How Forgiveness Can Help You and Your Family Heal

Are you struggling to forgive a loved one experiencing addiction or in recovery? If so, you are not alone. Forgiveness is a challenging aspect of the human experience, and for families touched by addiction, a crucial concept to navigate. Why is forgiveness such a powerful force? Many great philosophers, theorists, and writers have attempted to tackle this very question. As a marriage and family therapist, I first turn to the family systems theory for insight.

Family Dynamics and Forgiveness

The family systems concept of cybernetics suggests that equilibrium shifts when one aspect of a system changes, causing the entire system to reorganize. Change creates a ripple effect, and shifts at one level of a system reverberate outward, changing other parts of the system. Forgiving a loved one struggling with addiction has the power to heal your resentments towards yourself and the loved one. It can also assist in healing the entire family, potentially inspiring change and forgiveness within the loved ones.

Research supports the notion that forgiveness of others has been shown to cause self-forgiveness. Through forgiving others, humans can learn to release internalized shame, pain, and resentment that affect self-worth. This research seems particularly striking when thinking about families touched by addiction. Shame is a common barrier to long-term recovery and can lead to relapse if not resolved. Engaging in the forgiveness process with your loved one struggling with addiction could inspire their forgiveness of self, allowing them to move past shame and break the relapse cycle to sustain long-term recovery.

What Is Forgiveness?

The definition depends on who you ask. To me, the act of forgiveness includes changing one’s relationship with the pain that still lingers after a relational rupture. The nature of the rupture can vary in severity and subsequently leave more or less pain behind. I believe forgiveness means releasing some of the energy we spend on pain as a means of healing. In his book, The Book of Forgiving, Archbishop Desmond Tutu says forgiveness is when “we take back control of our fate and our feelings. We become our own liberators.” By this definition, forgiveness can become a gift of freedom given to oneself and the entire family.

The Four Steps to Forgiveness

Tutu outlines a “fourfold path” which includes these four steps to forgiveness:

• • Telling the story: First, tell the facts to a trusted friend or professional, and eventually, to the person who inflicted the harm (either directly if safe to do so or through a letter, email, or text).

• • Naming the hurt: Identify the feelings involved in the experience and accept them without judgment of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Invite someone to listen to your feelings, holding and validating them without attempting to fix them.

• • Granting forgiveness: Choosing by growing and moving past the experience through rewriting our narrative so that we are the hero instead of the victim. The mark of healing is experiencing and telling the story differently than the first draft of just facts.

• • Renewing or releasing the relationship: Renewal is preferred unless there is a safety issue. Renewing includes discovering what you need from the person who inflicted the harm and asking them to give that to you.

Going through these steps entails a rebirth, both of the self and the relationship. You can deepen your understanding of your role in the situation by telling the story first in facts and then in feelings. The act of choosing to grant forgiveness allows you to have agency and autonomy over the experience, which in itself is healing. Renewal spans beyond repair. This means forgiveness often looks like starting a new relationship together rather than trying to recreate the “normal” one that existed before the rupture.

The Power of Forgiveness

A common barrier to forgiveness is the thought that ‘if I forgive, I am excusing the behavior that hurt me?’, or ‘forgiveness takes my power and my experience away’. This is not the case. In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the phrase “what we resist persists” is often mentioned, and I think of that phrase when thinking about forgiveness. If we resist reauthoring our experience narrative, we stay trapped in a story where we are the victim of a horrible act without access to the full range of emotions. That means no room for joy, pleasure, or lightness. The relationship is frozen in the negative feelings, and so are we.

In my most often utilized theoretical approach, Narrative Family Therapy, it is thought that people integrate meaning moment-to-moment through a story. Within our narrative, particular themes emerge that become the lenses through which we experience the world. If your narrative is the broken relationship and the person who has hurt or failed you is a monster, the relationship will remain broken until you rewrite that story. In each interaction, you focus on what is not working and what is painful rather than refocusing on what is working and feeling the love and joy that exists.

While the path of forgiveness varies from person to person and within each relationship, the implications are universal. Forgiving your loved one opens the possibility of forgiving yourself. In the context of addiction, inviting forgiveness into the family could facilitate your loved one’s efforts to stay sober. Forgiveness means choosing to move forward and repair things. Once you learn to forgive after a relational rupture, you allow yourself to build a culture of fondness and admiration within the relationship where previous barriers of resentment and pain stood in the way. In this way, forgiveness becomes the ultimate gift of peace and serenity you can choose to give yourself and your family.