Twenty years ago, Jo Berry lost her father in the Brighton bombing. Rather than get angry she chose to try to understand the bombers instead. So, several years later, she made contact with the man responsible. Since then she and Patrick Magee, the IRA member who planted the bomb, have struck up a remarkable friendship as each struggles to understand the cause and effect of this devastating act of violence. “I wanted to meet him as a human being rather than a demonised figure,” says Berry, whose father was the MP Sir Anthony Berry. “I didn’t want to save his soul; it was about me feeling better about myself.” She needed to understand what led Magee to such violence. “It’s about shared responsibility in terms of politics and history. Meeting him has helped me to heal.”
Magee and Berry have held public talks about their reconciliation and more events are taking place this year. For Berry, it’s a way of creating something positive out of a tragedy.
Her extraordinary act of humanity may be part of a greater movement. According to Everett Worthington, the director of the Campaign for Forgiveness Research in Virginia, there is a new focus on forgiveness emerging from big global political shifts. “After the fall of communism,” he says, “we realised that we had to learn to get along with people we had called enemies.”
The study of forgiveness, once the preserve of theologians, has become the hottest field of research among clinical psychologists in America, where more than 1,000 studies on the subject have been published in the past five years. Much of the research focuses on the health benefits, both psychological and physical, of forgiveness.
Human nature seems inclined rather more towards vengeance and rage; certainly they have always provided us with more entertainment, but, according to the American psychologist Ed Hallowell, learning to forgive could be as important for our health as fastening our seat belts or giving up smoking. In his book, Dare to Forgive, he lists the health benefits of relinquishing a grudge: “Your blood pressure may go down, your resting heart rate may decrease, your immune system may get stronger, your susceptibility to a heart attack or a stroke may decrease, headaches, backaches and neck pain may abate, your need for medications may diminish and your sexual self may gain strength.”
The science behind this impressive list has yet to be proven, according to Worthington, but a handful of studies offers evidence of a link between forgiveness and improved health.
Research by the endocrinologist Dr Bruce McEwen, of New York’s Rockefeller University, indicates that forgiveness could boost the immune system by reducing production of the “stress hormone” cortisol, which, if produced at high levels over a long period of time, may have damaging effects. Another study, by J. W. Berry and Worthington, published in the Journal of Counselling Psychology, looked at couples living in troubled relationships, bogged down in resentment. They found that happy couples who forgave daily irritants or acts of selfishness tended to have lower levels of cortisol.
What is behind this emphasis on forgiveness? Is it enough just to be a nice, unselfish kind of person? It appears that forgiveness unites several positive emotions — empathy, sympathy, compassion and love — which have been shown to boost resilience. Depressive brooding or nursing a grudge produces negative emotions — resentment, bitterness, hostility, hatred, anger and fear. Hostility is a central part of “unforgiveness” and has been identified as having pernicious health effects. “There’s always been an assumption that forgiveness has an impact on health because of the associated anger, which is causally related to health problems,” says Dr Ann Macaskill, a reader in health and psychology at Sheffield Hallam University and the author of Heal the Hurt: How to Forgive and Move On. “There are links between stress and physical ill-health because stress suppresses the immune system. There are also links between anger and high blood pressure and strokes. We know from cardiovascular research that angry people are more prone to heart attacks.”
Despite the health benefits we are promised if we forgive, a self-righteous rage often feels better, at least in the short term. In Dare to Forgive, Hallowell acknowledges the short-term pleasure of indulging your anger. He concedes that forgiveness never comes naturally. He describes anger like smoking a cigarette: short-term relief with damaging long-term consequences.
So what should we do with our grudge that we have nurtured and fed over the years? How should we process that slow-burning rage about the manner in which we have been chucked or sacked? Should we vent it, or bury it?
“The social view is that you’ve got to get anger out of your system,” says Roger Baker, a psychologist at Dorset Healthcare NHS Trust. “But research shows this is not good for you: if you do express it, it can come back at you. If you continue to revisit the bad feeling, it may be like buried anger, which is related to poor immune function. Forgiveness is a way of dropping it.” Some people are suspicious of what might look like a sign of weakness. “Forgiveness needs a health warning,” says Macaskill. “Americans are very pro-forgiveness but there are times when it can be dangerous; for example, a woman living with a violent abuser. If she continually forgives, she lowers her self-esteem and the abuse continues.”
Although Berry’s efforts seem to exemplify an almost superhuman forgiveness, she struggles with its Christian overtones and is clearly reluctant to occupy the moral high ground. She told Marina Cantacuzino, the director of the London-based Forgiveness Project, a new organisation working with grass-roots projects in conflict resolutions: “To say ‘I forgive you’ is almost condescending; it locks you into an ‘us and them’ scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won’t change anything. But I can experience empathy and in that moment there is no judgment.”
Berry resists not just the Christian ideal of forgiveness but the way it replaces anger with feelings of peace. She says: “I want to be able to feel angry.” Anyone who has lost a loved one in such a way must at some level feel obliged to keep alive feelings of vengefulness, as though to let go would be a betrayal.
Here, fortunately, there is a let-out clause. Forgiveness does not have to mean forgetting about the wrong done, or pretending it never happened. On the contrary, suppressing and failing to process feelings of anger and injustice can have equally noxious effects on our health.
Dr Mary Reid, a senior lecturer at Bournemouth University, has studied links between emotional repression and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). She writes: “Some individuals tend to repress certain unpleasant experiences, including experiences of fear, humiliation, rage or grief. Rather than consciously avoiding these experiences, these individuals do not recognise having these feelings and may instead find they are suffering from a bodily-based symptom, such as pain or abdominal symptoms such as those found in IBS.”
There are apparently different ways of chipping away at your unforgiveness, without going so far as to forgive. You may get your revenge; perhaps the person will go to prison, so you get justice. The offender may apologise abjectly or you may decide that they couldn’t help it — they were drunk, or just stupid. But if you really want to reap benefits, you have got to relinquish your toxic resentment. “When I talk about forgiveness, I mean letting go,” says the American lifestyle guru Dr Dean Ornish, “just letting go of your own suffering.”
And this is where we discover what we perhaps secretly hoped — that forgiveness can be a selfish impulse after all.
Peace in our time
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established in 1991 to promote a sense of shared history between Australian peoples and to recognise the disadvantages faced by Aborigines.
FRAN YEOMAN For further information on the Forgiveness Project, call 020-8964 4034; or visit www.theforgivenessproject.com
