One intriguing research finding is a link between forgiveness and lower levels of depression. Psychologist Loren Toussaint at Luther College in Iowa, along with his colleagues David Williams, Marc Musick, and Susan Everson-Rose, analyzed more than fourteen hundred telephone interviews across the United States. These interviews allowed the researchers to assess a number of sensitive psychological issues. Depending on how participants answered a handful of screening questions, the interviewers would be prompted to ask in-depth follow-up questions. For instance, they asked participants if they had recently lost interest in things they used to enjoy, such as work or hobbies. If someone answered yes, follow-up questions tested for major depressive disorder. In addition to questions about mental illness, interviewers asked about people’s tendencies to forgive others and themselves. According to the results published in the journal Personality and Mental Health, people’s answers to the forgiveness questions were among the best predictors of their probability of having depression. It’s not surprising that people’s tendency to forgive themselves for wrongdoings they’ve perpetrated against others is associated with a lower probability of encountering depression. Guilt and shame can be pretty depressing. More surprisingly, however, people who tended to forgive others for wronging them also appeared to enjoy lowered probability of depression. This can’t be explained by appealing to decreased guilt or shame; after all, those who forgive are the wronged parties. So the question is: why?
“Without forgiveness there is no hope,” Archbishop Tutu famously said. He was referring to South Africa immediately following the abolition of apartheid, when resisting the tendency to seek revenge upon white leaders who formerly perpetrated human rights violations against the black majority seemed to be the only way to keep the nation from tearing itself apart. But he’s also pointing to something much more personal: forgiveness of others appears to fuel hope. Though research on the topic is still in its infancy, forgiveness may play a more important role in nurturing hope than anyone ever thought. Along with the findings already discussed, Toussaint and his colleagues found that hope may be the link between forgiveness and lowered risk of depression. They found that less willingness to forgive predicted greater hopelessness, which in turn predicted greater depression.
Toussaint’s study isn’t the only one linking forgiveness with hope. In fact, one of the world’s foremost researchers on hope, University of Kansas psychologist C. R. Snyder helped to develop a prominent theory of forgiveness. Along with psychologist Laura Yamhure Thompson and a team of researchers, he created a psychological test to measure forgiveness, called the Heartland Forgiveness Scale. In a 2005 study appearing in the Journal of Personality, they report strong correlations between this test, hope, and depression. To Snyder, who passed away just a few months after publication of that article, the link between forgiveness and hope seemed simple. “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different,” he was fond of saying. Forgiveness means breaking the psychological ties that bind you to the past, giving up the quest to change what has already happened. As discussed in chapter 2, sometimes giving up on impossible goals can free people to experience the true hope, the grounded hope, of changing the future. But what does that really look like for someone who has suffered like Clemantine?
Life as a refugee was nearly unbearable for Clemantine and her sister. Over the next six years, they relocated to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When war erupted there, they fled to Tanzania, then to camps in Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, and finally Zambia. The locations changed, but the same poverty, lawlessness, larceny, rape, and death followed them. Someday, Clemantine told herself, the people responsible for all this would be brought to justice so this would never happen again; someday she would search the continent to find her displaced family. The more time that passed, however, the more unlikely that reality seemed to become.
Clemantine shares these memories in language filled with metaphors and striking imagery. Rwanda during the massacre, for instance, was “noise and chaos.” The camps were “places where the mind and body were imprisoned, where your brain reverses and becomes your stomach. All you know is hunger and worry.” This is part of what makes her such an engaging person. She paints a beautiful picture of horror. But as you spend more time with her, a different picture emerges, one in which these perceptions, much like any defense, kept her moving and alive.
When Clemantine was a child, her nanny told her a story about a lost little girl. But this girl was different from all other girls. Born of a thunder god and a mortal woman, when this girl smiled, glass beads fell from her lips. And so the lost little girl smiled through her fear, knowing that her mother would follow a glimmering trail to find her again. “I saw myself as this little lost girl in the story,” Clemantine explains. In the refugee camps, she wrote her name on walls to mark her way, in the hope that her parents might follow the trail back to their daughter. As she moved from country to country, she walked the streets looking at people’s faces. “Maybe I’ll see someone that looks like me, and know it’s my parents.”
In 2000 Clemantine and her sister worked with the International Organization for Migration to obtain refugee status in the United States. That summer, they boarded a plane from Zambia to Zurich, where the passengers looked clean and well-dressed. From Zurich she flew to Washington, DC, feeling more lost than ever. The last leg of their journey brought them to Chicago. “I was filled with mixed emotions,” she says. “I was happy to leave the horror, but I worried I’d never see my mom and dad again. When I was traveling from camp to camp, I would count how many mountains I passed so I could find my way back home. In a plane, I couldn’t leave any trace behind to let my parents know where I’d gone. They were lost. I was lost.”
Her first host family had a fridge stocked with embarrassing amounts of food. “I’d open the refrigerator and just stare,” she remembers. “I thought I was dreaming this luxury. There was a drawer of green apples there that I just kept on staring at. There were so many people I’d left behind that didn’t have this food. How many months would we be able to make this one fridge last in Zambia?”
In 2001 there came two revelations. Clemantine’s sister, Claire, had recently met a Rwandan businesswoman in Chicago, and together they’d made a nearly impossible connection. The woman had a friend back in Rwanda who, oddly enough, knew a friend of their aunt—an aunt whom they thought had been murdered. The woman made a call and got a phone number. That night, Clemantine sat in the corner of the living room and watched Claire dial. “It was silent for a long time,” Clemantine says. “Then Claire started talking into the phone, and she smiled. I knew it was her. It was my aunt. She was alive. She thought Claire was lying about her identity. She thought we were dead.” Then her aunt said something that turned Claire’s face to stone.
Their parents were alive in Rwanda.
“It was like digging up the grave and watching them walk out,” Clemantine says. “They were still invisible to me and so far away. In some ways, it was harder to know they were alive, because I couldn’t get to them. We didn’t know what to do. I wanted to reach through time and space and pull them back to me.”
The second revelation came in the form of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, from which Clemantine first learned the word genocide. Wiesel’s survival in the Nazi concentration camps was revelatory to Clemantine. He was the first person to describe accurately the pain and confusion she herself had endured. Clemantine was so moved that she wrote an essay for a contest put on by The Oprah Winfrey Show, about the scar of genocide that marred both Germany and Rwanda. A few months later, she was shocked to learn that her essay was a finalist, earning her a seat at a taping of the program.
On the day of the taping, Clemantine put on a black pantsuit with wide lapels. She drove with her sister to Harpo Productions in the Near West Side of Chicago. The set was smaller than it looked on television.
Partway through the taping, Oprah did something, well . . . very Oprah. Sh
e invited Clemantine and her sister, Claire, to join her onstage. Oprah was holding an envelope. “This is from your family in Rwanda . . . and I wanted you to read it,” Oprah said. Clemantine took the envelope and slipped her finger along the opening. But Oprah put her hand on Clemantine’s and said, “You don’t have to read it right now in front of all these people because”—Clemantine laughed nervously—“your family is here.”
Clemantine’s breath disappeared. Claire reached her arms out into the air to try to brace herself from falling. Behind the sisters a panel slid open. Their parents rushed out to embrace them. Unbeknownst to the sisters, Oprah producers had worked weeks to locate Clemantine’s parents and had flown them back to their children.
“I fell on the floor,” Clemantine recalls. “I raised my hands up and said, ‘Thank you, God!’ I squeezed my father and held my mother. No one had seen that private pain in me that I’d been carrying for twelve years since they were torn from us.” The girl who smiled beads cried and mourned. “I let it go. The pain was gone. I could forgive,” she says. “I could forgive. I could forgive.”
Clemantine’s journey toward forgiveness had begun years before her appearance on Oprah, though. Shortly after arriving in the United States, she’d picked up a strange new hobby. Every day, she collected the newspaper and saved the obituaries of strangers. She amassed hundreds of names, folding the pages and keeping them safely in her bedroom closet.
Clemantine now recognizes this as one symptom of a general obsession with memory. She was disturbed by the fact that what had happened to her, her family, and hundreds of thousands of others in Rwanda might not be remembered, honored, or mourned. In stark contrast, the names in the obituaries “were being recorded and honored,” she says, her eyes pooling with tears. “They were not buried in unmarked holes in the dirt. Someone cared enough to write about the dead.”
Clemantine believes that acknowledging and grieving her own trauma was an important step on her road to forgiveness. Forgiveness researchers tend to agree. A number of researchers have developed so-called “process models” of how people ultimately arrive at forgiveness. Though these models differ in their details and terminology, almost all of them observe that victims must pass through a stage of acknowledging the suffering that the wrongdoing has caused, admitting that it may have forever changed their lives, and owning their feelings of sorrow, loss, resentment, and sometimes rage.
Psychologist Robert Enright and psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons developed one of the most influential therapeutic approaches for helping people forgive. “This can be an emotionally painful time,” they write in their book Helping Clients Forgive. “Yet, if the client or patient concludes that he or she is suffering emotionally because of another’s injustice, this can serve as a motivator to change. The emotional pain can be a motivator to think about and to try to forgive.” It was through this process, which Clemantine calls “mourning,” that she realized she’d already lost enough valuable time and energy to the trauma, and decided she needed to find a way to move beyond the hurt.
A second commonality among most process models of forgiveness is the idea that it is useful to understand why the perpetrators did what they did, taking their perspective. “We ask a series of questions to challenge the person’s view of the offender,” write Enright and Fitzgibbons. “The point of all questions is to help the patient see a person who is, in fact, a human being and not evil incarnate.” As distasteful as this may sound, this harkens back to an idea we began with: trauma often begets cycles of unforgiveness and revenge. Many perpetrators were once victims themselves. Understanding their pain may help victims move forward.
This is exactly what Clemantine naturally found herself doing. “I’m not just a girl who survived genocide and war,” she explains. “I have learned to love others, even the people who did the killing. Before, I saw people as either friendly or dangerous. I now see that we are all bound by a universal desire to live. Every human being strives for this. They would kill each other to live. Who was my persecutor? I have no idea. They killed, but most murderers, they knew that killing is wrong. But there was a campaign of fear and misinformation everywhere.
“I can’t be a part of that anymore,” Clemantine continues. “That wouldn’t have brought my parents back. Forgiveness allowed me to wash my burdened past away.” She came to a simple yet freeing conclusion: she could not change the past. Rather than dwelling on the past, she found herself asking the hopeful and forward-looking question “What now?”
In the past, Clemantine was fighting for her life, but that past was unfixable. In the present, Clemantine was alive. As for the future, Clemantine’s life could now go in any number of directions. Where would it go next?
Aaron Acharya wondered something similar as he waited in a hut at a refugee camp for the return of the man who had betrayed his father and helped force the eviction of his village. How could he possibly forgive this betrayal? What purpose would forgiveness serve? Forgiveness wasn’t going to save his people!
Aaron had every reason to want to spill this man’s blood as a proxy for all those responsible for the expulsion.
The man came home that night to find Aaron and his friends ready to teach him a lesson. “I wondered what he was thinking when he did this to my village. Did he regret what he’d done?” asks Aaron. “We told him, ‘We are angry. You are a horrible person.’ And it was very strange because [he] admitted what he did. ‘I made a horrible mistake. But look, they took away everything from me, too, and now I don’t have anything anymore. You can do what you want to me. Just make sure my wife and kids will be okay.’ ” At that moment, Aaron took his enemy’s perspective and understood what had happened.
“The foot soldiers in war, doing the prosecution, beating, jailing, and starving—these people don’t generally get to make the decisions,” Aaron says. “They are also doing what they do to stay alive. Nothing I could do to this man on this night would change what happened in Relukha. Here I am in his little hut in the camp, and I see his wife, who is dependent on him. I look at his children. They are hungry, naked, looking up to this father as a provider. I decided I would look after their father. If something were to happen to this man, what will happen to his children and wife? There is something deep inside each one of us that goes out to the underdog of the moment, no matter what that person has done before.”
“To forgive is to abandon one’s right to revenge,” comments Archbishop Tutu, reflecting on his own experience. “It is to give the other, the offender, the chance to make a new beginning. To forgive is to say, ‘I refuse to be a victim.’ ” Whether or not this man who had betrayed Devi’s village deserved to pay for what he had done, Aaron recognized that to exact revenge would be to continue the cycle of violence, to stoke the fires of anger, and to victimize others.
Aaron had gone to the hut, he says, to teach his neighbor a lesson. But teaching someone a lesson has multiple meanings. “I started out wanting to teach him a lesson through revenge, but left teaching him a lesson through education, how to reform. I probably taught myself a lesson that day, a lesson in forgiveness,” Aarons says. “Over time we worked with him. We talked about what he had gone through in his life. He visited my father and me a lot after that. Our relationship eventually returned to normal. We patched things up. We taught him that there was potential in him to still do good.”
But this process wasn’t easy. Aaron was still plenty angry. It was virtually impossible for him to see anything but loss all around. “But I realized I had to forgive to push forward, otherwise I’d be lost in my anger,” he says, and then pauses before making a persuasive distinction. “There’s a difference, by the way, between forgiving and forgetting.”
Though the science may show that forgiving is healthy, virtually all psychologists also make this important distinction, observing that forgetting is at best impossible and at worse unhealthy. As we’ve seen, remembering and expressing the pain of the wrongdoing seem to be important parts of the proce
ss of forgiving. But Aaron doesn’t see forgetting as the least bit desirable. Tutu agrees. “Forgiving is not pretending you have not been wronged. This must be acknowledged,” he asserts.
Aaron had seen far too much awfulness to forget. He would make certain that others remembered the injustices toward his disenfranchised people. Beginning in 1992, the United Nations Refugee Agency and other NGOs, at the request of the government of Nepal, started providing food, shelter, and nonfood assistance to the Bhutanese refugees. Aaron was the highest-educated person from his village and at the new camp his family had been transferred to, so he volunteered to document the human rights abuses of his people. Collecting these stories of torture and survival acted as a sort of catharsis—the kind of acknowledgment and expression of feelings observed in many process models of forgiveness. In the beginning of his documenting, he wanted to promise justice to every victim of torture. But he realized that this was an impossible goal. Over time, he began to train his focus on the future more than the past. The United Nations High Commission and the German embassy arranged for him and many others like him to receive a college scholarship. There was still a chance at reclaiming his old life. The scholarship didn’t cover the high cost of an engineering degree, but Aaron had a different plan now. The refugee camps needed journalists. As a reporter, he could bring the refugees’ stories to the world.
In 1998 he graduated from the University of North Bengal, in Darjeeling, India, with a degree in English literature—the closest thing the university offered to a journalism degree. He continued to be involved in Bhutanese human rights organizations and traveled throughout India for the Youth Organization of Bhutan, raising awareness and support for the Bhutanese refugees.
“I saw a need to speak about what I’d seen to whoever would listen,” Aaron says. “The world needed to hear that my story was typical of the one hundred thousand refugees who required help to restart their lives.” He had given up the false hope that he could somehow correct the past. Now it was time to make the future better, and for as many people as possible.
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