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A 20/20 segment broadcast in early January: As the uplifting music swells, the avuncular announcer intones “And now here’s a resolution for the New Year we should all make—forgiveness.” We see a mother and daughter estranged for years kiss and make up, a couple after just a few sessions of “forgiveness therapy” (all previous marriage counseling had failed) holding hands and renewing their vows. Amid the gauzy backgrounds, the inevitable tears flow, the inevitable hugs proliferate, and the inevitable psychological experts stop just short of claiming that failure to forgive causes cancer and heart disease. They say traditional psychotherapy has neglected this essential element of cure and that studies show that forgiving alleviates depression and enhances self-esteem.

Several weeks later, on Good Morning America: A rabbi asserts that “forgiving is like taking a poison out of your body,” and a priest agrees that, otherwise, “evil is recycled.”

Politicians caught in scandalous behavior make public displays of contrition and speak poignantly of how their ordeals have taught them the importance of not only asking forgiveness, but of granting it to their accusers.

What’s wrong with this picture?

All the hype is not entirely inaccurate. We all know people (often in our own families) who haven’t spoken to one another for so long that they have forgotten what they were angry about, couples whose mutual resentments are etched on their faces, acquaintances so obsessed with hating or plotting revenge on their enemies that they have alienated us. I have treated many patients like them in my twenty-five years as a psychotherapist. But don’t we also know others—mature, even wise people—who passionately refuse to forgive wrongs, or who feel, despite their best efforts, that they cannot without doing violence to themselves? Has failure to forgive destroyed their ability to love?

Forgiving and Not Forgiving proposes a paradigm shift. It challenges the conventional wisdom and offers a new and consoling perspective: that forgiveness as it is commonly understood is only one of many routes to resolution, humanity, and peace and that reengaging with the past is the best was to change the future. It charges that false forgiveness damages self and society, and that not forgiving without vindictiveness can be morally and emotionally right.

The capacity to forgive is an essential part of an examined life. However, enshrining universal forgiveness as a panacea, a requirement, or the only moral choice, is rigid, simplistic, and even pernicious. Forgiveness by the numbers leads too frequently to emotional inauthenticity—a condition rampant in contemporary America.

Everybody has something to forgive—parents who failed, lovers who left, friends who deceived, and—often the hardest of all—our own actions. (Crimes by strangers are not intimate betrayals because they do not violate a personal relationship with the victim and will not be considered here.) Though it is a cornerstone of the Judeo-Christian tradition, forgiveness is not “natural,” or religion and society would not have to lobby so hard to get people to do it; the reflexive reaction to being hurt is hatred, outrage, and the desire for revenge. While forgiveness is not always necessary or possible, coming to terms with intimate betrayal is, and that is what this book is about.

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