demobilized and confessed their crimes are now living back in the same towns and rural districts with their former victims.

I spoke with De Brigard about what forgiveness does to the emotional weight of a painful memory, what his research tells us about how memory works, and what makes some offenses unforgivable.

People are often told to “forgive and forget,” but your research into how forgiveness affects memory suggests this is bad advice. Why?

Forgetting is a tricky term. It’s unclear exactly what people mean by that. The memory and forgiveness project is an offshoot of another project that I had been working on for almost a decade, which capitalizes on the fact that every time you remember a personal event, you risk changing the memory itself.

Most of the research on this process looks at the negative consequences. Typical examples are that the person sees someone mug someone else and then the cop comes and gives them some misinformation at the time of recollection, saying, “Oh, did you notice if the person was African American?” or something like that. Then that information, along with the biases of the individual, taint the content of the original memory such that when they remember it, it comes up as if the perpetrator was an African American.

I wanted to know, are there any positive consequences of the interaction between memory and imagination? And one of the positive consequences that we have explored is what is known as “emotional reappraisal.” Sometimes you have really negative memories, and one of these memories gets reactivated and then you do something in your mind to modify the emotion that is associated with that memory such that it doesn't hurt as much.

The particular kind of emotional reappraisal strategy that we had been exploring for those 10 years is what we call “downward counterfactual thinking.” Counterfactuals are imaginations about alternative ways in which past events could have occurred. A typical counterfactual that we engage in when we remember negative events is how things could be better, but that tends to generate a feeling of regret. The strategy that we employ is instead asking people to think about how a bad event could have been actually worse. And that generates a feeling of relief. “Well, at least I didn't die. At least I didn't lose my limbs,” or something like that.

That relief is a positive feeling that can be incorporated into the original memory so that the next time they remember it, it doesn’t hurt as much. That brings us to forgiveness. I started to think about other kinds of cognitive processes that could engage emotional reappraisal strategies. And I thought that forgiveness was one of them.

When you forgive, it’s not that you forget the event, but rather, now that you bring the event back to mind, now that you think about the perpetrator, now that you think about what happened, it doesn't elicit the same kind of negative affective reactions that it once did. The suggestion is, because we have emotionally reappraised the memory, we can bring ourselves to forgive. You don’t need to forget the contents of the memory. You just need to change the effect that is associated with the remembering.

Obviously, for some minor offenses, it’s probably not terribly difficult, but for bigger ones, more extreme ones, especially if it’s at the level of violence against an entire community, or a genocide, something really extreme, I imagine this kind of emotional reappraisal can become much more difficult.

Yes, for sure. That’s what is really fascinating. Most of my work is conducted both in Colombia and in the U.S. And in Colombia, where I'm from, I did research in Montes de María, which is in the northern part of Colombia, in an area that was terribly affected by violence for 40 years or so. In particular, in the early 2000s, that was just a really horrible period. We interview people from Montes de Maríaand take biophysiological measures from them. The data is in our favor, but what we have been trying to determine was whether forgiveness led to a change in affect associated with painful memories in both the US and Colombia.

We have seen it in the US, as you say, with relatively easy offenses, such as if someone said something mean to a person on Facebook. But as you say, severity seems to be an important factor here. And we have observed it in the United States, but I wanted to see it in Colombia as well. And you actually do. It’s remarkable. You see a reduction in the affective reaction, in the intensity with which the memory is remembered.

And not only verbal self-reports, we also measure objective physiological response. We measure facial expressions, heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, all those things that are associated with the expression of emotions. And you actually see it there, too. Another paper that we just published recently also suggests that the reduction in affect occurs regardless of the severity of the offense, and it also occurs regardless of how close the perpetrator was to you. We seem to have identified something that is essential to the experience of forgiveness.

How does someone actually get to forgiveness in these scenarios? Can you describe the mental process of letting go of that hurt and anger?

I wish there were a single technique. First of all, the person needs to want to forgive. And there are lots of reasons why someone might want to forgive. In the context of the post-conflict areas where I work in Colombia, there’s a very strong motivator to want to forgive, which is the fact that the perpetrators are back to living in the same community with you. 

This is not like a situation in which I hated my roommate who did something terrible to me, so I decided to move to another house. You don’t have that possibility. There are plenty of people who live in conflict-torn zones that don’t have the possibility, the means, to move to a different place. And in Colombia, because it was a war, and because of the transitional justice process, it’s not like the perpetrators are going to go to prison. They are reincorporated into society. You find these communities where former guerrilla members and former paramilitaries that attacked communities are now back to living in the same areas. For this reason, forgiveness is an extremely desirable process to go through because it helps you to live with your past without it hurting as much. But willingness to forgive is extremely important, too, and not everyone is willing to forgive.

But what do you think is the most predictive factor determining whether you’re going to forgive or not? It’s an apology. If the perpetrator apologizes, more than if the perpetrator atones, your likelihood of forgiving just increased. There are a number of other factors that can pile on to increase the likelihood of forgiveness: empathizing with the perpetrator, seeing things from their perspective, thinking about the positive consequences that a bad action could have brought to your life. All of these things are a part of this emotional reappraisal strategy that I was telling you about and all of them can be combined. It’s not like a recipe, though, in the sense that if you follow all the steps you’re guaranteed to forgive, but they increase your chances.

But one of the things that we are very clear with the community about is that forgiveness is absolutely not mandatory. There are unforgivable offenses, and I don’t think that forgiving is morally obligatory. But one of the great advantages of the approach that we take is that we are separating the process of forgiveness from the underlying mechanism of emotional reappraisal. We believe that forgiveness involves this emotional reappraisal that I was telling you about, but it’s not the only emotional reappraisal strategy. There are other emotional reappraisal strategies that can help you to bring about that desired emotional change. So even for folks who cannot bring themselves to forgive, who don’t want to forgive, but do want the emotional change, offering the possibility that other techniques, borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy and so forth, are available, provides a little bit of a relief. A sense of forgiveness is not the only mechanism for reconciliation.

Are there unforgivable offences? What kinds of offenses are these?

Forgivability is what we philosophers call a moral term. It’s a term that talks about possibilities. Things can be unforgivable or hard to forgive for various reasons. In the context of war, for instance, many times the perpetrator just doesn’t exist because the perpetrator was killed in the conflict, and there is no one who can apologize for a massacre. It’s tricky to forgive someone if you don’t even know who that person might be. It’s difficult to forgive someone who passed away. If they were still alive, would they feel bad?

Imagine, even worse, forgiving someone you don't know, a soldier or a guerrilla member who killed your mom in the conflict zone, and then was, in turn, killed in another battle, and no one knows who that person was, no one knows the circumstances. There was a perpetrator that did the most horrible thing that could have happened to you, and you’re in a peace process in which you’re asked to forgive the perpetrator, which is a member of a large group, say FARC [the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia]. That’s a very tricky one, right?

That’s one kind of unforgivability, because there is no one to forgive. But there is another kind of unforgivability. When is it morally incorrect or morally wrong to forgive someone? That is a philosophically complex questio,n and views vary. Some folks in philosophy think that forgiveness is mandatory, that when you are asked for forgiveness, it is your responsibility, it’s your duty actually to forgive the perpetrator. Theistic views sometimes posit this.

I don’t subscribe to this view, and the argument for me is that it seems strange when you’ve been wronged to acquire a duty to do something good for someone else. I don’t love thinking about forgiveness in this way. It might be possible that forgiving someone would actually break an even more important principle. One thing that seems very clear is that if you’re unbelievably forgiving, if you forgive anything, even offenses that you think are completely contrary to your dignity, maybe forgiving breaks another moral norm.

I would imagine also in certain circumstances, it could make you more vulnerable to continued or future abuse.

Absolutely. I had a former graduate student of mine, who’s now a professor in business school in Singapore, who was also interested in forgiveness. And one of the things that he discovered in his work is that if you are in the corporate world, and you’re very forgiving, it could work against you. Suppose that your boss constantly asks you to work extra hours. Being extremely forgiving is like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll do it. No worries.” And then, they apologize. Then it leaves you more vulnerable for exploitation. Too much forgiveness seems to be bad. Too little forgiveness also seems to be bad. You don’t want to work with someone who’s completely unforgiving. Like, “Oh, I accidentally used your mug,” and the person goes, “Well, that’s it!” Some sweet spot in the middle seems to be ideal.

You mentioned that if a person does not want to forgive, there are other ways to blunt the pain of a memory or experience. What are those alternatives?

Within cognitive behavioral therapy, people have employed different strategies for emotional reappraisal. The most well-known are things like temporal distancing. Suppose that something bad happens to you, and it’s like, “Oh, this is the worst thing. I’m never gonna survive that.” But then you imagine how you will feel 10 years from now about this thing. When I was in college, I remember I broke up with my girlfriend, and I thought, “This is the end of my life. It’s just terrible.” And one of the strategies was to think, “Well, you’re 20. Think how you’re going to feel about this ten years from now. It’s gonna be okay.” That projection into the future helps to assuage or mollify the negativity.

Another option is remembering painful events in a context that makes them more positive, that positive affect sort of contaminates the original memory and then it just doesn’t hurt as much next time you remember. So that’s one downward counterfactual that I was mentioning, that’s the one we have. Which ones are more conducive to forgiveness? We don’t know. That is actually the second part of the memory and forgiveness project that we are working on now. I was looking for support to continue with this project, so this MacArthur award is going to go mostly to that.

What other kinds of techniques of reappraisal are you exploring that might be helpful for forgiveness?

There are a few others. We have six in the proposal that we’re going to be studying. So emotional distancing is one. There’s another one called “meaning making.” There’s counterfactual thinking. There is empathy. Empathy plays a super important role. Like if you empathize with the person, see them as a human.

The problem with empathy in post-conflict zones is that it’s easier to empathize when you have a concrete individual you can think of, right? It’s tough to empathize with an abstract individual, like when you don't know who the perpetrator is. We’re going to be testing several ones, but I don’t know if all of them are going to be equally applicable for all the scenarios that we’ll be facing because we face lots of different kinds of criminal and war horrors.

Yes. It tells you one thing that is very clear and something that I have become more and more convinced of throughout my career: Memory is not a monolithic phenomena. It’s not like you have one memory, and the memory either dies or is preserved as a whole. In fact, something that is super cool is that different details of the memory are forgotten at different rates.

And memories are also a composite of information about space, about people, about objects, about feelings, about intensities of those feelings, about light. Like all those things are composite. It turns out that they’re relatively easy to differentiate in your mental representation if you want.

An example that I give to people is that when you stop talking to someone for a long time—this occurs with dead loved ones—if you try to picture their faces, you can sometimes do that easily. But it’s hard to imagine their voices, right? Obviously, we now have recordings that can trigger the memory of an absent person’s voice. But without this recording, it is very difficult to remember a voice. You might remember mannerisms, faces, but not voices. Why? Because the contents of those memories are not lost all the same at the same rate. They’re not all preserved equally.

That’s wild. Do we understand why voice is harder to remember?

There might be some individual variability there, too. Some people might remember voices better than others, but, no, I don’t know exactly why. We’re a very visual and spatial species. We preserve memories of spaces extraordinarily well, better than objects, sounds, or tastes.

One possible explanation is that evolutionarily, we were foragers, and we really needed to remember where we left the food that we caught, where we saw the saber-toothed tiger that wanted to attack us and so forth. If you think about it, you probably can remember spaces from your childhood extremely well, but you’re going to have a harder time remembering the faces of people you knew in elementary school. There is a kind of hierarchy of preservation of different kinds of contents in memory.

Does self-forgiveness generally affect memory in the same way that these other forms of forgiveness do?

In fact, one of my current students is working on self-forgiveness. It is tricky though, because you are both the perpetrator and the victim. It is up to you to ask for forgiveness, but it is also up to you to forgive. My student who has been working on self-forgiveness has been looking at what kinds of wrongs we tend to blame ourselves for and forgive ourselves for. She’s looking into whether similar emotional reappraisal mechanisms that we have seen with interpersonal forgiveness also work with self-forgiveness, so the jury is still out, but we’re working on that.

How has your view of the nature of forgiveness changed over the course of the memory and forgiveness project?

When I first started thinking about forgiveness six years or so ago, I thought that forgiveness was a dyadic relationship. That is to say between a perpetrator and a victim. Typically when you lead work on forgiveness, the idea is that forgiveness is there to repair a relationship. Most of the empirical research or psychological research on forgiveness is with couples therapies. One cheats on the other, or treats the other poorly, and then they really want to repair the relationship. Forgiveness is employed as a way of repairing the relationship.

But there is an enormous amount of variability on when forgiveness is called for, and there are lots of different variations depending on the relationship you have to the person you’re forgiving: Forgiving your partner is different than forgiving your boss is different than forgiving the person sitting next to you on the bus.

Sometimes forgiveness is the way in which you can split from another person without hurt. Sometimes forgiveness as it happens in the context of war occurs between two people who have never met each other and that have no plans whatsoever to have a relationship afterwards.

And sometimes, even more strangely, especially in the context of war, forgiveness occurs not between a victim and a direct perpetrator—because both might be dead—but rather between a representative of the group to which the perpetrator belonged and a representative of the group to which the victim belonged.

And finally, there is also an argument to be made that even with all this weirdness of different relationships, that sometimes it’s not dyadic, that sometimes it’s not between two parties. Sometimes it’s between three parties. The two coinvestigators I work with in Colombia think that forgiveness in many of these communities is actually a tripartite relationship that involves a perpetrator, a victim, and a community.

The kind of relationship involved in different practices of forgiveness is really important.

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