Forgive Me, Forgive Me Not

One brisk fall day when I was in high school, my little sister was driving me to work at a local bakery in the car we shared. Normally, I drive, but, on this day, she needed the car while I was working, so she was going to drop me off. On the way to work, we got into a fight about something I can't quite remember. What I do remember, though, was how quickly it escalated and how angry I was at her. She slammed on the breaks at a stoplight. I got out of the car, and refused to get back in. She followed me for a while, and being stubborn, I refused to get in, preferring to instead, walk several miles to work. By the time I got to work, my shift was half over, I was worn out, but still VERY angry. About 20 minutes later, I got a delivery of flowers from her with a sweet note of apology, just like the ones pictured above. It took me no time at all to pick those beautiful flowers up that she had purchased with her own hard earned money and unceremoniously dump them in the nearest trash can. I know, I was a real peach, right?

That incident has always bothered me. It's not like me to be so unforgiving. I'm usually the first one to accept an apology and move beyond it. I don't like or believe in in making people feel guilty...I find it to be manipulative and pious. If I expect others to feel guilty about every little thing they do, then that means I owe them a ton of guilt too. And I don't want to owe them that...so I'd rather just accept that we're all imperfect beings. Now, it's not that simple. I am certainly not above this, but I think I should be, and I strive to be--though not always with success. At any rate, I have always been bothered by my inability to forgive my sister in that moment--and, it was one major pivotal point in our relational history. Not the only pivotal moment--but certainly one. In withholding forgiveness in that instant, I was drawing a line in the sand and saying--guess what? Forgiveness isn't a given anymore. And that reality has marked our relationship in transgressions that came after that.


Metts & Cupach (2007) suggest that forgiveness is a negotiated phenomenon and that apologies elicit empathy which leads to forgiveness. Sounds a lot like emotions used as a relational resource/strategy (kind of like guilt from earlier in the semester). Yeah. I can pretty much tell you that, while I didn't know it then, I was sensing Jodi's response to me as an attempt to get me to feel sorry for her and forgive her. And it felt manipulative. Thinking about our relational history, she had a history of playing the victim and garnering sympathies of others to use to her advantage. And I wasn't having it this time. So, I drew a line in the sand. I said no. I withheld forgiveness in an attempt to re-negotiate the relational patterns in our relationship. Guess what? She wasn't re-negotiating. We didn't speak for months, and the absence of this re-negotiation that I attempted to initiate through my decision to not accept her apology forever changed our relationship--but not in the way I had intended.

Metts & Cupach also say that emotional responses to relational transgressions are normal and adaptive in that they "facilitate emotional and physical survival" (p. 252) but that they are problematic when they endure "beyond their utility" (p. 252). Our emotions, here, are described as functional, adaptive responses that help us protect ourselves, and so serve a function in helping us avoid hurt/pain, but when they are no longer useful in helping to protect us or in helping us cope with a perceived transgression, they "eventually become psychologically debilitating and even detrimental to one's physical health" (p. 252). I take issue with this statement--because I just don't see it playing out that way. At least not for all of us. Further, they (Metts & Cupach) seem to position revenge and forgiveness as opposite ends of the same spectrum. In their discussion on personality traits in forgiveness, they talk about how "abandoning the desire for revenge is an integral component of forgiveness" (p. 260). I realize that here they're talking about specific personality types that re more prone to revenge, but this seems, at least for me, that the readings in general set a tone of polarization--there's revenge and there's forgiveness. We are driven toward revenge, according to Yoshimura (2007). I don't see the choice to forgive and the choice to seek vengeance as on the same continuum. There's the choice to forgive and the choice to not forgive--and there are relational outcomes of these decisions. There's the choice to seek revenge when that desire exists, and the choice to not seek revenge. But, the two are not inherently related.

Maybe my issue lies in the absence of the acknowledgement of the role of perception. "Rather, the essential element in the accomplishment of forgiveness is a transformation of the initial negative emotions elicited by a transgression to a more positive motivations toward the offending person, even if he or she has no right to such compassion" (p. 252). Really? In what world does anyone have NO RIGHT to compassion? This wide reaching, bold claim fundamentally goes against my world view. Further, in Yoshimura's chapter on revenge, he claims that "the perception of wrong conceptually distinguishes revenge from general and various specific acts of aggression" (p. 278). So, I was feeling better about the role/acknowledgement of perception in the readings. UNTIL, p. 292 when he says that revenge may be considered virtuous if the individual must have the authority to act vengefully toward another, the offender must rightly deserve the punishment and the punishment must be proportional to the offense. WHAT? So, by whose standards? Who's making this call? How can we use these kinds of assessments about what justifies revenge when the perception of what's right and wrong cannot be response(ably) defined?

If someone has NO RIGHT to compassion, then there is clearly NO ROOM for a perspective other than the one passing judgment. If someone DESERVES revenge...deserves according to who's perspective? Again, there's only room for one perspective here. And that's just not congruent with a dark side lens as I understand it.

Jodi certainly had a right to compassion in this scenario. She felt she was doing nothing wrong. She was acting in accordance with our relational pattern. And me--I deserved compassion. Clearly I saw this act as pivotal to our relational trajectory. I felt the need to draw a line in the sand. She didn't see it as more than just another action in our relationship. I saw it as relationship defining. We each framed the same act very differently and assigned very different relational significance to it. So, we were both right, and we were both deserving of compassion, but operating from different frames of reference and sets of expectations, despite the fact that we were operating in the same relational context. And our relationship, in all our universal rightness, was forever changed.

Last point--How does Stewart's definition of IPC fit with the Dark Side perspective: His definition is that interpersonal communication occurs when people talk and listen in ways that maximize the personal. You maximize the personal across all of these dimensions: uniqueness, unmeasurability, responsiveness (choice rather than reacting), reflectiveness (perspective-taking), addressability (collaboration). In doing this, he says that IPC is ideal communication. So the problem with the dark side is, can you have IPC that is not IDEAL or something you would prescribe?

My answer at this point: Yes, you can have IPC using a dark side lens. If you define IDEAL as communication specific, separating the communicative exchange from the valence associated with the word IDEAL. In other words, you can say that the communication in an abusive relationship is interpersonal and therefore meets the notion of ideal in as much as it is ideal for the IPC pattern of that relationship. BUT, is the IPC pattern ideal? No. You have truly interpersonal communication that fits the definition of ideal communication because its interpersonal, but that communication is occurring in a toxic pattern within the relationship, creating a toxic relationship. So, for me, it's not the communication that assigns valence to the type of relationship. It's the pattern of the relationship that the communication is comprising.