Steven Siegel Dissertation

1 Forgiveness and Relational Experience

EXPLORING FORGIVENESS IN THE CONTEXT OF EARLY RELATIONAL EXPERIENCE

A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of The Institute of Clinical Social Work in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Steven Siegel The Institute for Clinical Social Work Chicago, Illinois October, 2023

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THE INSTITUTE FOR CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK DISSERTATION APPROVAL

We hereby approve the Dissertation Exploring Forgiveness in the Context of Early Relational Experience of Steven Siegel Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Committee:

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John Ridings, PhD Dissertation Chair

Sherwood Faigen, MA

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Lynne Tylke, PhD

Kerstin Blumhardt, PhD

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Copyright@2023 by Steven Siegel. All rights reserved.

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Abstract

This qualitative study explored forgiveness and its application to caregivers. Seven adult participants with self-reported experiences of sub-optimally attuned caregiving were interviewed following the methodological model of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The analysis revealed a formulation of forgiveness based on the three superordinate themes that emerged from the data: accountability, delineation, and universality.

Psychoanalytic and neuropsychological theories were used to interpret the findings. The study revealed the potential utility of forgiveness to aid in the integration of early relational experience.

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For Ollie and Chloe

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Acknowledgments Many thanks to my dissertation chair, Dr. John Ridings, and committee members Lynne Tylke, Ph.D., Woody Faigen, MA, and Kerstin Andrews, Ph.D. Special thanks to James Lampe, Ph.D., for valuable feedback during the proposal stage. Much appreciation to the faculty at ICSW and the members of my cohort in the distance program. Outside of the academic circle, I’m grateful to Dinha, Joel & Vera for a variety of support in the early years of the process and to Kate for her boundless encouragement in the final stretch.

SCS

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Contents Chapter 1: Introduction.……………...………………………………………………………

9 Statement

of

Purpose………………………………………………………………............9 Significance of the Study for Clinical Social Work…………………………...…... ……….9 Formulation of the Problem and Specific Objectives to be Achieved………….. …...........11 Research Questions……………………………………………………………….……...13 Definitions of Major Concepts…………………………………………………………...14 Assumptions……………………………………………………………………………...15 Epistemological Foundations…………………………………………………………….17 Foregrounding……………………………………………………………………………18 Chapter 2: Literature Review………………………………………………………………19 Psychological Trauma: An Overview……………………………………………………

21 Trauma in Psychoanalytic Thought………………………………………………………

21 Relational

Experience

Development…………………………………………..24

and

Brain

8 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Contextualizing Relational Experience in Psychoanalytic Theory………………………27 Forgiveness: An Introduction……………………………………………………............28 Trends

in

the

Research………………………………………………………….

………...28 Forgiveness

in

Psychoanalytic

Thought………………………………………………….31 Forgiveness, Psychopathology, and Health………………………………………............37 Clarification of Definitions………………………………………………………............38 Theoretical Framework…………………………………………………………………..39 Chapter 3: Methodology……………………………………………………………………

41 Research Design………………………………………………………………………….42 Population

and

Sampling…………………………………………………………............43 Data Collection…………………………………………………………………………...47 Data Analysis…………………………………………………………………………….48 Ethical Considerations……………………………………………………………...........50 Issues of Trustworthiness………………………………………………………………...51 Limitations and Delimitations……………………………………………………............51 Background of the Researcher……………………………………………………………

52

9 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Chapter

4:

Results…………………………………………………………………………..53 The Participants…………………………………………………………………………..53 Results……………………………………………………………………………………59 Chapter 5: Findings and Implications………………………………………………………

98 Conceptual Model………………………………………………………………………..98 Theoretical Lens………………………………………………………………………...100 Application

of

Models…………………………………………………………..............102 Findings………………………………………………………………………………...104 Validity and Limitations………………………………………………………………...115 Implications

for

Social

Work

Practice…………………………………………..............116 Suggestions for Future Research………………………………………………..............117 Revisiting

the

Original

Study

Assumptions……………………………………..............117 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...119 References…………………………………………………………………………………121 Appendix: Form…………………………………………………………..............134

Consent

10 Forgiveness and Relational Experience CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Statement of Purpose This study aimed to explore how forgiveness is defined and utilized by individuals who reportedly experienced suboptimal attunement from one or more caregivers in early life. The study was phenomenological, with an emphasis on the subjective experience of participants. The interpretation of the meaning of participants’ narratives was the goal of the study. To that end, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis was the chosen method of inquiry.

A review of the literature on forgiveness will follow, but the concept connotes a personal experience with interpersonal precipitants (Fincham, 2000) and potentially intrapsychic consequences (Siassi, 2013). A significant outcome of forgiveness is an affective change, often identified as prosocial, typically represented as a curtailment of anger and fantasies of reprisal (McCullough et al., 1997). Early relational experience refers to the environment informed by attachment relationships in early development. In this context, misattunement is a pathogenic experience resulting in emotional injuries sustained in an attachment bond (Herman, 1992). The following chapter will review the literature on developmental trauma and forgiveness.

Significance of the Study for Clinical Social Work Trends in psychoanalytic thought show a clear trajectory toward the primacy of interpersonal relationships. In the discipline’s early days, the groundwork was laid for an understanding of development couched in the determinism of Freud’s psychosexual stages (Eagle, 2013). Eventually, seeds were sown by Freud (1917), suggesting that relationships play a part in human motivation and psychological pathogenesis. In

11 Forgiveness and Relational Experience the decades since, the importance of relationships—specifically during early development--has been a consistently significant dimension of every major theoretical addition to the psychoanalytic canon.

Object relations broke from the psychoanalytic orthodoxy, exposing a widening gap between relationally oriented theory and the intrapsychic conflict model. Reconciling the importance of early relational experience with the tenets of drive theory grew increasingly tricky for theorists. That led them to either resist the shift altogether or question some of the accepted givens of the discipline. From the British Object Relations school, thinkers like Fairbairn and Winnicott underscored the importance of relationships. In America, Sullivan emphasized interpersonal experience, and Kohut conceptualized a vision of selfhood rooted in the subjective experience of others. Intersubjective systems theory and the relational tradition further shifted from the tenets of drive theory. As a result, thinking concerning clinical technique and what is curative evolved. In both theory and technique, the significant shifts reflected the evolving thinking about the importance of relationships. Some of the concepts referenced above, as well as the research and theory that followed, will be explored in the following chapter.

The slow shift from dogmatic adherence to drive theory left relationally contextualized concepts like forgiveness largely unexamined in the psychoanalytic literature. As Akhtar (2002) notes, the theological tone associated with forgiveness was likely another reason for the lack of attention. The theological connotations were likely the cause of my lack of curiosity in the topic, even though it was broached by clients in clinical work. Upon further reflection, the topic spurred interest on several fronts.

In at least two cases, forgiveness was brought up in session by clients who had experienced moderate to severe abuse or neglect in early life. While their focus on forgiveness

12 Forgiveness and Relational Experience appeared to have been grounded in their Christian belief systems, I greatly admired their hard work in therapy and wanted to understand the concept better. Additionally, the concept of forgiveness straddles the intrapsychic and interpersonal spheres of experience, giving it unique clinical interest. As the literature review will show, it is broadly accepted that the overlap of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal is particularly significant in the context of early relational experience. Therefore, forgiveness applied to attachment figures emerged as a topic worthy of exploration.

Lastly, I am curious about how linguistic constructs inform meaning-making. The extent to which meaning is predicated on language rooted in antiquated frameworks of normativity is an area of focus. Forgiveness has etymological roots in morality and finance (Graeber, 2011), giving it a rigid linguistic framework of meaning.

Formulation of the Problem and Specific Objectives to be Achieved Forgiveness lacks definitional clarity. However, it can be generally viewed as a volitional response to interpersonal wrongdoing that results in affective change. With a focus on the forgiveness of caregivers, the lines between the interpersonal and intrapsychic are highly permeable, given the impact of early relational life on the sense of self and longitudinal patterns of relating. Therefore, increased clarity regarding the already oblique concept of forgiveness was a goal, specifically regarding relationships that affect the trajectory of emerging identity.

This qualitative exploration of forgiveness investigated meaning at a subjective level. While the participants of this study were a homogeneous sample, the experience of misattunement was viewed as broadly generalizable (Bromberg, 2011).

While achieving clarity regarding the meaning of forgiveness was an objective of the study, standardizing its definition was not a goal, and the subjectivity of participants was

13 Forgiveness and Relational Experience honored. Further, the study was entered into with an appreciation of how clinical needs can be underserved by labeling. As is often the case with medical diagnostic language, labels fall short of capturing the nuance and complexity of suffering. In addition to the skepticism about semantic pragmatism, I remained mindful of the flaws of traditional frameworks of meaning. As noted, forgiveness has linguistic roots in moral and financial frameworks for meaning (Graeber, 2011). The study aimed to explore how these frameworks of meaning-making affected participants' lived experience.

Much of the quantitative research on the topic aimed to test or validate existing process models for forgiveness. Further, much of the extant literature on forgiveness is contextualized in marriage or partnered dyads (see Heintzelman et al., 2014). The literature also pointed to a bias among researchers by which forgiveness is a strictly positive phenomenon (Pargament et al., 2000). This study aimed to explore participants’ subjective experience of forgiveness and to evaluate the impact of forgiveness on integrating early relational experience. The study did not aim to make value judgments about the efficacy of forgiveness or to deem any participant’s definition more or less valuable than any other’s. The goal was to inform clinical practice based on a deeper understanding of how participants utilize the construct of forgiveness.

Defining the concepts that inform the integration of early relational experience is a worthy goal in psychodynamic therapy. Facilitating a process of personal meaning-making is at the heart of good clinical work. Among those who seek to provide or receive forgiveness, it seems paramount that a clear and personally relevant working definition is achieved.

Research Questions

14 Forgiveness and Relational Experience This study was focused on producing an understanding of the conceptual nuances of forgiveness in the sample population. In addition to increased clarity, this study was intended to identify the part forgiveness played in meaning-making and integration. The following questions served as a guide to that end: 1. How is forgiveness defined when applied to a misattuned caregiver?

Implied in this question is the possibility that new dimensions can be added to the existing definitions of forgiveness through an in-depth inquiry into how it is understood by individuals who have experienced misattunement in early relational experience. In addition to widening the breadth of the extant literature, it was expected that common themes would emerge in the interpretation of the subjective experiences of forgiveness in this sample.

2. How is forgiveness used to make meaning during the construction of personal narratives?

This question suggests that individual conceptualizations of forgiveness inform how they come to make sense of their experience. In addition to illuminating nuances and shared themes related to forgiveness in this population, the study aimed to identify how participants felt their definitions served their process of making sense of their experience. It is a general goal of clinical work to construct or enhance the meaning of personal narratives. Therapy facilitates that process by exploring the client’s subjective experience so that their meaning-making process feels authentic. It was the goal of this study to identify how individual concepts of forgiveness influence meaning.

3.

How do individual definitions of forgiveness help or hinder the integration of early relational experience?

15 Forgiveness and Relational Experience This question stems from the intention that no value was ascribed to forgiveness at the study’s outset. The question was designed to assess participants’ understanding of the part forgiveness (or the lack of it) played in managing affective, interpersonal, and intrapsychic derivatives of early relational experience.

Definitions of Major Concepts 1. Forgiveness. McCullough et al. (1997) conceptualize forgiveness as a prosocial shift in motivation away from retaliation by the recipient of the wrongdoing. Because forgiveness involves intrapsychic and interpersonal components, the resulting shift is not necessarily prosocial but invariably affective. Because affect weighs heavily on how experience is integrated, the exploration focused on the potential of forgiveness to impact the intrapsychic and interpersonal dimensions of experience and the resulting affect on meaning-making and narrative coherence.

2.

Early relational experience. This refers to attachment relationships, associated affects, introjects, and interpersonal patterns. The repercussions of suboptimal caregiving on development and personality formation are well documented in the literature, and the related symptomatology is commonly found among individuals in outpatient treatment. The following literature review will explore the evolution of theoretical perspectives on trauma to illustrate the impact of early relational experience on interpersonal patterns in adulthood (Hill, 2015) and persistent emotional distress originating from the attachment bond (Herman, 1992).

3. Meaning-making. In addition to adding detail to the definition of forgiveness, this study explored how the concept played a part in participants’ constructions of meaningful personal narratives. To that end, I drew from Tronick and Beeghly’s

16 Forgiveness and Relational Experience (2011) concept of meaning-making as a dyadic enterprise starting in early life when developing infants make sense of their environments and inner worlds through interaction with their caregivers. As infants are exposed to different internal and external stimuli, the reactions from caregivers can either promote emotional regulation through attunement or impede it through neglect. These relational dynamics impact the developing autonomic nervous system (Hill, 2015) and form one’s baseline of relational security with a lasting impact on subjective perspective.

4. Integration. This refers to a coalescence of experience. Memories, affects, and other derivatives of lived experience can be felt as “not being a part of the organization of one's self” (Ornstein, 1994, p. 136), resulting in a lack of psychic cohesion. Integration is the process by which pathogenic experience is brought into cohesive selfhood.

Assumptions The clinical assumptions of this study are consistent with foundational psychodynamic beliefs. The significance of early relationships and their impact on development and pathology are embraced unequivocally. Additionally, it is assumed that individual meaning is subjective; while it was open to interpretation, it was not exposed to value judgment. Lastly, the framework for understanding meaning-making identifies it as a largely dyadic process beginning with the infant and caregiver (Tronick & Beeghly, 2011) and potentially reworked between the client and therapist (Stern, 1983). These dyads are among the relationships by which subjective reality is socially constructed.

The study was conducted from a social constructivist perspective, contextualizing data in a framework suspicious of existing concepts of normativity. The constructionist perspective

17 Forgiveness and Relational Experience views existing norms and formalized concepts as limited (Gergen, 2015). This allows for a line of inquiry that eschews claims of objective truth and questions existing understanding of human behavior grounded in inegalitarian structures of meaning.

Perhaps the most critical assumption in this study is the decidedly neutral stance on the value of forgiveness. While it seems counterintuitive to name a lack of assumptions in a discussion of assumptions, it sets this study apart from the quantitative research on the topic.

Unlike studies conducted to test a given forgiveness model, the intention here was to illuminate personal meaning. Forgiveness was not presumed to be a desirable achievement; the concept’s utility or lack thereof was contingent upon participants’ lived experience.

In keeping with the guidelines of IPA methodology as set forth by Smith, Flowers, and Larkin (2009), assumptions related to forgiveness are enumerated below: 1. Forgiveness is a process that results in a reduction of anger toward another.

2. Despite the expected outcome, forgiveness--as a linguistic shortcut referring to a complex process--lacks clarity.

3. Therapy clients--either consciously or unconsciously-- can refer to forgiveness in a manner that obfuscates personal meaning.

4. Forgiveness is not therapeutic without personal meaning.

5. Forgiveness may have a meaningful role in the narratives of those who have struggled to integrate parts of their early relational experience.

6. Misattunement in early relational experience is subjective; it is self-defined by the individual who experienced it.

18 Forgiveness and Relational Experience 7. The type of relational experience being studied is ubiquitous, affecting adults who have “been abused, neglected and violated…inescapable aspects of even the best ‘good enough’ growings up” (Gottleib, 2004, p.670).

Epistemological Foundations Given that this study was intended to illuminate a dimension of lived experience, data was drawn from the participants' subjective experience. A qualitative approach was indicated because participant experience was viewed as a data source (Ponterotto, 2005). Further, this study did not conform to existing constructs dictating what is normative in one’s use or definition of forgiveness. Thus, the study was decidedly idiographic, and data collection was performed with specific consideration of and respect for each participant’s subjective experience (Ponterotto). As addressed above, subjective experience has its developmental origin in the infant-caregiver dyad. Subjective reality, therefore, has relational roots.

In deference to subjectivity, this study did not give preference to any individual or group’s perceived reality. To this end, the paradigm of social constructionism was embraced to privilege subjectivity in the formulation of truth (Ponterotto, 2005). Social constructionism also recognizes the dialogic nature of truth (Gergen, 2015). Therefore, personal meaning evolved through an ongoing openness to the points of view of others, allowing for new dimensions of meaning to be co-constructed (Orange, 2011). In other words, while the lived experiences of participants were explored without being filtered through existing biases, understanding unfolded dialogically as was expected from the hermeneutic underpinnings of IPA (Smith et al., 2009).

To summarize, this study considered participants’ subjective experiences as data. The understanding of subjectivity used here was drawn from an appreciation of dyadic meaning-

19 Forgiveness and Relational Experience making and social constructionism, both supporting a view of subjective truth as relationally determined.

Foregrounding Interest in this topic stems from clinical experience indicating that clients benefit from formulating meaningful personal narratives. For clients who have experienced any form of trauma, personal narratives are often incomplete due to dissociated or unintegrated historical material. For individuals with histories of misattuned early relational experience, understanding and meaning-making can be impaired by affective and interpersonal patterns stemming from early relational experience. This creates unique challenges to constructing satisfying personal narratives through the therapeutic dyad. Forgiveness is among the concepts discussed by clients with misattuned early relational experience. My (nonverbal) reaction to forgiveness being brought up in this context was regrettably dismissive, likely because of associations with theology. The literature indicates that psychoanalytic thinkers have been similarly dismissive, possibly due to the same associations (Akhtar, 2002). While I brought an open mind to this study, I remained curious about forgiveness’s meaning to these clients and suspicious that existing definitions of forgiveness compromised personal meaning. My goal was to tease personal beliefs apart from the linguistic, cultural, and familial shorthand.

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW Introduction This qualitative study aimed to explore the role of forgiveness in the lived experience of individuals with histories of misattuned early relational experience. The research focused on the part that forgiving or not forgiving played in the participants' meaning-making process, as defined above. The following literature review is organized into two sections related to the themes of trauma and forgiveness, respectively. The focus on trauma was intended to chart the theoretical evolution regarding the etiology of emotional suffering. As noted, the shift in psychoanalysis from a one-person psychology toward an increasingly relational take on development and psychopathology underscored the profound significance of early relational experience. Therefore, the following review of the trauma literature is provided to give a scientific and theoretical context for the lived experience of the study participants. The extensive scholarship on trauma is surveyed to give an overview of the topic. Focusing on the evolving understanding of trauma through psychoanalytic history will underscore its increasingly relational origins.

The impact of relational experience on development—specifically its impact on brain development, its role in the evolution of one's sense of self, and its ability to regulate affect states —is explored. The specific attention paid to these features of relational experience will illuminate the biological and experiential features of the group being studied. The literature will identify the trajectory in the thinking that defines trauma in far less objective terms. The

21 Forgiveness and Relational Experience evolving understanding that defines traumatogenic experience as subjective is consistent with the epistemological leanings of this study.

The review of the literature on forgiveness that follows seeks to identify similar components among conceptualizations across disciplines. As with the section on trauma, a brief overview of theoretical literature on forgiveness offers an understanding of the precursors to generally accepted definitions of the concept. With this as a framework for understanding the phenomenon, a closer look at psychoanalytic perspectives on the subject identifies a trajectory similar to that of trauma; that is, toward understanding the concept as a personal process informed by subjective experience.

The collection of literature for inclusion in this review began in the fall of 2014 and continued through the winter of 2022. Scholarly sources were retrieved from online databases, including PEP, Researchgate, and Google Scholar. Searches included combinations of keywords: forgiveness, forgiving, trauma, relationships, attachment, misattunement, development, integration, and affect regulation. Other relevant literature was brought to my attention by professors and colleagues.

A significant portion of the literature reviewed is not particularly current. This was necessary to contextualize current understandings of the concepts in their respective histories and track the trends in understanding over time. Lastly, the research referenced in this review is included to clarify concepts relevant to this study. For that reason, the broader quantitative body of research on forgiveness is cited to better understand the conceptualizations employed by the researchers. The findings of these studies are often predicated on a given process model and were often not applicable to a qualitative study based on personal experience.

22 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Psychological Trauma: An Overview The idea of non-physical trauma can be traced back at least as far as the late 19th Century when Janet identified sensory symptoms attributable to traumatic experience (Renn, 2012).

Trauma and its associated symptomatology have received significant clinical and theoretical attention in recent years. As the body of trauma research has swelled, it has come to be seen as a distinct category of psychopathology (Gabbard, 2014). Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, categorized initially as an anxiety disorder, was reconsidered for the DSM 5 and placed in the new diagnostic category of trauma and stress-related disorders (Gabbard).

The evolving understanding of trauma as a unique category of psychic experience has also led to reconsidering what constitutes trauma itself. While only a small fraction of individuals meet the criteria for PTSD, it is estimated that almost 90 percent of Americans have experienced trauma (Gabbard, 2014), indicating a broad range of precipitants. It is no longer assumed that the severity of posttraumatic symptoms is commensurate to the intensity of the traumatic events; it is now understood that the experience of and reaction to trauma is subjective (Gabbard). As the understanding of trauma has evolved, it has intersected with a growing clinical understanding of the importance of relationships.

Trauma in Psychoanalytic Thought Before turning to unconscious and intrapsychic sources of trauma, Freud’s seduction theory pointed to clear environmental precipitants to trauma (Khan, 1963). Freud’s departure from this formulation toward a strictly intrapsychic etiology of emotional suffering set the trajectory for psychoanalytic thinking for decades to come (Khan). There were, however, those within the discipline who continued to see the importance of the external world in the pathogenesis of mental distress. Ferenczi (1949), for example, emphasized the importance of

23 Forgiveness and Relational Experience real-world experiences and urged practitioners to accept the veracity of their patients’ claims of abuse. Klein delved deeper into the preverbal infant's phantasy life and leaned heavily on Freud’s death instinct (Khan, 1963), further identifying trauma as an intrapsychic phenomenon.

Although fantasy and defenses were often the focus for Klein, the object relations perspective did bring the infant's interaction with the environment into focus. The child's subjective experience of being betrayed by early objects was traumatic in the view of object relations theorists. (Davies & Frawley, 1994) Along with a more robust consideration of relational experience in early development, psychoanalytic thinkers began conceptualizing the repercussions of misattuned caregiving on one’s sense of self. Winnicott’s (1960) theory of the false self speaks to an experience of inauthenticity rooted in adaptations to maternal failures. Similarly, Khan (1963) suggests that feeling unprotected by a caregiver over time amounts to cumulative trauma and could negatively affect one’s sense of personhood. In step with a widening conceptualization of trauma, selfpsychology views psychic trauma as a commonly seen clinical presentation stemming from recurring, suboptimal responses from selfobjects (Wolf, 1995). In this model, chronic threat or deprivation constitutes trauma (Wolf). Further, Kohut (1971) suggests that a vertical split could compartmentalize shameful or affectively intolerable components of lived experience. This concept from self psychology is identifiable as a less severe form of posttraumatic dissociation (Gabbard, 2014). Driven by conscious disavowal rather than unconscious repression, the vertical split connotes the presence of unwanted and unreconciled parts of the self living side by side (Kohut, 1971). The qualities of disintegration and self-loathing implied are applicable to the individuals being studied.

24 Forgiveness and Relational Experience As Bromberg (1996) suggests, mental wellness is the ability to feel complete while consisting of different parts. The feeling of wholeness, or self cohesion, was the focus of self psychology, and the relationally contextualized impediments to achieving it were enumerated by attachment theorists. Previously viewed as a secondary drive predicated on psychosexual gratification (Fonagy, 2015), caregiving relationships were reconsidered in attachment theory and given a central role in human development and psychic wellness (Bowlby, 1969).

Attachment theorists recognized the profound impact of separation and loss on development, identifying these experiences as trauma (Ringell & Brandell, 2012). The evidence-based approach taken by John Bowlby and attachment researchers inspired by him brought the importance of the relationship between child and caregiver into clear focus; the attachment relationship is definitively consequential with regard to brain and character development and is a fertile source of trauma.

Thus, the history of psychoanalytic thinking divides understandings of the etiology of trauma into two camps: the intrapsychic and the environmental. This delineation reflects the often stubborn allegiance to drive theory that, perhaps inadvertently, minimized the importance of lived experience. This study openly embraces the importance of environment and relationship, as are corresponding theoretical positions. Therefore, an exploration of neuroscience findings follows with attention paid to contributions to the understanding of development and the potential for traumatic experience to occur within the caregiving relationship. What takes shape is a trend in psychoanalytic thinking that identifies early developmental experience as more than a standardized process that can be viewed as normative or non-normative. Rather, development involves a highly subjective and relationally determined set of processes. A brief look at what neuroscientific research adds to this premise follows.

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Relational Experience and Brain Development Neuroscience research provides some stunning data about the importance of attunement in the early relational context. It is now understood that the infant’s surroundings impact synaptic connectivity, and the bulk of the social experience that informs neuronal connectivity in early development stems from the attachment relationship (Siegel, 1999).

The attachment relationship is understood to provide an emotional regulatory function for the infant (Coan, 2008), creating the template from which one operates into adulthood (Hill, 2015).

Data is interpreted and stored as long-term memory in the amygdala, a brain structure involved in emotional experience and understood to be highly responsive to facial expressions (Coan).

Neuroscience supports the significance of the attachment relationship in developing narratives of meaning and subjective experiences of security. The current understanding of brain connectivity supports a view of development dependent on relationships. This provides a clearer picture of the importance of early relational experience.

Conceptually, traumatic relational experience fits into a more contemporary understanding in which subjective rather than objective measures of impairment are honored.

Psychoanalytic schools that embrace a one-person psychology model are difficult to apply to a view of trauma stemming from interpersonal experience. As Mitchell (1984) points out, inherent contradictions exist between the basic tenets of drive theory and more relationally oriented views of pathology. A discussion of relational experience based on this researcher’s viewpoint necessitates a theoretical perspective that ascribes importance to experience, environment, and subjectivity.

26 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Throughout psychoanalytic history, theories of development have dovetailed with theories of psychological pathogenesis. It could be argued that psychoanalysis has always been a discipline concerned with posttraumatic relational experience, although the evolution of thinking has shifted ideological contexts. For this study, an exploration of posttraumatic relational experience is best served by a developmental model that allows for a reorganization of experience in accordance with the dynamic capacities of the developing brain (Palombo, 2013).

A view of development that recognizes the variety of subjective experience and the importance of early relationships in making sense of them provides a good foundation for exploring lived experience. Working from this basic understanding, many enduring and clinically ubiquitous features of misattuned early relational experience come to light. In the following sections, I focus on three dimensions of experience impacted by relationally determined psychopathology.

Affectivity. As Winnicott (1960) noted, caregiving that is ‘good enough’ provides the infant with peace that can eventually be internalized for the infant’s self-soothing. Attachment and neuroscientific research have come to the same conclusion: The attachment figure provides a regulatory function for the infant before it can be provided autonomously (Schore, 2009).

Further, the quality of attunement provided by the caregiver creates the context in which the infant’s brain develops. Specifically, the autonomic nervous system, the brain's fight or flight alarm system (van der Kolk, 2002), comes online in the relational matrix between caregiver and infant. Poorly attuned caregiving in which suboptimal exogenous soothing is provided to the infant results in over or under-active autonomic activity, setting the groundwork for affective dysregulation that can persist into adulthood (Hill, 2015). Therefore, the emotional experience of an adult with a history of cumulative developmental (relational) trauma is comparable to that of a helpless infant crying out for a caregiver (van der Kolk).

27 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Subjectivity. Early relational experience affects brain development, leading to enduring patterns of autonomic hypo or hyperactivity (Hill, 2015). The dysregulated patterns of affectivity that follow misattuned early experience shape personal perspectives about self and others and impact subjective experiences of safety. In other words, the effect that early relational experience has on autonomic development creates a baseline of sympathetic hypo or hyperarousal that will invariably impact meaning-making because affect is a large part of what gives experience meaning (Morrison, 1994). Thus, early relational experience affects the development of subjectivity.

Shame, for example, is a specific and painful affect state created by misattunement in the attachment relationship (Schore, 1991). Schore explains that a caregiver’s empathic response to an infant activates the parasympathetic nervous system to counterbalance the sympathetic nervous system activated by distress. In the absence of this counterbalance, when the infant’s distress is not soothed by attuned caregiving, the result can be the deflated affect state of shame (Schore). Morrison (1989) explains that shame is a phenomenon that involves the entire self; it engenders in the sufferer the feeling of being constitutionally flawed as opposed to having done something wrong.

Intersubjectivity. For better or worse, systems of relating are built on early relational experience. Thus, it is to be expected that relational patterns will play out interpersonally in adulthood. Bromberg (2011) explains that intersubjectivity calls for a sense of self that is informed by the other: “When you are able to see yourself as others see you, while not dissociating from the experience of how you see yourself, you are relating intersubjectively” (p.

14). Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood (1995) provide a clinical framework in which intersubjectivity stands in contrast to the classical notions of a one-person psychology. In the

28 Forgiveness and Relational Experience context of developmental trauma, poorly attuned caregiving will not provide an infant with the experience of mutual regulation (Bromberg, 2001), setting the stage for a pattern of meaningmaking that is not constructed dyadically and does not provide foundational experiences of self in relation to others. Post-traumatic relational styles that go unexamined are likely to repeat intergenerationally and can manifest in relationships as a “negation of the other’s subjectivity” (Shaw, 2014, p. 71). This consequence of relational trauma is what I am referring to as an impairment of intersubjectivity.

Contextualizing Relational Experience in Psychoanalytic Theory The three dimensions of experience listed above underscore the potential for early relational experience to impact one’s subjective sense of security well into adulthood. With this in mind, a specific and familiar clinical picture takes shape. Many features of this clinical picture are comparable to clinical phenomena that psychoanalytic thinkers have observed for some time.

As noted above, the experience of feeling flawed, inauthentic, or constitutionally inferior are clinical phenomena that many psychoanalytic thinkers have considered and have generally tied to relational experience.

Whatever the resulting clinical features, early relational derivatives require integration to be worked through. Ornstein (1994) explains that the integration of traumatic memories is not equivalent to their disappearance. “Rather, it means that they will cease to be experienced as not being a part of the organization of one's self, as being incongruent with one's current selfperception" (p. 136). The focus on self-fragmentation as a source of psychic disturbance is a primary treatment goal in self-psychology, and the disavowal of experience does not promote cohesion. In part, the treatment process is a reconstruction of autobiographical data through the

29 Forgiveness and Relational Experience therapeutic relationship (Ornstein). As the focus shifts to forgiveness, considering what part that process can play in integration is worth considering.

Forgiveness: An Introduction Because forgiveness straddles both social and intrapsychic terrain (Akhtar, 2002; Horwitz, 2005), it is a meaningful topic to consider in an exploration of the lived experience of adults who received misattuned caregiving. The following review of the literature on forgiveness tracks some of the trends in scholarly thinking on the topic. This review of the extant, predominantly quantitative research is incomplete but identifies some valuable frameworks for understanding the phenomenology of forgiveness. A focus on defining process dimensions noted ubiquitously across theoretical perspectives follows, as does a closer look at psychoanalytically leaning literature on the subject.

Trends in the Research Strelan and Covic’s (2006) meta-analysis of twenty-five process models finds that forgiveness lacks conceptual coherence and that the process does not have a clear endpoint.

Nevertheless, forgiveness is generally viewed favorably by social science researchers (Strelan & Covic). McCullough et al. (2003) note the prosocial features of forgiveness and conceptualize it as a counterbalance to retaliatory inclinations and its potential to mitigate interpersonal estrangement.

Given its favorability in the literature, it is unsurprising that numerous quantitative studies seek to identify barriers to forgiveness or factors that promote it. McCullough et al.

(1997, 1998) find that empathy is a significant determinant of forgiveness, and Heintzelman et al. (2014) find that differentiation of self is a reliable predictor of one’s capacity to forgive. The

30 Forgiveness and Relational Experience research notes that the decision to forgive is reached more easily for individuals who are in satisfying relationships with their offenders (McCullough et al., 1998; Burnette et al., 2012) and that unforgiveness is more rigid when transgressions pose a threat to identity (Pearce et al., 2018). Research is often predicated on the belief that forgiveness is inherently valuable based on its potential to promote relatedness (Fincham, 2000).

The research provides a framework for understanding the phenomenology of forgiveness, describing it as a sequential process with affective, cognitive, and moral components resulting in increased empathy for the offender (Strelan & Covic, 2006). This process entails abdicating anger (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000), often called ‘letting go.’ Burnette et al. (2012) suggest that forgiveness is a computational process by which the value of a relationship is weighed against the possibility of future exploitation. While Lee & Enright (2019) fail to find a causal relationship between forgiveness and physical health, a meta-analysis by Rasmussen et al. (2019) drawing from a combined sample of over 26,000 participants finds that forgiveness and psychological health can be reasonably correlated. Yao and Chao (2018) challenge assumptions about the association of power to forgiveness by finding differences along gender lines. The findings suggest that when assessed by a third party, women who forgive are perceived as weak, while male forgivers are viewed as powerful (Yao & Chao).

The research supports a view of forgiveness as a high-order psychological operation with significant mental health benefits. These studies represent forgiveness as a purposive undertaking requiring a fair amount of cognitive wherewithal (Burnette et al., 2012) and emotional maturity (Heintzelman et al., 2014). For those with histories of misattuned caregiving and the affective dysregulation associated with it, forgiveness could not be entered into easily. It would be assumed, for example, that individuals with misattuned early relational experience

31 Forgiveness and Relational Experience would struggle with differentiation of self. This measure correlated highly with the capacity to forgive in the study by Heintzelman et al. (2014). Drawn from Bowen’s (1978) family system theory, differentiation of self refers to the capacity to “experience both intimacy and autonomy within a relationship” (Heintzelman et al., p. 15). The correlation of forgiveness with such a complex psychological operation is telling. It is worth noting that much of the research discussed above focused on applying forgiveness to betrayals such as marital infidelity (Heintzelman et al.) and other close adult relationships, not attachment relationships. Given the clinical features ascribed to recipients of misattuned caregiving, it is expected that forgiveness would be a tall order for adults with that kind of early relational experience. Not surprisingly, Yarnoz-Yaben (2009) finds that the security of attachment correlates significantly with the quality of forgiveness in adults dealing with divorce. With this in mind, it would be expected that the appearance of forgiveness in the clinical situation would be more authentic in late-stage treatment (Schafer, 2004).

In the literature, forgiveness is characterized as a constellation of psychic mechanisms that changes the forgiver’s perspective toward their offender. This shift in perspective entails a widened view of the offender as a complete person (Schafer, 2004), resulting in the ability to separate offender and offense (van Tongren, 2008). Forgiveness is conceptualized as a capacity (Horwitz, 2005) to integrate traumatic relational experience. Derivatives of anger, most notably shame, have roots in early relational experience (Schore, 1991); the role of forgiveness in altering the phenomenology of these affects (Stolorow, 1971) is addressed below. Its proponents often compare forgiveness to familiar psychodynamic ideas; a discussion of some of those comparisons follows. Reflections in the literature on the role of forgiveness in addressing relationally determined psychopathology are also explored.

32 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Forgiveness in Psychoanalytic Thought As noted above, forgiveness has a troubled history in psychoanalytic thought. As suggested by Akhtar (2002) and others, the paucity of psychoanalytic literature on forgiveness is partially attributable to the concept’s assumed theological underpinnings. The lack of literature suggests that faith-based action is antithetical to the process of psychoanalysis, one that values insight and understanding. Smith (2008), for example, argues that forgiveness has no place in psychoanalytic work and that its use in practice is indicative of “the Christianizing of a culture and its thought processes” (p. 932). Proponents of the concept of forgiveness in psychoanalytic work often warn of the pitfalls of its inauthentic use. Pseudo-forgiveness, which Stolorow likens to “self-prostitution” (1971, p. 102), is linked to various pathologies that will be explored later.

However, the clinical benefits of authentic forgiveness are consistent with the centrality of relational experience in mental health. They also apply to the therapeutic goal of integration for adults with misattuned early relational experiences.

Forgiveness and affect. As noted above, an affective shift is a defining feature of forgiveness across definitions and disciplines. Also noted is the affective dysregulation that is often part of the clinical picture of the adults with the type of relational experience being studied (Hill, 2015). In the psychoanalytic literature, the affective shift and the resulting change in attitude toward the offender has the potential for the well-being of the wronged individual rather than the payoff of beneficence promised in theology. The literature addresses the spectrum of experience stemming from derivatives of aggression as it pertains to internal and external objects and the associated struggle of delineating the two. For this study, I focus primarily on internalized (introjected) object derivatives and their affective consequences in adulthood.

33 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Stolorow (1971) suggests that forgiveness can alter the phenomenology of hate and facilitate integration, a clinical goal for posttraumatic affectivity. Conversely, the literature describes the state of unforgiveness as one marked by rage, entitlement, vengefulness, and grudge-holding (Lansky, 2001). Unforgiveness is conceptualized in the literature as a state thick with ‘primitive’ defenses such as splitting (Horwitz, 2005). These defenses are operationalized to attenuate painful affect states such as shame. Like anger toward an external object, shame can be viewed as a specific type of anger toward one’s self relevant to this exploration of forgiveness. As noted previously, the type of relational experience of interest in this study is defined by sub-optimally attuned caregiving to which shame can be a response (Morrison, 1994). In the literature, the experience of shame and troubles with its regulation are considered to be interpersonally determined. As referenced earlier, Schore (1991) identifies the origins of shame in early relational experiences in which the infant’s expectation of affective consensus is met with misattunement from the caregiver.

Shame has roots in developmental misattunement and can manifest in adulthood as an experience of being flawed (Morrison, 1994), a profound disruption of self-esteem experienced as personal weakness (McWilliams, 1999), or as a sense of failure to live up to personal ideals (Gottlieb, 2004). Considering shame’s ontogeny illuminates the problem of delineation of self and other. As noted above, the relational matrix in which development unfolds is profoundly consequential, and the affectivity during this process plays a part in meaning-making (Morrison). Therefore, an individual who received suboptimal attunement during early development might default to shame. That affective experience might color their narrative because the affective response was concretized during preverbal development. These patterns play out in adulthood along similar lines; Gottlieb (2004) suggests that helplessness—a

34 Forgiveness and Relational Experience potentially prodromal traumatic experience rooted in very early relational experience--is a precipitant to shame. This early, relationally determined experience can be felt in adulthood as failure, inadequacy, or regret and can be defended against through social withdrawal (Buechler, 2009). Additionally, Lansky (2009) conceptualizes the splitting operations that defend against shame as a regression to a retributive state of mind. Misattuned early relational experience can lead to a subjective reality colored by isolation and anger.

Lansky (2005) suggests that shame is so painful an affect that it can be unbearable, making forgiveness untenable. The mechanisms that keep the shame of interpersonal betrayal out of consciousness are tantamount to a position of unforgiveness (Lansky, 2001, 2005).

Horwitz (2005) suggests that forgiveness can be viewed as the capacity to circumvent lowerorder defenses used to keep shame out of consciousness.

Like forgiveness itself, affect can only be fully appreciated in a relational context. The literature provides a formulation of affectivity that identifies it as a component of meaningmaking with relational origins. The literature also supports a developmental understanding of affectivity. It is suggested that forgiveness has clinical value in addressing affective symptomatology such as dysregulation when utilized in a psychodynamic treatment. This is consistent with the interdisciplinary literature on forgiveness, which consistently identifies affective change as an outcome of the process of forgiveness.

Forgiveness and the depressive position. Smith (2008) suggests that forgiveness is tantamount to a compromise formation steeped in avoidance and wishful fantasy. In the literature, comparisons of forgiveness to Klein’s (1935) concept of the depressive position suggest just the opposite. Like Freud’s (1923) suggestion that a normative developmental trajectory moves away from narcissistic gratification toward a reality-based perspective, Klein’s

35 Forgiveness and Relational Experience concept implies that psychic wellness will entail an acceptance of unavoidable frustration. Like the discussion of affect above, this literature review focuses on themes most applicable to the clinical implications for the developmentally traumatized.

The achievement of the depressive position replaces the terrifying and amorphous object world of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1935) with a relatedness that has some basis in conscious acceptance of reality (Siassi, 2013). This capacity, Ogden (1986) suggests, is rooted in subjectivity. From this perspective, subjectivity is tantamount to psychic sovereignty, a departure from an experience based on projective and introjective process. Feeling boundaries separating self from other is a capability that holds significant importance for the individual with a history of sub-optimally attuned early relational experience. As explicated in the above discussion of traumatic early relational experience, subjectivity—the degree to which a sense of self is cohesive and reliable—is foundational. Klein’s (1935) concept identifies the profundity of the developmental capacity for more clearly delineated ego boundaries between infant and caregiver. The earlier, more ‘primitive’ psychic perspective can be returned to throughout life in times of stress (Ogden). Further, this state–one colored by deeply embedded introjects–leads to the experience of deficient selfhood, a phenomenon repeatedly explored in psychoanalytic theory.

The depressive position reduces anxiety and paranoia due to an experience of cohesion whereby disparate portions of self are experienced as parts of a cohesive whole (Ogden, 1986).

The anxiety that the depressive position mitigates is severe; the helplessness that the utter dependency of human infancy entails is profound. Ogden’s conceptualization of the depressive position as the birth of subjectivity is especially germane to our exploration of relational experience. It provides a perspective from which others can be viewed as separate and worthy of

36 Forgiveness and Relational Experience compassion (Ogden). What makes psychoanalytic perspectives stand apart from theological ones is that recognition of the value of the offender is not motivated by exogenous ideals of moral correctness. Through a process of forgiveness, its proponents posit, the offender is seen as a complex, whole person (Schafer, 2005), and the value of the relationship is restored to the wronged individual’s relational narrative (Siassi, 2013). Consequently, one’s inner object world can be reorganized, and components of self co-constructed within the attachment dyad can be reclaimed (Siassi).

If a psychoanalytic view of forgiveness finds it to be phenomenologically comparable to the depressive position, it implies none of the wishful fantasy ascribed to it by Smith (2008). It could be argued that the parallels between forgiveness and the depressive position have more to do with the resigned acceptance of reality implicit in both concepts. The literature suggests that forgiveness, like the depressive position, allows for a return to a relational context with an appreciation of its value and its dangers.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the altered view of the offender’s human fallibility has excellent clinical utility. Among them is the opportunity for a reorganization of meaning (Stern, 1983) that is less reliant on projection and introjection. Taking that idea a step further, forgiveness can be a tool for meaning creation in reaction to the seemingly meaningless experience of having been wronged (Kristeva & Rice, 2002). This ascribes curative potential to forgiveness along psychoanalytic lines (Kristeva & Rice). An important distinction here is that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, forgiveness occurs in service to one’s healthy narcissism and is not an act of charity (Siassi, 2013).

The adage coupling forgiveness with forgetting would likely be incompatible with most working definitions of forgiveness. This association is likely a byproduct of misunderstandings

37 Forgiveness and Relational Experience of letting go of resentment. Forgetting as an outcome of forgiveness is hard to reconcile with any widely held views of forgiveness, including theologically informed perspectives in which beneficence toward the offender is a significant goal (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000). Forgetting would be an especially contradictory goal in psychoanalysis, given that remembering is part of the work (Siassi, 2013).

Forgiveness and mourning. It could be argued that the theoretical inflection point I referenced at the beginning of this chapter started with Freud’s (1917) exploration of mourning and its role in mitigating psychopathology. Like Klein’s (1935) depressive position, the benefits of mourning are connected to the acceptance of reality and a reduced reliance on fantasy.

Comparisons to mourning in the literature suggest that forgiveness entails accepting relational disappointments (Horwitz, 2005). If appropriately mourned, losses can be fully experienced and integrated without taking up residence in the ego (Freud). The melancholic reaction to loss entails an over-identification with a lost object until it becomes part of the self to detrimental effect (Ogden, 1986).

Siassi (2013) posits that forgiveness has the potential to aid in the integration of object derivatives that might be disavowed or defended against otherwise. As a result, forgiveness can lessen the harshness of introjected object derivatives (Siassi), allowing for a reduction of selfrecrimination, a clinical feature of adults with suboptimally attuned caregiving and part of Freud’s (1917) formulation of melancholia. The difficult work of processing loss results in a better narcissistic balance (Siassi) and better integrated (less dysregulated) affect.

Freud's (1917) delineation of mourning and melancholia associates the latter with a pervasive sense of emptiness and a general erosion of self-image. It is worth noting that the Freudian melancholic is clinically similar to those with relational experience being explored

38 Forgiveness and Relational Experience here. On the other side of that coin, mourning allows for the neutralization of painful affect over time. Freud’s conceptualization of mourning has been repeatedly referenced in the psychoanalytic literature and applied to clinical practice with all varieties of loss. Horwitz (2005) and Siassi (2013) suggest that forgiveness facilitates or potentiates mourning.

Forgiveness, Psychopathology, and Health It is not my intention to toe the line for medical diagnosis, but it is worth identifying where forgiveness can be plotted along the continuum of character pathology. At one end are those who cannot forgive, grudge holders who can be hateful and vindictive and might fit into diagnostic categories including paranoid, antisocial, or narcissistic personality disorders (Akhtar, 2002). On the other end of the spectrum are those individuals who are overly eager to forgive and may be highly defended against or avoidant of aggression or similar affects (Akhtar).

Diagnostically, these individuals could have features of obsessional or schizoid disorders (Akhtar).

Much of the literature casts forgiveness as a mediator of vengeance with the potential outcome of letting go rather than holding on to resentment. The potential for good attributed to forgiveness is not a given, however. Safer (1999) underscores the importance of authenticity in forgiveness and suggests that pseudo-forgiveness, in its varied iterations, can have deleterious effects. As noted above, avoidance can motivate insincere forgiveness (Safer). Further, a superficial morality could motivate forgiveness offered mechanically (Safer).

Authentic forgiveness is viewed as a catalyst for personal growth among wronged individuals and dyadic growth among wronged individuals and those they were wronged by (Heintzelman et al., 2014). A psychoanalytic understanding of forgiveness sees its potential to

39 Forgiveness and Relational Experience recapitulate infant-caregiver dyadic meaning-making (Tronick & Beeghly, 2011) through the therapeutic relationship (Siassi, 2013).

Clarification of Definitions For the study at hand, a perspective that embraces subjectivity is appropriate. Defining concepts like forgiveness—and, for that matter, trauma—must be hinged on the understanding that individuals have unique reactions to stimuli. Just as contemporary approaches to trauma treatment call for highly personalized interventions (Gabbard, 2014), understanding the process of forgiveness must include accepting the variety of subjective experience. Of course, this makes the process of defining concepts difficult. What follows is a consideration of some of the defining features of the concepts as informed by the literature.

The two defining features of forgiveness noted with some consistency in the literature can be framed as outcomes of the process. They are letting go of resentment and a change in attitude toward the offender. While there is no consensus regarding the endpoint of the forgiveness process (Strelan & Covic, 2006), the literature conveys significant enthusiasm about its clinical potential. Researchers suggest that forgiveness is a sequential process (Strelan & Covic), that one's empathic capacity affects the ability to forgive, and that the level of satisfaction in the relationship with the offender impacts the likelihood that one will forgive (McCullough et al., 2003). The latter two assertions, gleaned from research by social psychologists, work from an understanding of forgiveness that is "relationship constructive" (McCullough et al., 1998). While this allows for the prosocial shift, an often-referenced feature of forgiveness (McCullough et al., 2003), it lacks the self-restorative qualities referred to in the clinical literature.

40 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Theoretical Framework The trauma and forgiveness literature reveals similar trends in understanding. As noted above, the growing appreciation of subjective experience is evident in the histories of both concepts and serves as a point of convergence for the two. Therefore, subjectivity- as it informs and unifies both concepts- is a significant component of this study. It is now known that development, including the shaping of the central nervous system and the formation of a sense of self, is impacted significantly by experience (van der Kolk, 2002). Further, it is believed that personality takes shape both experientially and relationally (Siegel, 1999). In other words, what is recognizable as selfhood takes shape within the context of early relationships; the mind, and much of the neural connectivity that makes it unique in humans, is formed within the relational matrix (Siegel).

Theory and research show a clear trajectory toward understanding trauma as a complex and varied set of phenomena. In psychoanalytic thought, an allegiance to drive theory gave way to reconsidering what constitutes trauma and underscored its connection to environmental and relational conditions. The idea that cumulative developmental frustrations were tantamount to trauma was noted by Khan (1963), and self psychology recontextualized pathology in traumatizing effects of unmet narcissistic needs. Similarly, attachment research provided a framework for recognizing problematic and enduring patterns of relating. Further, neuroscience illustrates the impact of early relational experience on the brain, making it clear that relational experience is potentially traumatic, calling for interventions that utilize integration. The three dimensions of affectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity that I correlated with early relational experience underscore its profound impact on developing personhood and personal perspective.

41 Forgiveness and Relational Experience The literature on forgiveness shows that it holds unique potential for affective change and altered relatedness, making it a process worthy of consideration for the integration of dissociated affects and the neutralization of long-held negative views of self. The associations to theology that may have caused psychoanalytic thinkers to shy away from forgiveness (Akhtar, 2002) were reframed by social and evolutionary psychologists, giving forgiveness some scientific validity just as early psychoanalysis did for neuroses. Scientific conceptualizations of forgiveness identify it as an objectively desirable process. This does little to challenge the theological perspective that equates forgiveness with morality. Fosshage (1995) noted that self psychology set a paradigm shift in motion by which psychoanalysis utilized a relativistic rather than positivistic position. Defining forgiveness along positivistic lines is incompatible with contemporary psychoanalytic practice.

42 Forgiveness and Relational Experience CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY Introduction This phenomenological study aimed to explore the meaning of forgiveness among individuals with histories of early relational misattunement. At the onset of the research, forgiveness was generally defined as a personal experience with interpersonal precipitants (Fincham, 2000), resulting in an affective shift and an altered view of the offender (Akhtar, 2002).

Early relational experience refers to the environment informed by the attachment relationships. At the outset of the research, the early relational experience was considered highly consequential to development, specifically concerning affect, relational patterns, and sense of self, as enumerated in the literature. The sample of individuals with reported histories of suboptimally attuned caregiving represented a ubiquitous iteration of early relational experience.

The study sought to examine the meaning of forgiveness among participants and to explore the role forgiveness plays in integrating early relational experience. The study was loosely organized around the questions below: 1. Can one forgive a family member or significant caregiver for sub-optimally attuned caregiving?

2. What constitutes forgiveness in this context, and what are the essential features of the experience of forgiving or not forgiving in this context?

3. Among those who have forgiven, have attempted to forgive, or chosen not to forgive, how has that process impacted their integration of early relational experience?

43 Forgiveness and Relational Experience This chapter outlines the study’s research methodology. It includes a description of the following areas: the rationale for a qualitative approach, a discussion of the epistemological and ontological underpinnings, a description of the research sample, an overview of the research design, the methods of data collection, ethical considerations, issues of trustworthiness, and limitations of the study.

Research Design Rationale for a qualitative study. While the participants of this study met inclusionary criteria that suggested a degree of homogeneity, the research focused on the lived experience of the individual participants. It was expected that there would be some diversity of experience among participants. The criterion of misattunement in early relational experience was the only essential commonality aside from the broad inclusionary criteria that will be enumerated below.

For these reasons, a qualitative approach was indicated. Because the participants’ subjective realities were given equal value and not viewed through an existing template of truth, the study was decidedly qualitative.

Rationale for phenomenology. As discussed in the preceding literature review, understanding forgiveness leaves substantial room for clarification. Through a focus on a small group of participants, a nuanced understanding of forgiveness was expected. Because this study was intended to explore forgiveness in this population at a deep level, phenomenology was the appropriate method of inquiry. The goal was to explore the essential qualities of the phenomenon of forgiveness among the participants and to do so with reflexivity and with as little adherence as possible to any existing preconceptions (Smith et al., 2009). Therefore, phenomenology was the correct method to explore the impact of forgiving or not forgiving on the integration of early relational experience.

44 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was the specific form of qualitative inquiry employed in this study. In keeping with the values of the constructivist position, this study used a personal narrative structure (Ponterotto, 2005) while embracing the hermeneutic values of IPA (Smith et al., 2009). Additionally, because meaning-making was an area of focus, the values of IPA matched the task at hand (Smith et al.). The sample size of seven individuals was appropriate for an in-depth look at subjective experience. Within the context of the participants’ personal narratives, the idiographic lens provided by IPA allowed for a nuanced exploration of the specific elements of forgiveness.

Population and Sampling The individuals chosen for participation reflected some heterogeneity concerning their experiences of misattuned caregiving. Additionally, the participants all conveyed having experience with or interest in forgiveness. Therefore, the sampling was purposive as opposed to random and consistent with the basic tenets of qualitative research (Bloomberg & Volpe, 2016).

As a qualitative study, no claims were made regarding generalizability; rather, the data provided a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of forgiveness among this small group of individuals. At the onset of recruitment, the following inclusionary criteria were honored: 

All participants are over the age of 18



All participants had experienced one or more caregivers as misattuned.



All participants had forgiven, chosen not to forgive, or struggled with forgiving these caregivers.

Additionally, the following exclusionary criteria were considered during the recruitment phase:

45 Forgiveness and Relational Experience 

Marital or romantic partnerships were not the focus of the study. Therefore, individuals who have reflected on forgiveness only in this context were not considered candidates for participation.



Individuals whom I deemed to be at risk of being emotionally harmed by a discussion of early relational experience would be excluded in deference to their mental health.

Recruitment. The participants were recruited from my social circle and through

referrals from trusted colleagues. The initial contact with potential participants from my social group was made via phone or email. I explained that, as part of my doctoral work, I was conducting on the topic of forgiveness. Once interest in participation was expressed, I explained that the process would start with a brief telephone conversation intended to screen potential participants to determine the appropriateness of their inclusion. Similarly, colleagues were contacted through email with something similar to the following explanation: ‘I am conducting qualitative research on the topic of forgiveness and am looking for a few more participants. If you have any adult friends, colleagues, or clients interested in learning more about it, please feel free to give them my information.’

Two individuals I contacted from my social circle were interested in participation. A third expressed interest, was screened and deemed appropriate, and then was lost to contact.

Two colleagues, both psychotherapists, referred the additional five participants. Of those five, two were patients of one of the referrers, one was a family member of the same referrer, and the other two were colleagues of the other referrer.

Screening. All screening interviews were conducted over the phone and began with a brief but slightly more detailed introduction and explanation of the study, typically a variation of the following:

46 Forgiveness and Relational Experience ‘Hello, and thanks for your time today. I’m Steven Siegel, a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Clinical Social Work. I am conducting research for my dissertation on the topic of forgiveness, specifically the process of forgiving or not forgiving caregivers. The purpose of our talk today is to determine if you are an appropriate candidate for the study. If you are a good fit and interested in participation, the next step will be a 60 to 90-minute conversation via videoconference.’

After allowing time for questions, I informed potential participants that they could end the conversation at any time and that their privacy would be protected. The screenings were not recorded. I took contemporaneous handwritten notes during the screenings. Immediately following each screening, I typed my notes and added additional content in a manner similar to the transcription of a process recording. The screenings were framed around the following prompts: 1. Family of origin. Very simply and unspecifically, I asked potential participants to tell me a little about their early relational experience, typically articulated as ‘Could you tell me about your family of origin?.’ This prompt allowed for an assessment of potential participants’ experience of attunement. As anticipated (Gottleib, 2004; Bromberg, 2011), a subjective experience of suboptimal attunement was communicated quickly. Most potential participants shared one or more experiences of neglect, abuse, invalidation, or unsafety in one or more attachment relationships. However, to ascertain potential participants’ subjective experience, I typically asked a follow-up question such as ‘Did you feel understood by your [caregiver(s)]?’

47 Forgiveness and Relational Experience 2. Adult relationships. Along similar lines, this prompt was introduced generally with a request such as ‘What are your relationships like these days?’ Generally, potential participants identified troubled patterns of relating informed by early relational experience. Potential participants described relational patterns marked by avoidance, accommodation, and pervasive attraction to “abusers.” While most potential participants independently identified the significance of their family of origin experiences in establishing relational patterns, I typically asked a follow-up question to confirm this.

3. Experience with forgiveness. The last prompt aimed to assess potential participants’ willingness to explore the topic. All potential participants reiterated their interest in the topic, although the variety of experience was significant.

Some individuals responded positively, expressing the concept’s importance in their lives, while others reported uncertainty.

All eight individuals screened were deemed appropriate for inclusion in the study. The establishment of a subjective experience of suboptimal attunement in early relational life and the acknowledgment of the role of early relational experience in establishing longitudinal patterns of relating were present in all cases. Further, all screened individuals were open to discussing their perspectives with regard to forgiveness. After each screening conversation, I told the potential participant they would be well suited for the study. All screened individuals wanted to participate. I reiterated that a conversation via video conferencing software would follow. I explained that that conversation would be recorded and transcribed. I explained that I would send each individual a consent form (see appendix) and that I would be available to answer any questions they had. I again informed each individual that their participation could be withdrawn

48 Forgiveness and Relational Experience at any time. Lastly, I reiterated my commitment to privacy and explained that pseudonyms would be used in my written work. I invited each individual to choose their pseudo-name.

Data Collection Data collection took the form of a 60-90 minute semi-structured interview with each participant. The interview was structured around a basic schedule containing broad questions (Fylan, 2005). The scheduling approach drew from a master list of important topics and unfolded organically in a conversational style (Smith et al., 2009). This framework allowed for some variation once interviews were underway with given participants (Smith et al.).

Semi-structured interview guide. The semi-structured interview schedule below served as a general framework for the conversations with participants. The questions below were designed to provide data appropriate for IPA research in that they are open-ended, not overly empathic, and straight-forward without being leading (Smith et al., 2009).

1. Tell me about your experience with forgiveness.

2. Tell me about why you chose to forgive or not forgive the caregiver(s) in question.

3. What did it mean to you to forgive or not forgive this attachment figure?

4. Tell me about the experience of forgiving or choosing not to forgive.

5. What impact, if any, did forgiveness have on your feelings about the misattunement you experienced?

6. Did forgiving or not forgiving the caregiver(s) in question impact how you see yourself?

7.

Did forgiving or not forgiving the caregiver(s) in question impact your emotional life?

8. Did forgiving or not forgiving the caregiver(s) in question impact how you related to others?

49 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Data Analysis Themes and subordinate themes emerged from the data collected, and coding took shape organically. The underlying principles of IPA include the expectation of a double hermeneutic (Smith et al., 2009). In the case of the study at hand, this can be characterized as an attempt to make meaning of how participants make meaning of forgiveness. To that end, six steps laid out

by Smith et al. for the analysis of data in the IPA method were followed and are laid out below.

1.

Reading and rereading. The first readings of interview transcripts allowed for reflection on the unfolding narrative. This step did not involve coding and allowed the researcher to become absorbed in the participants’ worlds (Smith et al., 2009). These initial readings constituted an empathic engagement with each participant’s transcript (Smith, 2004), during which I connected to each participant’s narrative emotionally.

2. Initial coding. This step moved beyond the largely experiential readings of step one toward a slightly more investigative posture. The initial coding included taking note of the general thematic and conceptual arcs of the transcripts as well as the linguistic patterns of the participants (Smith et al.).

3. Developing emergent themes. Following the exploratory coding of step two, the search for emergent themes involved pulling back from the details somewhat (Smith et al.).

This step called for a more interpretive reading (Smith et al.). In keeping with the hermeneutic approach embraced by IPA, interpretive, experiential, and investigative readings were considered individually and as part of a whole.

4. Searching for connections across emergent themes. The next step of analysis focused on identifying similarities among emergent themes and grouping them accordingly (Smith et al.). Numeration—the frequency of a theme’s appearance in the transcript—

50 Forgiveness and Relational Experience was one technique that informed the emergence of themes (Smith et al.). Another helpful technique was contextualization, which allowed for a consideration of themes that emerged from key points in a participant’s narrative.

5. Moving to the next case. As the above steps were performed with the transcript from the next participant’s interview, the data was approached as a singular, unique dataset (Smith et al.). In order to achieve this, the phenomenological concept of bracketing was employed (Smith et al.). This called for interacting with the data with fresh eyes, deliberately removed from any biases or associations to the previous case.

6. Looking for patterns across cases. After interacting with the texts individually, the final step focused on comparing and contrasting data across the cases (Smith et al.).

Transcription. The collection and transcription of data were performed in accordance with IPA requirements. For the interviews with participants, a reputable transcription service was used. To ensure that no identifying information was included in transcribed data, pseudonames were used in all written documentation. Additionally, as I transcribed my notes, I remained mindful of the interpretative nature of the endeavor (Smith et al.).

Coding. The second step of IPA data analysis referenced above only scratched the surface of theme formation. As expected, the analysis unfolded over time during the research (Basit, 2003). Further, in keeping with the values of IPA, my thoughts about the participants’ ways of making meaning became codable data in itself (Smith et al., 2009).

Forming categories. As themes emerged from coded data, categories were formed. As noted, the process of forgiveness was not clearly defined by the review of the literature.

However, the literature on early relational experience and the three general dimensions of impact- affect, subjectivity (including sense of self and subjective feelings of security), and

51 Forgiveness and Relational Experience intersubjectivity—organically became areas of focus during the forming of categories as they all proved to be worthy entry points for a consideration of integration. The intrapsychic and interpersonal repercussions of forgiveness were also areas of focus and, like affect, were well served by the data. The data was allowed to speak for itself rather than being categorized in accordance with the extant research and theory. However, emergent themes were often consistent with the literature, and the coded data was contextualized within the larger body of research and theory when appropriate. The steps of analysis shifted focus from the general to the more detailed, leading to component themes. The frame was then widened again to create superordinate themes that reflected both parts and the whole.

Ethical Considerations Privacy. All safeguards were taken to protect the anonymity of participants. This included the use of pseudo-names and the careful monitoring of interview recordings and transcripts. A reputable transcription service with an understanding of the legalities of protected health information was used, and no identifying information was included in written materials.

Prevention of psychological harm. While it was expected that the potential for retraumatization was low in this population, discussion of trauma of any kind was taken very seriously, and all efforts were made to mitigate psychological harm. Following the scheduling approach to data collection, participants were informed in advance of potentially sensitive topics (Smith et al., 2009). Additionally, participants were informed (both in writing and verbally) of their right to withdraw from the study at any point. While it did not become necessary, I was prepared to monitor participants for signs of psychological distress during the data collection stage with the intention of discontinuing the interview and making a referral for treatment.

52 Forgiveness and Relational Experience

Issues of Trustworthiness Throughout the data collection and analysis, all efforts were made to document the process. Journaling was one method of documentation employed during data analysis. Before superordinate themes were established, a detailed journal was kept to explore the emergent themes in each transcript. This provided a helpful record of the evolution of the data, documenting the interpretive process as component themes emerged. The journal was referred to later in data analysis to provide consistency as superordinate themes were enumerated.

Lastly, committee collaboration was sought to provide checks and balances to my subjectivity. As stated above, the researcher’s subjectivity has a place in IPA methodology.

However, it was my goal to remain reflective about my own experience to mitigate the potential for unexamined biases to impact the research. To that end, the journaling done during data analysis was provided to certain panel members to fortify validity as it pertained to the research design and the interpretive process.

Limitations and Delimitations One of the more unique features of IPA, in contrast with other phenomenological approaches, is that it examines points of convergence and divergence among the data (Smith et al., 2009). While a rich and detailed analysis of the data was performed, it did not produce a theoretical explanation in the way that a method such as grounded theory does (Smith et al.).

While this can be viewed as a limitation for a study aspiring to have implications for clinical social work, it is believed that the double hermeneutic structure will provide a level of detail to the understanding of forgiveness that is not well reflected in the literature. Further, it is my

53 Forgiveness and Relational Experience opinion that the clinical features of this population are ubiquitous in clinical practice and relevant to the field of psychodynamically informed clinical social work.

The Background of the Researcher The interest in this topic is informed by clinical and personal experience. While there is chatter about the validity of so-called “me-search” in the social sciences, the field’s openness to paradigms like social construction points to the flaws in claims of objectivity and illuminates the value of research methods that honor subjective experience. I intended to be reflective about my subjectivity throughout the research process. Rosen (2009) warns clinicians to examine their countertransference about forgiveness, given the potential for cultural or moral biases with which the concept may be associated. As stated in the introductory chapter, I became aware of biases that caused me to quietly dismiss the concept of forgiveness in my clinical work.

In retrospect, I can attribute my negative attitude about forgiveness to the context in which it was introduced. Clients with trauma histories (some of them severe) occasionally referenced forgiveness. I was aware of a suspicion that some clients may have been using the concept to facilitate a flight into health, a phenomenon acknowledged in the literature (Safer, 1999; Siassi, 2013; Akhtar, 2002). However, a deeper look at my countertransference indicated that my early relational experience likely informed my attitude. This bit of self-awareness, although humbling, has further underscored the importance of ongoing reflectivity in my clinical work and informed my approach to this study.

54 Forgiveness and Relational Experience

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS Introduction to Results The participants of this study are seven adults who had experience with or interest in applying concepts of forgiveness to their caregivers. All participants reported experiencing at least one caregiver as sub-optimally attuned. Recruitment was open to adults who expressed a willingness to reflect on and discuss the topic of forgiveness as it pertained to their subjective experiences of misattunement. No additional exclusionary criteria were used in recruitment. All participants were able to engage in a screening conversation over the telephone and an interview via video conferencing software. This chapter will introduce the seven participants in the study and present data to illustrate three superordinate themes that emerged. A discussion of the data will be included in the following chapter.

The Participants As outlined in the previous chapter, screening interviews with participants centered around three open-ended prompts. The first two--family of origin and current relationships-provided a basic framework for understanding the participants’ relational experiences over time.

The third, experience with forgiveness, is largely self-explanatory. The following introduction will provide data from those three areas, drawing primarily from the initial phone interviews with data from transcripts added for clarity.

55 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Ellen. Ellen is a 66-year-old semi-retired psychotherapist and mother. Divorced from the father of her adult children, Ellen lives with her current husband to whom she is happily married. Ellen explained that her mother was separated from her family and lived as a “hidden child” during the Holocaust. This childhood trauma was made known to Ellen and her younger sister early in their lives and provided Ellen with a historical frame of reference for her mother’s suboptimal attunement.

Her father, “a gambler,” was “in and out” of Ellen’s life. While she was in middle school, Ellen’s parents divorced. This was followed by a two-year absence by her father, during which time Ellen assumed he had died. Despite his inconsistent presence, Ellen was closer to her father than she was to her reportedly fragile, traumatized mother. Ellen “had abandonment issues” stemming from her father and “attachment issues” with her mom.

Ellen described her adult relationships as marked by “anxiety, dependency, and fear of abandonment.” Notable among them was her first marriage, which was “verbally abusive” and ended acrimoniously, putting significant strain on Ellen’s relationships with her children.

Through therapy and work in twelve-step programs, Ellen’s relational patterns and their associated affects were brought into more explicit focus.

Principles of twelve-step work informed Ellen’s understanding of forgiveness, which emphasizes personal responsibility and encourages “making amends to people and looking at your own side of the street.” Ellen’s conceptualization of forgiveness identifies it as a process of accountability starting with self: “I’ve hurt a lot of people in my life, and I think I had to forgive myself first before I could forgive others.”

Marty. Marty is a 69-year-old mother and retired psychotherapist. She lives with her husband. Marty was one of six kids to a mother who had “depression and trauma” and “a 1950s

56 Forgiveness and Relational Experience dad” who “was always at work.” Her mother may have been “on the spectrum,” and Marty experienced her as poorly attuned to her needs. At around the age of two, Marty was hospitalized for nearly three months due to a severe infection, during which time her mother did not visit. “I hadn't even internalized the mother at that point. I was two years old…after two and a half months without her, my mother said I was just very shy and coming into the room slowly. Like it wasn't like, ‘Mommy!’ and I ran over to her and hugged her.”

Marty explains that her adult relationships echo an anticipation of neglect stemming from her early relational experience. Marty suspects her husband may have Autism Spectrum Disorder, noting an aloofness reminiscent of her mother’s. Marty explains, ”I had to go for someone who was a little bit problematic and distant because that's what felt comfortable…any like super nice guy that was really super interested in me, I was not interested in them.”

Marty strived to achieve forgiveness with her mother; it’s “something I’ve worked on my whole life,” she explained. Marty’s framework for understanding forgiveness is drawn from her spiritual practice and is grounded in self-reflection and accountability. Marty feels that forgiveness is “the right thing to do.”

Willow. Willow is a 62-year-old mother of two adult children. When still in her teens, Willow lost her first boyfriend in a motor vehicle accident, a source of painful trauma. Not long after, at age twenty, Willow met the man who would later become her husband. They live together and have been married for 37 years. While her early loss was a precipitant to seeking mental health support, Willow’s family is often the focus with her current therapist with whom she has been working for over ten years: “They are probably why I’m in treatment,” she explained.

57 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Willow’s father suffered from alcoholism and was verbally and physically abusive. This created chaos in the home, including incidents of domestic violence that Willow and her siblings witnessed. Willow connected with her father when he became ill with cancer before his death over 25 years ago. A sensitive person since childhood, Willow was often compared unfavorably by her mother to her less sensitive twin sister. Willow no longer sees her sensitivity as a liability but recognizes that emotional security was lacking in her childhood. This deficit was especially pronounced in her relationship with her mother: “I never got the comfort needed from her.”

Willow has strong adult relationships. In addition to her husband, Willow’s connections with her two adult children are stable and satisfying but occasionally fraught with affect stemming from Willow’s early relational experience: “Yeah. I think I smother them too much.

Only because of how I grew up, nobody said, ‘I love you.’ So I think they're like, ‘alright, Ma.’” Relationships with her family members remain strained, however. Ongoing conflicts with her brother and twin sister and lingering dysphoria related to her experience of her mother’s dismissive parenting style, leave Willow feeling like “the black sheep” of her family of origin.

Willow frames forgiveness around a sense of “understanding,” something that she was able to reach with her father but not her mother. Willow felt—and continues to feel—a heightened betrayal related to her mother’s parenting, a phenomenon that she attributes to her own experience as a mother. While her father was far from perfect, the connection was more robust and was further enhanced when he became ill.

Lisa. Lisa is a divorced, retired animal lover in her mid-sixties. She explained that her family of origin was “like two teams,” with her mother and two sisters on one and Lisa and her father on the other. Lisa described her father as “the good in the family” and the one who was

58 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “on my side.” Lisa described her mother as “terribly depressed” and in general poor health, leading to her death at the age of 42 when Lisa was in her early twenties. Lisa continues to feel tremendous guilt for her anger and embarrassment toward her mother. Her father also experienced “real guilt” about her mother’s decline, which Lisa suspects hastened his death four years later. In recent years, Lisa has become aware of her father’s poor treatment of her mother, complicating Lisa’s feelings about him.

Lisa is retired from a successful corporate career and lives alone with her dogs. “I don't have any really normal relationships,” she explains and adds, “I don't trust men at all.” Lisa harbors resentment toward her ex-husband, “a jerk” who had an extramarital affair with a coworker. She explains that she “really didn't want to get married. He kind of tricked me into it.” Lisa maintains some relationships but prefers to avoid interacting with others. “I have some friends, and I send some cards out… that's about as much as I want to be involved, barely.”

Complex affects mark Lisa’s experience with forgiveness. In particular, the guilt Lisa feels about her mother has made forgiving herself difficult: “I think when you walk around with…the really hard feeling of knowing that you never got that closure with your mother, you don't know whether she died hating your guts…that’s really hard to deal with.”

Hannah. Hannah is a project manager and mother in her late thirties. She is divorced and lives with her young daughter, her current partner, and his teenage son. Hannah grew up in a working-class Midwestern family that was “really close.” During her teens, Hannah became increasingly aware of her mother’s significant mental illness and her father’s general “immaturity.” Hannah explains that she “didn’t feel safe” at home and was troubled by the demands for caretaking that her parents imposed on her and her siblings. When she married at

59 Forgiveness and Relational Experience the age of thirty, Hannah had a “ticket out” of the family and relocated to the Northeast to settle down with her husband.

Hannah chose to limit her interaction with her family. She explains that she rarely “looks back on” her early life and “feels numb” when she does. Although her adult relationships are stable, Hannah was shaken when her marriage failed. Hannah leaned into her Christian faith as she became immersed in divorce proceedings. She eventually got back on her feet, but the loss of her marriage and the much-needed emotional security it provided was jarring.

Hannah’s understanding of forgiveness is drawn from her religious practice. When Hannah’s marriage ended, leaving her a single mother of a young child with no family close by, forgiveness became a regular practice. It was “the only thing that got me through the divorce,” Hannah explained. While forgiveness was solidly rooted in her spirituality, it was less concrete as it pertained to her attachment figures.

Jane. Jane is 75 and retired from a successful career in graphic design. Her father was a handsome, intelligent, career military man with a high rank. Her mother was a Miss America finalist who struggled parenting her five children. Beginning when Jane was six months old, she was repeatedly shuffled from one caregiver to another. Jane was in her grandmother’s care, then moved to the care of a family friend, and then sent to an orphanage before returning to her grandmother’s care at the age of two. Her parents, Jane explained matter-of-factly, “were not interested in me.”

Despite her mother’s devotion to him, Jane’s father left her mother for a younger woman. Jane explained that this deepened her mother’s detachment from Jane and her siblings.

It also provided a cautionary lesson for Jane, who established a relational pattern marked by avoidance. The model provided by her parents carried into Jane’s adult life, and she opted to

60 Forgiveness and Relational Experience forego long-term romantic intimacy: “I didn’t think I was strong enough to hold my own. I didn’t think I would ever be loved enough to be able to say, ‘wait a minute honey, pick up your own socks’ or whatever you do when you’re married.”

Like Willow, Jane identified understanding as the primary component of forgiveness.

The process also includes something analogous to surrender. Jane made this analogy: “Well, it’s sort of like Robin Hood and Little John Fighting on the bridge. They both fight and fight and fight, and they get so tired and they finally just give up and shake hands. I don’t see it as caving in. I see it more as okay, let’s just stop. This is crazy.”

Diane. Diane is a 50-year-old artist and animal lover who lives with her husband and son. She described her father as “domineering, sadistic and narcissistic” and her mother as “depressed” and “weak.” Diane explained that theirs was an “abusive, codependent” relationship. Diane felt that both of her parents had low self-esteem. Her father--emotionally unavailable and dismissive—“projected” his negative sense of self onto Diane and her siblings.

Her mother’s emotional wellness was linked to her codependent investment in her kids and husband. Her mother had no insight into this burden on Diane and others.

Diane reported confusion about forgiveness in general and difficulty conceptualizing how it might happen with attachment figures. In Diane’s mind, forgiveness was a religious concept that called for a mysterious neutralization of affect: “You’re supposed to somehow make those [feelings] go away.” Despite the vagueness of this theological concept to secular Diane, she was curious.

Results

61 Forgiveness and Relational Experience What follows is a presentation of the data structured around three superordinate themes: accountability, delineation, and universality. The process of subsumption of component themes was performed in a manner consistent with IPA data analysis as laid out in Smith et al. (2009).

The introduction for each superordinate theme will include a brief narrative enumerating some of their associated component themes.

Superordinate theme 1: Accountability. Accountability entails taking stock of lived experience over time. It subsumed a group of component themes related to temporality.

Accountability also served as an appropriate superordinate theme for the subsumption of component themes related to the interplay between affect and relational experience. Among them was the ubiquitous theme of letting go. Additionally, the themes of identification and validation were identified as being helpful or hindering the accountability process and were subsumed accordingly.

Ellen: “Parallel process.” Having learned not to put demands on her traumatized mother, Ellen reported having appreciated the connection she had with her dad, making his sporadic presence challenging: “Well, I wasn't really angry at him. I just missed him terribly because he was my emotional connection, even though he was a gambler. When he was available, I was his confidant... There was some emotional incest, not physical incest, but emotional. He would share things with me he shouldn't have shared with me and told me things. Not sexual, but just like, ‘I held up this bodega in the South Bronx,’ you know what I mean?

You don't want to hear that from your dad.”

In adulthood, Ellen began to take stock of her interpersonal patterns, associated affects, and their roots in early unmet needs:

62 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “Well, I grew up with so many resentments and so much anger about different things that I was powerless over. I started going to twelve-step meetings in my thirties because I was dating an active alcoholic at the time, and that was too much to bear. Part of twelvestep recovery is making amends to people and looking at your own side of the street…

Even if they've hurt you deeply, and powerfully, and mortally, you still had to look at your own side of the street.”

The data reflects how Ellen’s process called for a reflective investigation of affect with a definitive focus on personal responsibility. Informed by affect, consistent over time, and relationally contextualized, Ellen’s accountability process became a regular practice: “We have a nightly review about, did we hurt anybody? Is there anybody that we owe an apology to? So we're constantly looking and seeking those we've harmed with our resentments. Yes. It's kind of an ongoing practice.”

Possibly due to relational epistemology implied in the process, an altered consideration of the wrongdoings of others emerged. Ellen explains how reflecting on her “side of the street” allowed for identification with her father: “See, I always put myself on a pedestal, like I was better than him because I wasn't a gambler. He was a gambler, and he left his whole family because he was a gambler, you know what I mean? Then, when I inherited or got the addiction, however that happens, right? I was like, ‘Wait a second, wait a second, I have to do a parallel process here,’ and it certainly helped me understand him and his process. Absolutely. I was able to not just let go of the anger, but working on my shame, I had to release it first before I could forgive myself, and then I could forgive others. That's how it worked. Yeah.”

63 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Marty: “To choose a healthier way.” Like Ellen, fellow psychotherapist Marty learned early that the attention available from her caregivers was limited. Having experienced a prolonged period of neglect while hospitalized as a child, Marty established an autonomy that entailed an eschewal of affect: “I was someone who was extremely self-reliant because of the way I was raised…I didn't need anybody.” Marty explained that taking stock of her emotional experience was an important step: “Feeling vulnerable was difficult. So, giving [in]to the hurt was first…and then just crying a lot in therapy and stuff. And then just realizing that it really didn't hurt anymore. That I had gotten past it.”

Marty reported that her affective experience was given external validation when her mother acknowledged her missteps as a parent: “I mean, she actually admitted to me that she could have done better. [I]n about 1986 [she]started going to AA… So she was trying to make amends… she was very self-aware about her shortcomings. And so her self-awareness helped me to just say, ‘Okay, well she's admitting how bad she was, so what else can you do to punish her, really?’ That doesn't make sense; she’s already feeling bad…I felt validated that she said she could have done better. …[S]he said that she realized that she really doesn't know how to feel empathy. And then so she learned, I think from going to AA…So she was just saying that she knew that she had fallen short and that she could have done better, and the fact that she said that made you feel validated that she understood.”

Her mother’s validation may have given solidity to Marty’s experiential narrative.

Altered affect, the result of feeling validated and understood, likely facilitated forgiveness, a process consistent with Marty’s spiritual framework for meaning-making:

64 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “Well, it was the right thing to do, and I knew on a spiritual level it would make me stuck. I had read a book called The Spiritual Significance of Forgiveness. And it talked a lot about just how that can tie people up for future lives if they're not forgiving. So, it was spiritual. And I guess it was psychological, too. It was showing kindness to my mother, who was trying to make it up to me. She wasn't very good at that, but she was trying, and she did her best. So I guess it was all kind of like tolerating certain things, increasing my tolerance for her shortcomings, and just wanting to do the right thing, I guess… I mean, I do believe in reincarnation, and also I believe in the damage that holding on to hurt and anger can do psychologically. So, it was to choose a healthier way of dealing with it. And those were the ways that I felt it would be healthier just to let things go.”

Willow: “A weight off my shoulders.” Willow’s narrative is rife with affects rooted in early relational experience. As it pertains to her abusive, alcoholic father, Willow’s decision to forgive was catalyzed by his cancer diagnosis. Despite the motivation to forgive that her father’s illness created, Willow did not rush into it. The process continued over the five years he lived after his diagnosis and beyond: “I had so many bad memories… Yeah. It took time with my dad…the addict, the guilt and everything, and he was such a liar, that's another thing. That took a tremendous amount of work…Looking back, I guess it was over a period of years. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I'm going to forgive my dad.’ It doesn't just happen…There was a lot of work. Because it's easy to say you're going to forgive somebody but to actually do it and believe it.”

Willow explains that forgiving her father was based on “trying to understand him, knowing he wasn't going to be around much longer.” Similarly to Ellen and Marty, Willow came to understand that affects rooted in early relational experience complicated the process of

65 Forgiveness and Relational Experience holding her father accountable. Willow’s description of the process of letting go speaks to the heaviness of their burden and is contextualized in self-care: “I guess it gave me more peace within myself. That I could forgive him. I don't know.

Yeah, I didn't want to carry all that. It wasn't hatred; I just didn't want to carry that. Just bad feelings, I guess, towards my dad of everything that happened throughout my childhood and all that stuff. It was just a weight off my shoulders, I guess.”

As noted above, Willow experienced her mother’s poor attunement as a greater betrayal than those attributable to her father. Also noted, Willow identified understanding as a foundational component of forgiveness; after becoming a mother herself, understanding was further complicated as it pertained to her mother: “I think it's more difficult because with your mom, you feel like they should be the one to protect you. And be just more nurturing as you're growing up, and I never felt that… I think because I look at how I took care of my kids. I'm like, ‘I'm going to give them lots of love…that I didn't feel at home… So I feel like my mom should have done that. I don't know. But I guess she wasn't capable. I don't know. I don't really feel like I know my mom.”

Willow has not ruled out the possibility of forgiving her mother. Presently, painful affects and ambiguity rival understanding. Elements of an accountability narrative are taking shape, however. This is reflected in a growing acceptance of her mother’s shortcomings and an evolving understanding of how they impacted her sense of self: “I can't expect her to be somebody she's not. That’s not my mom. That took me a long time to figure that out. I thought we were close, and now I'm like, that's not close. That's not closeness. I can't go to my mom and just tell her anything. I can't. I never have been

66 Forgiveness and Relational Experience able to; I can't. I don't know. I was always looked at as the weird one, I guess, in the family… I always used to think there's something wrong with me. But I know I'm not a broken person. And like I'm trying to do now, just be me.”

Lisa: “The gift that keeps on giving.” Having lost both parents in her twenties, Lisa has spent decades sorting out accountability. This has been complicated over the years as Lisa has come to learn additional details about her family, specifically regarding her father’s maltreatment of her mother. What is clear is that affects stemming from these early relationships remain complex. Guilt, resentment, and embarrassment are themes that come up repeatedly in Lisa’s narrative. Lisa explained that she and her family are “all Catholic, and…guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.”

Over forty years after her mother’s death, Lisa struggles with profound ambivalence.

During our video conference, while discussing her shame about her mother, Lisa relived it in real time: “It’s embarrassing to see your face and tell you this. It’d be easier on the phone.” She continued: “Yeah, we had a tumultuous relationship, especially toward the end of her life. I joined the Army so I could get out of there. I was supposed to go to college on a scholarship. I didn't go. You can imagine I'm every parent's nightmare. She didn't give me a hard time about that. I was very embarrassed of her. She got really, really heavy. I hit her once because I was just so frustrated I didn't know what to do. Then I caught myself. Children don't hit their parents. Maybe when they're two, they do, but not when they're in their twenties. I was just embarrassed by her, everything about her. Our house was terrible, she was terrible, she just wasn't very smart. It would mean a lot to me if I could... And I pray

67 Forgiveness and Relational Experience for this; I pray for if I could get some sort of sign that she understands that I didn't know what to do and I shouldn't have done or said the things I said.”

Contrary to Ellen’s parallel process of holding herself and others accountable, Lisa’s ambivalence appears to have obfuscated responsibility. The conflicting and muddled affects Lisa struggles to negotiate include seemingly unresolved disdain for her mother’s hygiene and obesity. A fear of becoming her mother further compounds Lisa’s affectivity: “I also have this terrible phobia about getting really heavy…and dying of that because that's what happened to her. Really, it haunts me. That part haunts me all the time. I can't trust, I don't trust any [men]. I think they're all kind of, not terrible, I appreciate certain things, but I don't seem to be able to have a good, healthy relationship. I also am petrified about becoming exactly what my mother became, which is really heavy because she was so depressed. I noticed my sister is kind of going down that path. She's getting really heavy, and she's not in a terrible marriage…I want to say something to her like, ‘Don't do what mommy did. You'll die.’ But I would never say that.”

Whereas identification served to attenuate affectivity for Ellen, an inverse phenomenon unfolded for Lisa. The fear of becoming her mother is seemingly tied to a fear of death and of being rejected by men. The latter stems from Lisa’s understanding of her father’s rejection of her mother: “I think he really made my mother just decide…she really didn't want to live anymore.”

Enduring ambivalence likely made taking stock of lived experience difficult for Lisa.

Affective derivatives of early relational experience also muted the effect of external validation.

After growing frustrated with the lack of corroboration from her sisters about the state of their

68 Forgiveness and Relational Experience childhood home, Lisa turned to her aunt for clarification. Despite having her memories authenticated, the result was more guilt: “She confirmed for me. She said, ‘Oh, your mother was very depressed. She really gave up on life. She really didn't care about living or dying. She stopped taking her medicine.

Your house was pretty awful….We wouldn't eat off your dishes.’ Then I started to cry, and I just said, ‘Oh, no. So everything that I remembered and I imagined happened…It was really upsetting, I remember, for me… I felt incredibly sad…I should have taken the time to talk to her, and I should have done something. I had no idea she was going to pass away.”

Hannah: “I can't go back there.” Like Lisa and Willow, Hannah felt unsupported by adults in her early relational world. Given that Hannah’s mother, her primary attachment figure, endured periods of psychosis, a consistent validation was unavailable in that dyad. Further, extended family or close family friends did not provide external validation. Hannah explains the lack of support among extended family: “I mean, all three of us cried out for help as children, and still, to this day, those families take sides with our parents… They say that we're bad kids- not bad kids, but basically we're in the wrong, and our feelings are unjust, that we should have more respect for our parents and want to be there to help them. And, I don't know, nobody understands except for the three of us, actually what we didn't have growing up in terms of supportive parents. So, I don't know. I don't know, sorry.”

According to Hannah, the accepted narrative among those close to her family was that she and her siblings were ingrateful. As a result, Hannah’s reasonable concerns about her parents’ capacity for caregiving were not validated. As she explains, inadequate mirroring of her

69 Forgiveness and Relational Experience subjective experience was partly what drove Hannah to relocate to a different part of the country. As a result, an optimal process of accountability was shelved in order to allow for the possibility of emotional survival. Early affects remain intense: “I can't go back there. It's so much work, and it's never going to go anywhere. It’s never going to change… I get to hide behind the fact that I live here now. So yeah, maybe that's bad. Yeah, that's a bad thing. I should try to mend the bridges with my parents, but I just already feel like it's never going to go anywhere. I just want to be happy.”

Hannah enacted a compensatory avoidance process to escape affects rooted in her early relational experience. As it pertained to her ex-husband, Hannah may have repeated this pattern to emotionally survive the divorce. Despite the practical benefits, this has caused some internal conflicts for Hannah: “But then there's also the question of forgiving yourself. Like, I see what my life is now and how much my daughter's life is just full, and happy, and healthy. And, she's not around two people who fight with each other all the time or have different morals than each other. And I get mad at myself because I don't know why I'm still in love with my ex-husband… And I worry that I always will, and then I get mad at myself, and I have to forgive myself for feeling that way.”

Jane: “The woo-woo realm.” Having endured neglect, including time in an orphanage, Jane struggled to make sense of her early relational experience. After becoming disenchanted with the slow process of psychodynamic therapy, Jane turned to practitioners like psychics and hypnotists who work within “the woo-woo realm.” She explained: “I don't know if you believe in psychics or stuff, but I was talking to a psychic, and I said, ‘Why can't my mother and I be mother and daughter? What's wrong?’ She said, ‘In a past

70 Forgiveness and Relational Experience life, you stole her husband,’ I was thinking maybe if all of this really is true, then in this life, she made sure I never had a husband…that I would never trust, and never be able to make connections, and never be able to bond, and all that stuff.”

The psychic’s simple causality contextualized Jane’s early relational experience and her adult difficulties with intimacy in cosmic homeostasis. Removed from her actual relational experience, the woo-woo realm likely served to circumvent early affects, providing a framework for making meaning that was not previously achievable. Jane explains the experience of attempting to achieve dyadic meaning with her mother: “You could never get your teeth into anything with her. She just wouldn't talk about anything, and so I got into the habit of just not persisting or just, ‘Oh, well, just forget it,’ which isn't very healthy either. But it's all I knew at the time because if I persisted, she'd get mad or something. When you're a kid, you don't really... I guess I got into the habit of being a real doormat kind of person.”

Self-incrimination, an interpersonal coping strategy she traced back to her mother, was part of an introjective narrative that Jane explains was recapitulated in her adult relationships.

This area of Jane’s relational life is evolving: “[I]t's changing, this is really exciting. I've had a friend since college… and what she ended up doing…is haranguing me over things…I was harangued unmercifully, and the way I responded was to abase myself in the hopes that [she] would lay off. ‘Well, I guess I'm a bad person. Well, I guess I'm a narcissist. I'm a rotten person. Okay, all right.’ Then I realized that that is my way of getting people to lay off, to abase myself, and to say, ‘Okay, I'm the bad guy, fine,’ when in reality, I'm not…I actually wrote her an email saying, ‘Ours was an abusive relationship… I can't do this anymore.’ I think that's how I

71 Forgiveness and Relational Experience took it in as a child. I would basically say, ‘Well, I guess I'm a bad person,’ or ‘I'm not worthy of love.’ I would deal with it that way, just take it on myself because that's easier than defending myself because it was indefensible.”

Diane: “The currencies we hold.” Jane’s exploration of alternative mental health interventions may have facilitated the construction of an accountability narrative. Further, her experience illuminates how accountability is hinged on questioning traditional frameworks of meaning. Diane also struggled to find a framework for understanding in which forgiving caregivers made sense. Using finance as a metaphor, Diane conceptualizes forgiveness as something transactional and potentially punitive: “I started to explore the idea of forgiveness in a different context, in the context of debt forgiveness, as something that banks could do for an individual. Of ‘okay, you owed me this money, and now I've decided you just don't owe me that money anymore, we'll forfeit’… I think that, in an emotional relationship, maybe there's a way that can be done…it seems like a choice to me that you could make, or that one could make where one kind of decides to let go of the debts…just start fresh…letting go of the idea of being owed.”

The financial metaphor problematizes forgiveness by equating it with forfeiture rather than allowing for a process of accountability based on relationally determined co-construction.

Diane explains how this conceptualization of forgiveness, when applied to interpersonal relationships, stokes tensions related to power and morality: “I think having a grudge against my parents or people gives me a feeling of power, or it gives me some sort of a currency. Like the way a lot of people indulge in a self-righteous indignation, like, "I'm the good guy, they're the bad guy… I don't know, I get some weird

72 Forgiveness and Relational Experience little dopamine hit off of that or something… I'm not proud of that…We all need to identify the currencies we hold…we learn at an early age, okay, these are real bits of power that I have in my life… And we cling to them. I know I do. And yeah, it's hard to be just giving them up or forgive them, right?”

Grounding meaning in the finance framework makes letting go of resentment tantamount to relinquishing power. Diane recognizes that the troubled model provided by finance and the resulting moralizing and sustained resentment are not a good fit when applied interpersonally.

Still, the fear remains: “I don't have that much power in the world, and I don't want it to, I don't know, it's all an illusion. It’s not like me forgiving my parents is going to somehow put me in some sort of a poverty but I cling to my need to not forgive…if that makes any sense.”

Superordinate theme 2: Delineation. Themes related to refractory affects and their roles in ongoing projective and introjective processes were numerous across cases. Participants’ narratives often displayed introjective processes in real time. Initial coding produced several themes that referenced a blurring of ego boundaries that were eventually subsumed by the superordinate theme of delineation. Compared to accountability, delineation refers to less conscious outgrowths of early relational experience. The following data illustrate interpersonal patterns of accommodation and avoidance rooted in early relational experience. The narratives illustrate the impact of those patterns on participants’ concepts of self. The data also offers insight into the role of forgiveness in integrating early relational experience that precipitated these patterns.

73 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Ellen: “Because of what she lost.” Ellen knew from an early age that her mother had experienced extreme childhood trauma in World War II-era Europe. In deference to her mother’s harrowing childhood experience, Ellen established a pattern of accommodation: “I always saw her as very vulnerable and very weak. Not weak, but very vulnerable and emotional because of her losses. We never, we meaning my sister and I, never wanted to push her too much because of what she lost…She lost her whole family and survived this trauma, so we never wanted to put pressure on her. That was hard. Sometimes she just wasn't there… My mother was only twenty-one when she had me and was in the States; she had no family here. She moved from England. She was all alone, so she had nobody.”

Despite understanding the origins of her mother’s hampered attunement, Ellen’s unmet needs impacted her emerging sense of self. She shared a memory from her first year of life in which she was crying from her crib for her mother to address her soiled diaper: “I was crying for my mother, and crying, and crying, and crying. Then I was tantruming.

Then I was shaking the bars on the jail, it felt like, but on the... The crib, right, but it felt like jail. I'm still crying, now I'm screaming on the top of my lungs. I can see myself, I can see this little toddler with same color hair, just like...come help me, you know? Then I finger-painted, all over everything. Then, that got her attention, and then she came in, and she forcefully kind of tossed me into the bathtub and had to give me the attention. I don't know what she was doing. I don't know why it took so long. I mean, I don't know...

I mean, when your kid, your little toddler's screaming and crying like that, you would think that you'd go look and see what's going on.”

Responding to misattunement with rebellion became a pattern that Ellen recognized in her relational life, she explains:

74 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “I was always very defiant. I acted out. I was a brat. I was very defiant. I know I was very defiant. I was very angry at not getting my needs met, and I was very angry that my father was not around…All those years of holding onto the anger at my dad and my mom, and acting out, and being defiant, and dating one alcoholic or gambler after another.”

In her first marriage, Ellen repeated a pattern of accommodating maltreatment followed by acting out by having an affair, she explains: “I had a horrible first marriage, and he was very verbally abusive. He was never physically abusive, but he was threatening to be physically abusive. I used to be terrified of him. I used to really resent him. I used to want him to be dead, truthfully… Through the years with him, I mean, I've done it through twelve step, but I've also just continuously let go, and let go, and let go… I can't believe I've forgiven him. I mean, he took me to court. It was a custody battle; it was humiliating; it was terrifying. It was all of these things, and took me a long time to look at my side of the road. Yes, the marriage was a bad marriage, but I could have exited it in a much more gentle way than I did. It would have been a bad ending anyway, but it wouldn't have been as bad. That's the part where I had to forgive him because I did something; some of my behaviors triggered his responses.”

Ellen’s process of accountability, by which she assessed her side of the street, likely underscored the relational nature of conflict. This process appears to have been galvanized by the delineation of self and other: “It helped with noticing the other person has their own side of the story and their own reasons for doing whatever they’ve done, and my own reactions are mine.”

75 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Marty: “Constricted and closed.” Severe neglect during her childhood illness left Marty without an “internalized” caregiver: “I had been in the hospital when I was young, and my mother didn't visit. I actually went home and almost really didn't even know who they were… I hadn't even internalized the mother at that point. I was two years old, and I hadn't internalized it enough…and so I think I did have a lot of hopeless feelings in the hospital when I was young, and they weren't even verbal. So that's the problem.”

Marty’s experience during her childhood illness can be conceptualized as the internalization of an absent other, introjected emptiness. As an adult, Marty’s connection to her mother remained troubled and evoked emotional desolation: “[W]hen I would go visit her, I would feel really constricted and closed, depressed. I just couldn’t feel joy and let go…I thought I had forgiven her, but it was still hard to be around her…I had to write down on my calendar when I should call her because I never really had a desire to…What was I going to say? So I would write it down so that I would not go too long…I really didn’t think I cared that much about seeing her. So, anyway, I wanted to do the right thing. I wrote down what the dutiful daughter would do…and I would do it even though I didn’t feel it because if I waited until I felt it, I don’t know if I would… It would have been a really long time…I didn't want to feel bad, and she felt bad that I didn't come and see her more.”

Marty’s aversion to being around her mother is likely based on a fear of returning to the hopelessness of early neglect. It is also possible that affective derivatives of early relational experience were not delineated. Marty explains the emotional experience of being with her mother in adulthood: “I just couldn't feel joy and let go. So I could see why she thought I was

76 Forgiveness and Relational Experience depressed. One time, when I was visiting her, she asked me if I was depressed. And I said, no, but I'm sure I have dysthymia, although, after therapy, I'm hoping I'm cured to some degree.”

A pattern of susceptibility to projection also unfolded with Marty’s husband, “a guy who thinks he's on the spectrum.” Marty explains: “I was very defensive, and I felt like he was criticizing all the time. And like I had to defend myself…. He has a lot of anxiety. And so that would translate into being critical of me. Like we were going somewhere on a trip, and he was anxious, it would just turn into this big fight. And so we had to really work on that a lot.”

Similarly, Marty’s experience as a parent could result in emotionality of unclear origin: “Well, for one thing, during the beginning of the pandemic, when I was doing therapy with people on the phone and online…And my kids had gone through a very bad time. I decided that I was depressed, and I went on antidepressants… But what it would do to me, it just all had to do with my kids. I would just ruminate about things. And so my son, my one 33-year-old son, was out of work for five months.”

Marty’s early relational experience resulted in an enduring vulnerability to hopelessness.

This was occasionally experienced as an increased permeability of boundaries between self and other. While the struggles stemming from that are ongoing, forgiveness provided some narrative structure, allowing Marty to achieve closure with her mother. At the very end of her mother’s life, Marty made a final gesture that communicated that early affects had been let go: “[A]t the very end, she was 92 when she died about two years ago, and so right at the very end…I sent her a birthday card. For the first time, it really was a card that said something kind, and close, and warm to her, and she was very taken by it. My sister told me, but [mom] didn’t mention anything to me, and I didn’t mention anything to her. It was all on a card that was saying the message of all was forgiven.”

77 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Willow: “I was hungry.” Willow’s father was the caregiver who she felt less betrayed by. Further, his cancer diagnosis prioritized forgiveness. As it pertained to her mother, Willow explained that a process of forgiveness had not begun. Again, Willow identified understanding as the defining feature of forgiveness. Regarding her father, understanding “helped…make sense of everything that happened and why it happened…I mean, he had a horrible childhood…in an orphanage for a while. So, he went through hell…He drank, and now I know why.” A similar calculus is applied to her mother: “I know she’s who she is because I think with her upbringing,” but forgiveness remains elusive.

What is clear in Willow’s narrative is that her sense of self was challenged in her relationship with her mother. As she noted, it took work for Willow to reframe her understanding that she was a bad person. Her mother often communicated this by comparing her to her twin sister: “I guess, growing up, I was more of the sensitive one. So it was always, ‘Why are you crying? Stop.’ So you weren't able even to express yourself if you wanted to. So then I would think, ‘Well, it's a bad thing.’ So I would try not to cry in front of people…And my mom always told me, ‘You always had to be the first one to be fed because you'd cry.’ Well, I was hungry.”

Despite her clear intellectual understanding of their differences, Willow’s understanding of herself based on her mother’s opinion of her was internalized and remains troubling: “I just spoke with her earlier, and I felt bad again. I called her house, and my sister answered.”

Willow’s ongoing project of delineation of self and other remains a source of dysphoria.

Further, lingering anxiety about her connections to significant others appears predicated on the disarticulation of her narrative secondary to problematic introjects. Willow describes her twin

78 Forgiveness and Relational Experience sister, clearly favored by her mother: “[S]he’s my twin, yeah, but we're night and day. We're fraternal, we don't look alike, we resemble [each other], but we're so opposite.” This description trails off, and Willow turns to anxieties about being separated from her daughter due to pandemic travel restrictions: “… Yeah. We're completely... Yeah. My daughter and I have a great relationship, and unfortunately, she lives out in Portland, Oregon. So it kills me I haven't been out there. I haven't been out there in over a year. And that's what I wanted.”

Lisa: “It haunts me.” Lisa’s ambivalence, as explored above, likely served to maintain a connection to early relational experience that complicated accountability. As previously noted, Lisa’s fear of becoming her mother was vaguely connected to her mistrust of adult intimacy: “I don't trust men at all, and I also have this terrible phobia about getting really heavy and dying of that because that's what happened to her. Really, it haunts me; that part haunts me all the time. I can't trust. I don't trust any of them.”

A pattern of vague delineation between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic is repeated in Lisa’s description of her subjective experience, often linking her affects to the experiences of others. Anger towards her father, for example, is contextualized in his actions toward her mother: “With my father, I found out a lot of things after he passed away, and he was the good in the family; on my side. These things I found out... I knew some things while he was still alive, but the other stuff I found out is really not good at all. When you find that out in your sixties, it's kind of hard to... No, I don't forgive him. I have to work on it because what he did was really crappy. I think he really made my mother just decide, ‘Eh, I don't...’ And she really didn't want to live anymore… It's terrible, and he felt real guilt.

Probably, that's why he died four years later. It'll take time because I really saw him in a

79 Forgiveness and Relational Experience different light. I think about it, and I talk about it [in therapy]...I don't automatically forgive him because of her, because of my mother. If she was alive, it might be different.

But she was so terribly depressed. ” Lisa’s focus shifts from person to person, and the affects tied to early relational experience are not consistently tied to her. This pattern of giving affect meaning in the experiences of others could be reflective of a troubled individuation.

Reflecting on how she experiences her mother in the present, Lisa first noted an affective similarity and then shifts to her marriage and to her fear of becoming her mother: “She had a very quick temper…when something would drop or slam or whatever, she would yell….I started doing that. I started to yell if something-and, then I caught myself and went, ‘don’t do that. Stop it.’ So I did. I don’t do that anymore. But I don’t know.

It really bothers me that most of my life I was in a not so great marriage…I like food, and I worry that I’m going to…I don’t want to end up like her. I don’t want to be this…I don’t want that.”

Articulating Lisa’s forgiveness narrative is complicated by affectivity that is not sourced in herself. This pattern is suggestive of hampered delineation of internal and external experience. Historicity is also poorly delineated as Lisa’s anxieties in the present are contextualized in early relational experience, creating a convoluted and palpably painful narrative. The confusion is marked by a muddled sense of self, possibly drawn from both her mother’s and her own experience of her, sometimes simultaneously: “I don’t know if my mother ever forgave me for being such a bad kid. I wasn’t a bad kid; she just didn’t like me.”

Hannah: “Afraid of who you are.” For Hannah, accommodation was a way of coping with caregivers who did not share her values. Her mother’s unpredictable mental health, along

80 Forgiveness and Relational Experience with a lack of support from important others, potentiated a painful introjective process from which Hannah’s faith provided a respite: “In my 20s, I started to go to church. I found a church and started to learn the lessons of forgiveness and what that means, and how powerful that is, being able to let go of certain things that you hold onto from your childhood that really make you afraid of things…

Afraid of who you are, not wanting to always...You're just wanting to always please everybody else because that's the only way to keep things from being bad.”

Drawing from her faith, Hannah established a practice of forgiveness that involved moving on from painful experiences that once defined her: “But then, when you find forgiveness, you don't have to act that way anymore. You don't have to please everybody else because you've just sort of forgiven the situation. You let go of it. You don't carry it with you anymore. It doesn't drive your future beliefs and your future emotions…Once you do it, once you figure it out…and you see how good it makes you feel, then you’re willing to keep doing it, and you don’t question it. It becomes part of who you are.”

Balanced by her faith, early introjects were managed but not fully worked through.

Hannah remains wary of interactions with family: “I can't go back there. It's so much work, and it's never going to go anywhere; it’s never going to change.” While interaction with her parents is limited, Hannah reports still being easily triggered by her father: “I mean, there’s times where I lose my composure…it’s usually my father that I will lose my composure towards because he’s just ridiculous…I realize that that’s just his level of maturity, and I shouldn’t have these expectations for him to be anything other than that.” Hannah’s frustration at being cast as a caretaker for her parents is likely relived in her experience of her father’s immaturity. The

81 Forgiveness and Relational Experience framework from which Hannah draws ideas about maturity is grounded in her painful experience of adultification, giving it affective connections to early relational experience: “You really have to be at a certain level of maturity to recognize that you are what you grew up as; you are what you see, experience, what you live. And if that’s what you live for half your life, you’re going to have the same tendencies…if you can’t be conscious of the decisions you make and the behaviors that you have, and the way you treat people in your interactions, you’re just going to fold into what you have assumed from those around you.”

Jane: “From the negative.” For Jane, financial independence was the obvious path to individuation. In her adult relationships, however, Jane feared she would end up like her mother. Jane explained how her mother “was not able to connect with [her] father in a way that he would be able to go the distance marriage-wise,” resulting in him leaving her for a younger woman. Jane explained, “This younger woman he married was very, very interesting, right on the ball. But she also had a way of talking about things that meant something, talking about emotions and feelings and stuff, and mother could never do that.” As Jane noted above, her mother’s emotional detachment was a source of frustration as well, strengthening Jane’s introjective sense of herself as a “real doormat kind of person.”

Further, Jane’s attempts to clarify autobiographical memory were met with resistance from her caregivers: “You'd say, ‘Mother, you told me once that I used to be such a sweet, happy little girl, and all of a sudden, I changed. How old was I?’ ‘Oh, I don't know. I don't know’…If you defended yourself to your father, he would just roar at you. If you defended yourself to your mother, she'd say things like, ‘Well, that's not fair.’”

82 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Like Lisa, Jane feared ending up like her mother while sympathizing with her plight: “Well, I feel bad for her. I think I may have told you this. My older sister told me that my mother had told her that when she was young and married and had five children, she sat down and thought, ‘I can't deal with the kids and the husband. I have to choose one.' So she chose her husband. Then it's her husband who dumps her for a younger woman, and mother was no slouch. She looked great into her 90s, and people couldn't believe how wonderful she was, blah, blah. She didn't get a very good deal either.”

Her mother’s decisions resulted in Jane’s severe neglect; however, her mother’s experience also provided a crash course in patriarchal inequities that Jane deferred to in her adult relationships. Despite its veracity, the acknowledgment of the inegalitarian reality she shared with her mother forced individuation as Jane anticipated that her mother’s interpersonal experiences would be her own: “Well, first, this morning, I woke up. The cat had come and slept next to me on the pillow, and I was, ‘Good morning, Sweetie.’ I was imagining, ‘Gee, what if this were a guy? Wouldn't that be nice? Good morning, Sweetie, and kisses, and stroking, and maybe a little something else?’ I thought, ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ But I also thought that's nothing that is possible now, that the guys my age are just too old… Well, younger men are great. I've always dated younger men. Except that you always have to know that they are hard-wired, when a beautiful young blonde divorcee comes along, they're going to dump you like a hot rock. It's what happens… No, no, no, but I really think it's true, and I think I think it's true because I know I don't have whatever that thing is that keeps them home. I think that I'm very aware that it could be that I just don't have that thing. I could always attract men, but I could never feel as though anything was permanent. Now, it

83 Forgiveness and Relational Experience could be just early childhood training that no relationships are permanent, being prepared to lose it. That's what your life is going to be like.”

While her options may have been limited and her sacrifices significant, Jane expressed gratitude for having dodged the life modeled by her mother: “[W]hen I go to the grocery store, something I hate to do, I think of my poor mother having to go all the time for five children, and she had to look beautiful and slim, and give parties, and do everything. I almost wonder if she shut down just so she could stand it. She was her daddy's little girl, and her parents did everything for her. Her mother packed her bags for college. She did not make one decision for herself. Now, here she is stuck, especially when dad was overseas or something. She was stuck doing everything. I get on my knees, and thank God I didn't end up like that. She did it very well, too. She was runner-up for the Miss America contest back in 1956 or whatever. Yeah. No, she was no slouch. So I really admired her for that, and at the same time, I think I'd looked at her life and thought, ‘I'm not going to get shoehorned into that. I don't care if I'm a bad girl because I'm on my own, and living on my own, and having sex outside of marriage, but I just will not live that life.’ I compare my life to my sister's lives, and there are no regrets because at least I have me.”

As noted above, Jane settled for the tangible security of financial success and opted out of finding emotional security in a relationship. Jane’s fear of recapitulating her mother’s relational experience can be conceptualized as a troubled delineation of the experience of self and other.

Although Jane did remarkably well in life, her sacrifices were collateral damage in a motivational system built on disarticulated internal and external experiences. The empathy Jane clearly feels for her mother is a product of her practice of forgiveness. The fears that appear to

84 Forgiveness and Relational Experience be drawn from disarticulated early experience are likely what results in Jane’s ongoing vigilance.

The compensatory mechanism Jane employed, she explains, “was from the negative. It was from do or die… I think it was just pure will. It was not hope, and it wasn't optimism. It was ‘you're not allowed to fall.’”

Diane: “On the hook.” The financial framework from which Diane made sense of forgiveness proved challenging to apply to relational matters. She associated her enduring resentment, anger, and “self-righteous indignation,” to “currency” in a financial model of forgiveness. From this perspective, forgiveness entails too much sacrifice: “[Y]ou are expected to do what I consider to be the impossible: love your enemy and love your neighbor as much as you'd love your own child or something. And forgive your enemies, and it's this highest view of forgiveness where you're supposed to just jettison your feelings of hurt or betrayal or woundedness, and you're supposed to somehow make those go away.”

Diane’s reported view, that interpersonal forgiveness based on the model of finance is impossible, is further problematized by its finality. In the financial model, forgiveness is the terminal act in the relationship between the debtor and the entity owed. Arguably, through nurturance of early affects, Diane maintains the most tangible connection to her caregivers available in the financial framework. Therefore, forgiveness—and the attenuation of affect it entails—is tantamount to forfeiture, to giving up. Diane’s unforgiving position toward her attachment figures, she explains, is “a way of feeling a little bit good…I think I don't want to forgive them, in a way, because if I'm not mad at them anymore, then that's almost like letting them off the hook, and I don't want them to be off the hook. I want them to be on the hook.”

85 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Diane recognizes the potential of forgiveness to increase connectedness: “I feel like the resentment I hold towards her makes it really difficult to be around her, for me and her… I think that it would be much easier to be around her if I wasn't carrying all that around with me.”

As it applies to her deceased father, Diane appears to recognize the potential benefits of better articulated inner and outer experience: “[H]e's dead, but the resentment lives on…The memories live on, and the internal dialogues of all the times I wished I had told him off or whatever. That lives on in my mental thought loop. And to be able to let go of that would be a relief for me. It would improve my quality of life to not do that… Even though he's gone, I still go through it… I spend a lot of time in my thoughts. My thoughts kind of dominate my life and a lot of my thoughts are negative. I'm worrying about the future, or I'm ruminating about the past, and it informs my moods every day. So, to be able to not be in a thought loop of, here's what I should have said to him before, like, ‘Oh, that thing he did.’ I would be not constantly getting dragged into a negative mood because of my thoughts… I think it would improve my relationships a lot. People like me better when I'm not angry and resentful and irritable and just mad with people. I'm a nicer person, and I think it makes for happy relationships to not be in that negative place all the time.”

The possibility of working through ongoing conflicts of her relational past leads Diane to a vision of herself in which her early affects are delineated from her present relational life. She also acknowledges the potential it holds for a process of compassionate individuation, she explains: “Intellectually, I can say…internally to myself if I couldn't say it to her…’ Okay Mom, we're good. You don't have to make anything up to me, you don't need to understand me, you don't need to make things right…You can just be, and I can accept you. And even if you don't

86 Forgiveness and Relational Experience accept me, I can accept myself.’"

Superordinate theme 3: Universality. Universality, the final superordinate theme, emerged from the data quickly. Themes of collectivity, equality, and freedom emerged across cases. The category broadened to subsume a cluster of themes related to understanding and empathy. Also subsumed were themes that emerged as counterpoints to those listed.

Ellen: “We’re all vulnerable.” At the heart of Ellen’s narrative is what can be viewed as a respect for the relational origins of affectivity. An appreciation of the reciprocal nature of interpersonal life based on a presumption of equality and a deliberate diminution of moralizing judgment appears to define her process. Ellen explains the mechanics of forgiveness: “The ability to see those people…that have hurt me, seeing the bigger picture and seeing them as equal…seeing people as human, and as fallible. We're all vulnerable; that's what makes us human, so I think to have compassion, and... Yeah, I think compassion, understanding. Yeah. To just see the other as having qualities that I've done to others what people have done to me.”

Twelve-step work provided a model for historically “defiant” Ellen to release painful affect rooted in accommodating bonds with poorly attuned caregivers. Arguably, an internalized relational experience marked by unmet basic needs led to a frustrating adult relational pattern.

Over time, Ellen’s sense of self was decreasingly informed by the conflict of desire and terror inherent in the expectation of abandonment. The interpersonal perspective gained is grounded in even-handedness. Countervailed reactivity is recognizable in her interpersonal life, Ellen explains:

87 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “My stepdad and I, he recently passed less than two months ago, and we had a contentious relationship. He was very domineering, and I hated him. I was very defiant with him, especially around my mom, because I felt like he controlled her. Anyway, so we had a very contentious relationship. There was a day, was it COVID? Let me think for a moment. Oh yeah, it was COVID because it was my birthday. Right. He came over, and things had been getting a little bit better these past couple of years because he was so frail, and not domineering anymore, and not threatening anymore. He lost his edge, so I felt more powerful, and I didn't feel afraid of him anymore…He came over to the house one day, and he fell.... I was the one that kind of found him there. I had to hold him until the ambulance came and stuff like that, and I just held him with love and forgiveness… I felt like I forgave him, and I forgave myself for the terrible dynamic that we battled out for fifty years, since I was 16, so it was a long time. I forgave myself, I forgave him, and I really, that day, that moment, I loved him. It was so amazing to me. His head was laying in my hands. He was bleeding. He had a picture of Jesus popped out of his pocket. I saw he carried Jesus with him, and I just thought that was so vulnerable and so beautiful that he carried that with him. I don't know. I just found that to be really vulnerable. I just held him, and I just kept him calm until the ambulance came, and he kept trying to get up, and I kept saying, ‘it's okay. You can get up in a few minutes. You can get up in a few minutes.’ I just kept him calm. My mom was hysterical… It was a scene, but I felt nothing, and then my sister pulled up, and she got there after he had fallen, and she's like, ‘What is going on?’ There's all these people around; the ambulance was there, but that was my time to bond with him.”

88 Forgiveness and Relational Experience The vulnerability that Ellen recognizes, identifies with, and honors in others is informed by her experience with forgiveness and emblematic of a universal perspective. As the above telling illustrates, allayed affectivity (“I didn't feel afraid of him anymore”) created the context for a new relational experience. Ellen describes a similar experience with her first husband: “I find now, I ask my daughter, ‘So how's your dad doing? How's his health? Is he okay?

What's he up to?’ He asks about me now, and I'm not afraid of him anymore. It's been 28 years since the marriage, but there is a forgiveness that's happened. I saw him at my son's wedding, and I actually asked for a hug. I said, ‘Give me a hug, for old time’s sake. Our kid just got married.’”

Marty: “The foibles.” Having been separated from her mother during her childhood hospitalization, Marty struggled with recurring feelings of hopelessness. While her mother’s acknowledgment of her shortcomings helped Marty work towards forgiveness, feelings of emptiness persisted, and it still takes effort for Marty to avoid falling into despair. Having worked as a therapist, Marty recognized the value of putting in the work. Additionally, her spirituality located the work in a larger framework of meaning.

Marty’s ongoing effort to circumvent affectivity rooted in early relational experience resulted in a shift in perspective by which affects are attenuated with less effort. This perspective certainly had its challenges from the state of the world during data collection. The Covid pandemic had been a part of life for some time, and the vaccine was only recently available. A presidential election loomed that would go on to be contested by the highly divisive incumbent president, eventually leading to a deadly insurrection. Marty remained committed to her perspective:

89 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “Even Trump, I can forgive him for being such an idiot. I do feel like, and I don't know whether it's because I'm older now, I mean, I'm 69. And if it's because of that or the pandemic or whatever, but I just feel the forgiveness, I feel like the world is full of people making mistakes, the foibles. And so I realized that even if Trump is there…we'll still recover, and the environment will recover because things will change… So I don't get so upset about those types of things because it doesn't feel hopeless anymore. So maybe that's part of it because I forgive people for all the dumb things they think."

Marty’s position appears to be grounded in her beliefs and an understanding that they are not unanimously shared. Her ability to steer clear of hopelessness allows for an appreciation of the other without defaulting to introjected emptiness.

Marty’s narrative connotes a spirit of universality seemingly inherent in subjectively authentic forgiveness. Unlike theological frameworks based on beneficence or pseudoforgiveness driven by unaddressed early relational experience, universality succeeds in honoring the other and the self while maintaining boundaries between the two. As alluded to above, Marty draws from her spiritual beliefs to frame her perspective on interpersonal responsibility: “[If] you forgive somebody else for something they did bad to you, then you're not only helping your own karma, but you're helping theirs.”

Willow: “Losing time.” Having delineated her sense of self from introjects rooted in her mother’s unfavorable view of her, Willow’s meaning-making was no longer tethered to the idea that her personhood was pathological. Her highly incisive effort toward forgiving her father brought her peace and attenuated affectivity. The resulting perspective is grounded in a spirit of collectivity but is not a panacea, she explains:

90 Forgiveness and Relational Experience “I think I try to look at people differently. Where I try to understand, I guess, more what they're going through or what maybe they've gone through. And not to say that that gives them the right to maybe treat me badly, like my brother. Who took more of the brunt from my dad than I did. Him and I don't have a good relationship because, at times, he's not a nice person. And he doesn't like the fact that I stood up for myself, unlike my mom and sister. So now, I'm kind of the black sheep of the family right now. So I wrote my brother a letter because of different things he's done to me. Just how he is. And my mother, brother, and sister kind of took a bad part of the letter and didn't acknowledge any good parts that I wrote. So I try and understand. I understand what he's gone through, but at the same time, I'm not going to... I couldn't forgive him. Well, at this moment, I couldn't forgive him for the way he's acted. I just want maybe just a little apology or just acknowledgment.”

The data related to the first superordinate theme of accountability noted that identification helped or hindered the forgiveness process for certain participants. In Willow’s case, becoming a parent further obfuscated her understanding of her mother’s caregiving. This lack of identification seemingly provided narrative solidity, illuminating their differences as parents and challenging the introjected bad person narrative Willow previously held. Apparently, it was also disappointing. Willow wanted to “understand [her] mom and be closer.” However, she explains: “I already know that’s not going to happen.” As noted above, Willow has not ruled out a process of forgiveness for her mother but has trouble visualizing it. This feeling of mildly hopeful resignation marks Willow’s perspective. While she has done the hard work of addressing harsh introjects and regulating early affects, Willow does feel a sense of urgency to

91 Forgiveness and Relational Experience reach a better place with her mother. This was intensified by the loss of life in New York during the pandemic, she explains: “I feel like I’m losing time…because, who knows?”

The management of her early affects remains good, and Willow maintains a perspective that is fueled by empathy rather than self-blame. The anxiety brought about by world events has been challenging, however. In addition to necessitating an unwanted separation of Willow from her adult children, the heartbreaking loss of life in New York at the beginning of the pandemic was dysregulating for Willow: “Yeah. It was nerve-wracking I think, not knowing what might happen or just everything when I saw all the hard stuff out of the City…I can't watch that stuff, the sick people… all the suffering.” The stress of the state of the world, it appears, was a threat to Willow’s hard-earned perspective built on evolving interpersonal understanding and mindful consideration of affectivity. Willow’s empathic interpersonal orientation may have augmented the overwhelm caused by world events. Upon reflection, Willow reported enhanced insight into her father’s experience as well as a shared proclivity for maladaptive coping. She explains: “When [drinking alcohol] became a problem and scared me was when I was going through my heavy therapy early on…And then I had the EMDR treatments…I was drinking because I couldn’t handle the memories…I know [father] had anxiety, I remember. I have memories of my mom bringing him to the hospital in the middle of the night when he was having panic attacks. Once I realized what I was going through then, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on.’ So, yeah. Yeah. And I know it’s not the answer because I don’t do that anymore until, well, last Wednesday when the Capitol got taken over…I know alcohol isn’t the answer and I’m not going to- It’s not worth it. Definitely not worth it.”

92 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Lisa: “It must have been just awful.” While Willow’s process of individuation from early forms of meaning-making is in progress, Lisa’s remains in conflict. Guilt, anger, sadness, and shame constitute the anchor of ambivalence that keeps Lisa entrenched in early relational experience. The experiences of independence, freedom, and collectivity that undergird a universal perspective are lacking.

As explored in the previous section, Lisa’s connection to the past is particularly complicated by conflicting feelings about her mother. Feelings of sadness and guilt combined with resentment and even disgust “haunted” Lisa after her mother’s death. More than four decades later, the convolution of historical affects circumvents empathy and keeps Lisa’s perspective mired in piteous morbidity. The following description of the day of her mother’s death--also her twenty-first birthday—demonstrates these conflicts: “This person that she married was a jerk. He was cheating on her all over the place, he was really smart and charming. I thought he was great. I thought he was the smartest man ever. He never went to college but you wouldn't know that… I was in California at this defense language institute in the Army…So he came and picked me up, it was my birthday, 21st birthday. He came and picked me and my friend up. We went to have a wonderful lunch and then he left. I'm sure he left and went with some women, I'm sure he did. But it didn't occur to me, of course, I thought he was wonderful… They were trying for hours and hours to get ahold of him. There was no cell phone, none of this stuff that we have today. I'm sure he just felt like, ‘Oh my God,’ when he found out. I know I felt terrible. I found out. I'm like, ‘Well it's my birthday. She can't be dead.’ We're really sorry. It's kind of a drag. I went, ‘Oh, great. Okay.’ It was terrible, it was terrible.”

93 Forgiveness and Relational Experience It is worth noting that Willow’s closeness with her father was a source of “jealousy” for her mother. Adding that detail to the messy affective bundle illustrated above gives Lisa’s story additional staying power: “I think when you walk around with the guilt of or the really hard feeling of knowing that you never got that closure with your mother…That's hard; it’s really hard to deal with.” Lisa’s fear of becoming her mother is also in conflict with her belief that she lost her will to live because her father rejected her through maltreatment, including infidelity. The following explanation of her mother’s cause of death supports Lisa’s take on her mother’s profoundly poor health: “Well I didn't see her for a few months before she passed away. I didn't see her.

Apparently, she got really, really obese, like some of those people you see on TV that have TV shows or whatever. She got really big and it made it impossible for her to drive a car. She couldn't fit down at the steering wheel, impossible for her to do certain things.

It must have been just awful. I remember looking at the death certificate and seeing something called Pickwickian disease. I know my sister…will argue with me about this but I just remember it because Charles Dickens’ "Pickwick Papers," right? I looked it up and it has to do with obesity. That was what was on the death thing. Basically, she had a lot of strokes. All the other stuff, I guess, that comes with being way, way too heavy.”

Intelligent and insightful, Lisa provided the facts surrounding her mother’s death but the associated affects are harder to track. The affective dulling that a more delineated narrative would entail is not achievable. The result is an interpersonal perspective that is not just haunted by the past but seemingly at risk of being possessed by it. This terror was further galvanized by her own experience of betrayal in her marriage. As noted above, the interpersonal perspective that resulted is largely avoidant. Lisa’s interview was conducted at a point in the pandemic when

94 Forgiveness and Relational Experience significant restrictions were still in place. The prohibitions on social life during that time were a relief for Lisa: “I love it. I don't love the pandemic, you know what I mean…I don't really care.

I've kind of given up, not on myself but on... I don't want to invite people here. I just don't want anyone to come here.”

Hannah: “Very intentional.” The expectation of compliance in her family of origin took a severe toll on Hannah. The unreliability of her caregivers exacerbated this. Her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcoholism brought their level of “maturity” into question.

Similarly to Lisa, Hannah adopted a pattern of avoidance. This pattern was enacted with her family of origin for protective reasons, but Hannah tried to apply principles of forgiveness drawn from her faith during her divorce: “It's a decision you have to make. You have to be very intentional about it, conscious of it. Like I said before in why I think forgiveness is the word that I would use to describe my marriage, it's... I mean, I forgave him the day we got married for anything that he was going to do to me. And, when it came time for my divorce and the abandonment, and the evil, I just knew that I had already made that commitment, that I was going to forgive him.”

Hannah’s perspective is grounded in a commitment to interpersonal harmony with an understanding that it does not come quickly. As it applies to her family of origin, as noted above, acceptance was as close to forgiveness as Hannah could. The principles of universality appear present, however: “Not one is more significant than the other. I see those relationships as pretty much the foundation of who you are as a person, like parent to child and spouse to spouse, whether you're the parent or the child, or whether you're one of the spouses. So they're significant,

95 Forgiveness and Relational Experience but they're very different relationships. Because they're significant relationships, they have equal needs for forgiveness, the effort that you have to put into it. And, I think I probably put more of a daily effort into my forgiveness with my husband... Ex-husband.”

Theory and practice are not aligned, Hannah explains, “I choose to just ignore my parents.” The volitional turning of a blind eye to her early relational experience gives life to early affect in the present. Despite her ongoing efforts to maintain a forgiving attitude toward her ex-husband, emotional dysregulation remains the rule: “The things that he told me and the things he said to me, he lives a totally different life.

They're lies. To fall in love with somebody that can lie that much. But knowing that you have a daughter with him, you want her to be healthy and to have a healthy relationship with him. And knowing that he can't do it on his own, like I just... Yeah, it's hard to forgive him all the time… I just cried the other day. It's so stupid. Like, will I ever get over this real piece of work? I don't know.”

Jane: “Nothing but ashes.” Driven and fiercely self-sufficient, Jane succeeded in the arts, an area that “young ladies who were going to get married studied,” without relying on a man. Drawing from the military values under which she was raised, a “do or die” mentality propelled Jane through her adult life. Having witnessed her mother endure the pain of patriarchal disparities, Jane committed to remaining unmarried. The fears underlying the decision were given meaning through Jane’s beliefs in Karma and past lives.

The simple justice of this belief system supports a spirit of collectivity: “I think it's looking at things in a universal way, looking at the universe, looking at we're all souls trying to kind of scrape our lives together, and we all make mistakes, and we're all trying…I'll give them an excuse because I would hope people would forgive me my foibles.”

96 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Hard work is valued in Jane’s perspective and, as was the case for other participants, it entails a tone of sufferance: “There's a universal law…that feeling that while you're on Earth…you have a body and you can affect things. You can make things happen, and the spirits, the dead people, whether or not they're spirits, we have that to find out yet, but the thought of them, they can't do anything. So it's up to us to do the work. I always thought of death as win/win anyway. If you're dead and that's the end of it, you're nothing but ashes. So what? You don't think about it. But if you're dead and you're a spirit, well, that's great too, because then you get to flutter around and do stuff.”

Jane’s hard-earned perspective evolved to include less tolerance for being treated as a “lickspittle.” Having traced the origins of the phenomenon to her rejecting mother, Jane eventually challenged the pattern: “I also finally figured out at this advanced stage that it doesn't do me any good to roll over like a dog, that you have to stand up for yourself.”

Her reference to Robin Hood and Little John agreeing not to fight speaks to a type of capitulation in Jane’s perspective. Jane’s dispassionate position was achieved over time and is regularly challenged: “Actually, now that you mention it, I have to work very hard not to hate and wish revenge on the MAGA hat wearers. When you see pictures of them without their masks and being jackasses, then I say, ‘get COVID, I don't care. See if I care.’ I'm angry at them for being so uneducated and misinformed as I see it. They think we're retards or something… But just wanting something bad, I mean, if Trump totally destroys the economy, if he burns down the house, as they said, those people are going to suffer and it'll serve them right. Now, of course, I forget the collateral damage, the innocent first

97 Forgiveness and Relational Experience responders who have to put up with all this, but I have to really think hard about the fact that yes, I want vengeance on these people for making it so difficult… Yet, if you look at it in another way, they're bringing us a gift of looking at this country through a different lens, looking at the racism and the sexism, and the political malfeasance…Maybe in a universal sense, they are…serving the greater good.”

Diane: “If I can be ok with myself.” Letting go of affects with roots in early relational life felt like a relinquishment of power to Diane. With finance as the frame of reference, forgiveness seemed impossible to apply to interpersonal relationships. The benefits of forgiveness and its associated diminution of affect were tangible but how to operationalize the process was elusive: “I don’t really know how to do it,” she explained.

Diane reflected on the power dynamics inherent in the financial framework and envisioned an iteration of forgiveness specific to interpersonal conflict based on equality: “[P]utting things in a hierarchy and I think that, in a financial realm, it definitely does that. It's like this person owes the bank for this amount of money for their mortgage and the bank has a position of power over the person who owes the debt, because they could come and collect on the debt and ruin that person, or something like that… And so maybe, in an emotional realm, forgiveness is kind of an acknowledging of we are not in a hierarchy, we are not superior or inferior, we are not in a competition, neither of us is better or worse than the other. Perhaps forgiveness is an acknowledgement of an equality between people.”

Diane’s consideration of her difficulty with forgiving caregivers identified a pattern of self-righteous indignation” based on hierarchical tenets: “like I’m the good guy and they’re the

98 Forgiveness and Relational Experience bad guy.” Diane’s recognition of a pattern of seeking power through moralizing provides a “dopamine hit” that is akin to an addiction: “I have noticed more and more…when I succumb to the temptation to indulge in that, let's call it indulging in my self-righteous indignation, when I indulge in it I have an unpleasant hangover from it… the other morning when I woke up to the news that Donald Trump had contracted COVID and I shared it with my friend…she and I do yoga together every morning, and I was like, ‘Oh, did you hear the news?’ And I blabbed it to her and my resentment toward Donald Trump came out in that moment. And then after that I felt really not good, it seeped through my whole yoga practice that morning.

Because I saw what I was doing, I was indulging in the self-righteous indignation activity and it didn't feel good.”

Additionally, anxieties related to scarcity are implicit in Diane’s exploration of her trouble with forgiving her mother: “[M]aybe the self-acceptance piece is important because you're not- if I can be okay with myself, I can love myself and accept myself, then I might feel less lack in the love and acceptance that I didn't get from her. And I would no longer see it as her job to provide that for me… And that would be a way to forgive that debt…I think, yeah, maybe forgiveness is just a collective understanding that we're all equal.”

99 Forgiveness and Relational Experience

CHAPTER 5 FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS

Introduction to Findings The aim of this study was to explore the process of forgiveness through the lived experience of adults who had encountered sub-optimally attuned caregiving. The study sought to explore the meaning of forgiveness and its role in facilitating the integration of affect and introjects rooted in early relational experience. The study drew from the lived experiences of seven participants who reported receiving suboptimal attunement from one or more caregivers.

What follows is a discussion of the conceptual and theoretical models developed in response to the data collected. A review of the superordinate themes that emerged from the data is also included, as are considerations of their clinical implications.

Conceptual Model Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the method chosen for this study, weighed heavily on the conceptual model. In addition to phenomenology and hermeneutics–the foundational components of IPA (Smith et al., 2009)–the conceptual model also drew from ideas of social construction and critical theories.

IPA has epistemological roots in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology for an application in qualitative research to capture the essential qualities of lived experience (Smith et al., 2009). Phenomenology differs from empirical research in that the latter takes predominant

100 Forgiveness and Relational Experience traditions of understanding for granted rather than exploring the social constructions that undergird those traditions (Gergen, 2015). To explore the subjective experiences that inform understanding, phenomenology does not default to presupposition (Husserl, 1927, in Smith et al.). Dermot Moran (2000) provides the following explanation of the aims of phenomenology: “Phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophizing, which emphasizes the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer. As such, phenomenology’s first step is to seek to avoid all misconstructions and impositions placed on experience in advance, whether these are drawn from religious or cultural traditions, from everyday common sense, or, indeed, from science itself. Explanations are not to be imposed before the phenomena have been understood from within” (p. 4).

The conceptual model used in this study adhered to the above phenomenological values.

Therefore, the exploration of forgiveness was a reflexive consideration of experience without defaulting to predominant structures of meaning.

Social construction theory also questions frameworks of truth. Gergen (2015) notes traditional frameworks of meaning can be reconsidered “not to abandon our various traditions of truth, but simply to see them all as optional” (p. 9). The elements of the conceptual model drawn from phenomenology and social construction provided a lens through which to view participants’ processes of meaning-making.

Hermeneutics, the interpretive foundation of IPA, also contributed to the conceptual framework. The concept of the hermeneutic circle, connoting the discipline’s non-linear approach to interpretation, views understanding as the result of “the dynamic relationship

101 Forgiveness and Relational Experience between the part and the whole” (Smith et al., 2009, p.28) that gives preference to learning rather than knowing (Orange, 2011). Therefore, the conceptual framework embraces knowledge as evolving, not static. The hermeneutic approach also views the attainment of knowledge as inherently relational, a dialogic process predicated on a “shared search for understanding” (Orange, p. 25). The conceptual elements provided by the component parts of IPA lead to an exploration of meaning that is dialogic and deliberately protected from preexisting bias (Orange; Smith et al.).

As noted, the linguistic overlap in moral and financial linguistic structures of meaningmaking was of interest early in the research process (Graeber, 2011). The phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions that drive IPA called for curiosity about the taken-for-granted components of understanding. As meaning emerged from the data, these components were increasingly identified as pathogenic. To incorporate this idea into the conceptual model, post-structuralist and critical theory schools of thought that “challenge the existing social order” (Keucheyan, 2014, p. 2) were influential. The conceptual model’s wariness of existing structures of meaningmaking seeks to circumvent a clinical position from which practitioners “would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack” (Foucault, 2009, p. xiii).

Theoretical Lens Compiling a theoretical lens to understand relational experience, I drew from trauma theory, neurobiology, attachment, affect regulation and psychoanalytic theories. For application to the adult participants in this study, suffering and conflict were loosely framed as developmental phenomena resulting in longitudinal patterns throughout life. These patterns were

102 Forgiveness and Relational Experience considered across the three dimensions listed in Chapter 1: affectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity.

On the first dimension, longitudinal patterns of affectivity that were or continue to be refractory to integration were grounded in the foundational components of attachment theory, the conceptualization of psychological survival being predicated on the subjective sense of security in early caregiving relationships (Bowlby, 1969; Siegel, 1999). Similarly, theories linking early relational experience to enduring patterns of affective dysregulation (Hill, 2015; Coan, 2008) contributed significantly to the theoretical framework. This informed a theoretical position that identifies the importance of early relational experience in creating affective patterns and the impact of affect on constructing a subjective sense of safety.

How relational experience informs the developing sense of self draws from the theories that tie relationally determined affects such as shame to the subjective sense of self (Morrison, 1994; Schore, 1991). The theoretical perspective drew from self psychology, specifically the theory of the selfobject, identified by Kohut and Wolf (1978) as representations of the other that “we experience as part of our self” (p. 414). This informed a theoretical lens that acknowledges the role of the other in the emergence of personhood. The clinical perspective is deepened by psychoanalytic theories that note the developmental origins of the sense of self, such as the feelings of fraudulence conceptualized in Winnicott’s theory of the false self (1960) and persistent feelings of inadequacy as noted in Khan’s theory of cumulative trauma (1963).

Broadly, I use the term intersubjectivity to denote patterns of relating. As noted, early relational experience weighs heavily on establishing relational patterns (Bowlby, 1969; Siegel, 1999). More specifically, intersubjectivity is used to connote an interpersonal perspective consistent with Benjamin’s (1990) formulation, which views intersubjectivity as the capacity for

103 Forgiveness and Relational Experience attunement and the ability to tolerate difference, a respect for the subjectivity of the other. This works from a conceptualization of subjecthood heavily reliant on Klein’s depressive position (1935), which Ogden (1986) characterized as a shift in the experience of self from object to subject. This shift, Ogden explains, impacts the sense of self, the experience of the other, and the capacity for meaning creation: “At the moment that the infant becomes capable of experiencing himself as the interpreter of his perceptions, the infant as subject is born. All experience from that point on is a personal creation…Awareness of the possibility that another person is a subject as well as an object creates the conditions wherein the infant can feel concern for another person…[the infant is] capable of feeling concern for another as a whole and separate person” (pp. 72-73).

Part of the difference between being an object and being a subject is the “enhanced capacity for self-object differentiation” (Ogden, 1986, p. 71) provided by the attainment of the depressive position. Therefore, enhanced subjectivity–a developmental achievement connoting a shift away from the terrifying, projection-laden paranoid/schizoid position as conceptualized by Klein (1935)--is predicated on an experience of separateness.

Application of Models The conceptual and theoretical frameworks that emerged from the data support a view of psychic life that is inexorably tied to relational experience. As noted, this is consistent with theories that view the subjective experience of early relational life as a template for relational and affective patterns into adulthood (Bowlby, 1969; Siegel, 1999; Hill, 2015). Further, the models applied in this study question traditional frameworks of truth. Before addressing the

104 Forgiveness and Relational Experience superordinate themes individually, the models adapted above will be applied to forgiveness as it is characterized in the literature.

Generally, forgiveness is considered a process that fosters relatedness (Fincham, 2000) through the attenuation of affects deemed asocial (McCullough et al., 2003), resulting in enhanced empathy (Strelan & Covic, 2006). Framing forgiveness around an affective, prosocial shift gives the concept a common sense motivational structure that can stand apart from theological formulations. Disciplines such as evolutionary psychology provide an alternative to theological formulations of forgiveness that underscore moral correctness. The data collected in this study suggested that definitional confusion about forgiveness is primarily based on the existing frameworks of meaning in which it is defined. The conceptual model that emerged from the data allows for a view of forgiveness from a poststructuralist perspective. Through this lens, the traditional framework of meaning is flawed and overly influenced by the linguistic junction where morality and finance converge (Graeber, 2011). The conventional moral/financial model contextualizes forgiveness in calculability. The qualitative nuances of forgiveness are lost in a framework that views equity through a strictly quantitative lens.

In the theoretical literature, forgiveness is often likened to the depressive position (Klein, 1935) by virtue of its potential to facilitate a shift away from affectively validated helplessness toward an acceptance of what is (Siassi, 2013). The acceptance fostered by the depressive position is tempered by capacities for self-reflection and self-other delineation (Ogden, 1986) that are unavailable in the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein). The implicit resignation in this process suggests the importance of compromise, a feature with some negative connotations.

Smith (2008), for example, takes issue with the compromise inherent in forgiveness, framing it as a default to blind faith, even an immersion into fantasy. Smith doubles down on the

105 Forgiveness and Relational Experience theological associations of forgiveness to underscore its inappropriateness in psychoanalytic work. Klein’s depressive position frames compromise in developmental achievement, the antithesis of infantile fantasy grounded in the brutal truths of reality.

Findings The seven participants in this study shared their unique experiences with forgiveness as applied to important relational figures. All participants grounded their perspectives in subjectively determined experiences of suboptimal attunement from one or more caregivers.

Across cases, participants spoke of troubling affects that they tied to early relational experience. This validated using a theoretical framework that embraced the centrality of affect in the experience of self (Emde, 1983). Also important are the basic tenets of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) and related neuroscientific theories linking affective patterns to the experience of attunement in the attachment relationship (Hill, 2015; Siegel, 1999; Schore, 1991).

Participants who had engaged in the process of forgiveness shared an experience of altered affectivity; participants who struggled with, were unable to, or had not yet forgiven caregivers displayed affectivity rooted in early relational experience.

Participants shared experiences with or difficulties with letting go of early affects. The process leading to a diminished affect over time took shape as a volitional, reflexive component process of forgiveness labeled here as accountability, the first superordinate theme. Transcripts also reflected a less conscious process of intrapsychic separation and strengthening of subjectivity (Ogden, 1986) that was aggregated to become the second superordinate theme of delineation. The resulting interpersonal and intrapsychic perspective entailing a more optimally regulated affectivity and a decreased reliance on projective and introjective process was named

106 Forgiveness and Relational Experience universality, the final superordinate theme. A discussion of the three superordinate themes follows.

Accountability. The data showed that forgiveness can be helpful in the integration of early relational experience. Among participants who had engaged in subjectively authentic forgiveness processes, affective change and enhanced narrative cohesion were noted. As I use it here, narrative refers to a personal account that holds together as a subjectively authentic story.

Consistent with its use in qualitative research, narrative connotes a personal story that provides cohesion through its potential to “present an inner reality to the outside world” (Lieblich et al., 1998, p. 7). The data suggests that subjective authenticity is part of a perspective gained over time and grounded in affectively attenuated reflexivity. Attenuated affect and improved narrative cohesion appeared to have a reciprocal relationship; some participants’ experiences with forgiveness illustrated how narrative cohesion was potentiated by a dispassionate taking stock of experience. Affective neutrality was noted in participants who coupled reflexivity with therapy or twelve-step work supporting a relational view of meaning-making (Gadamer, 2013; Orange, 2011; Tronick and Beeghly, 2011). Conversely, the lived experience of other participants suggested that less regulated affect clouded autobiographical memory and impeded narrative coherence. In these cases, I would argue that dysregulated affect prevented optimal reflection and impaired accountability. The superordinate theme of accountability is generally centered around the attenuation of affect that forgiveness entails and how affect–regulated or dysregulated–impacts narrative construction.

Affective change, as noted in Chapter 2, is foundational in most formulations of forgiveness. Further, the impact of attenuated affect on the integration of complex narrative

107 Forgiveness and Relational Experience elements is consistent with the literature linking affective dysregulation to early relational experience (see Hill, 2015). A volitional ‘letting go’ of early affects allows for a thoughtful process of accountability, a piecing together of autobiographical data that is deliberately removed from or suspicious of affects stemming from early relational experience. This is applicable to Ellen’s reciprocal two-sides-of-the-street process, Marty’s experience with validation, Willow’s volitional and pragmatic letting go, and Jane’s application of mystical narrative elements. In this respect, forgiveness arguably facilitates an integrative function consistent with affect regulation theory (Hill, 2015). The data suggests that taking stock of experience with the intentionality implied in accountability allows for decoupling experience from affects tied to early relational experience. The influence of early affect on meaning is a phenomenon noted in the literature (Schore, 1991; Morrison, 1994; Hill, 2015). Ideally, forgiveness facilitates a regulatory function decoupled from its origins in the attachment relationship, opening up space for novel meaning-making.

On the other side of the coin, participants who struggled with letting go of affects rooted in early relational experience—Lisa’s highly debilitating ambivalence, Hannah’s survival-driven avoidance, Diane’s clinging to resentment for fear of losing power—appeared to be reflected in less cohesive narratives steeped in early affective derivatives. Possibly, in these cases, early affects are the most compelling manner of adhering the pieces of lived experience to one another. This regressive phenomenon keeps the past in the present, complicating historicity in a recognizably posttraumatic manner (Renn, 2012). This coping strategy is less likely to promote integration than to serve as a flimsy guardrail against disintegration.

Accountability informs meaning-making that is active, dynamic, and flexible enough to integrate a growing bank of experience, allowing experiential data to be meaningfully

108 Forgiveness and Relational Experience reorganized (Stern, 1983). Accountability–narrative construction deliberately decoupled from early affect–creates a framework for meaning-making consistent with hermeneutic principles.

The concept of the hermeneutic circle suggests that parts of experience influence the whole and vice versa (Smith et al., 2009). Accountability allows for deepening meaning as personal experience consistently reinforms narrative meaning. The ability to dispassionately untangle the components of interpersonal wrongdoing is unlikely to be achieved without ample experience and rigorous reflection. Additionally, the dialogic quality of hermeneutics (Orange, 2011; Gadamer, 2013) provides a framework for dyadic meaning-making (Tronick & Beeghly, 2011) that facilitates the decoupling from early affect. While the participants in the study were at different places in their processes of forgiveness, they all had ample life experience; many had done quite a bit of self-reflection, and most were mothers.

An accounting of lived experience illuminates responsibility ascribable to self and other. When affect rooted in early relational experience is dysregulated, narratives reflect projective or introjective processes of blaming and self-recrimination. When affect is better regulated or let go, narratives are more cohesive. Examples of each were noted in participants' narratives. Therefore, affect regulation determines whether narratives are tethered to early relational experience. While forgiveness is relational by any reasonable metric, affect determines whether a narrative can be constructed from a place of stable subjectivity achieved by being the author of one’s narrative (Ogden, 1986).

Forgiveness is a potential outcome in response to interpersonal conflict. Accountability is similarly relational in that it ideally involves reconsidering meaning constructed in the relational matrix, circumventing blame through attenuated affectivity. Drawing from the critical theories of the conceptual framework—and in deference to the sociopolitical climate during the

109 Forgiveness and Relational Experience time of data collection and analysis--accountability is framed not only as a soberly reflexive consideration of the interpersonal origins of suffering but also of “the material conditions that give rise to it” (Ferguson, 2017, p.15). These conditions are evident in the data. Lisa, for example, described fears of becoming heavy that are grounded in socially normative ideas about female beauty and the very real fear of death. This only compounded the emotional tangle that impeded accountability. Jane also struggled to make sense of the neglect she suffered due to her mother’s inability to balance the demands of traditional gender roles, eventually turning to mysticism to form an accountability narrative. Additionally, Diane, drawing from the twisted moral framework borne of finance (Graeber, 2011), recognized that she clung to resentment because it seemed equivalent to power in that system.

Accountability, as reflected in the data, is identifiable as a component of forgiveness that strengthens narrative cohesion. The attenuation of early affective derivatives allows for a reorganization of experience (Stern, 1983) untethered from previously constructed structures of meaning. Without the verisimilitude that early affect creates, frameworks of meaning constructed in the early relational world are open to scrutiny. Additionally, the separateness of self and other is underscored, contextualizing lived experience dynamic intersubjectivity rather than affectively validated history.

Delineation. The subjective experience of separateness from early relational figures is what I refer to as delineation. Theoretical perspectives identifying the other as a component of the intrapsychic self inform this superordinate theme. Among them is attachment theory, with its focus on the other in the achievement of a subjective sense of security (Bowlby, 1969), as well as neuroscientifically informed concepts of the other as a model for relating and a tool for regulating affect (Siegel, 1999; Coan, 2008; Hill, 2015). Also influential are the basic tenets of

110 Forgiveness and Relational Experience self psychology that emphasize the role of the other in the development of a sense of self (Kohut, 1971) and Klein’s (1935) depressive position as the attainment of subjectivity (Ogden, 1986).

While the data suggests that forgiveness can alter a sense of self disproportionately informed by introjects, the framework of meaning applied to the process in the extant literature can be limiting.

In a comprehensive psychoanalytic exploration of forgiveness, Siassi (2013) lauds its clinical value, specifically what the author sees as the capacity of forgiveness to neutralize harsh introjects. Working from a theoretical perspective similar to my own, Siassi suggests that a psychoanalytic relationship informed by forgiveness can correct early deprivations, allowing the patient “to reclaim his basic entitlement to specific, extremely significant relationships of which he has been deprived” (p.41). While it is not my intention to disprove Siassi’s thesis, the data collected for this study shows that the reclamation of relational entitlements might not have been a goal of the participants. Reclamation of early relational elements entails risks inherent in grounding a remedy in the same structures of meaning that caused the illness. Further, the poststructuralist perspective that informs the conceptual model would make Siassi’s stated clinical goal suspect. The conceptual framework used here would suggest that Siassi’s goal is only one option among many (Gergen, 2015).

Delineation, on the other hand, locates safety in separateness, conceptualizing freedom as a sense of psychic sovereignty consistent with the attainment of subjectivity (Ogden, 1986). The data suggests that the capacity for delineation can be potentiated by forgiveness. An experience of separateness begins with the accountability process in which conflict is relationally contextualized. This sets the stage for an experience of self in relation to other. Recognizing the

111 Forgiveness and Relational Experience relational nature of conflict introduces a framework for meaning-making that can challenge the template created in early development.

The data suggests that the separateness implicit in delineation facilitates a healthy sense of self. While separateness is not the only component of self, the emergence of self is greatly potentiated by the basic understanding of separateness. This stands in contrast to models based on traditional frameworks such as Siassi’s (2013). For example, Ellen’s experience with accountability unfolded in an affectively neutral context, allowing for a consideration of her “side of the street,” likely laying the groundwork for a pattern of delineation culminating in the understanding that “the other person has their own side of the story and their own reasons for doing whatever they’ve done, and my own reactions are mine.” In this case, delineation played a significant role in the emergence of reflexivity. Conversely, the fear and confusion that Hannah associated with her caregivers led to a pattern of vigilance that prompted her to move across the country. Having recognized that harsh introjects can lead to being “afraid of who you are,” Hannah’s geographic intervention could be viewed as a compensatory reaction to the ongoing introjective process, a consciously enacted variation of delineation. The untenability of Hannah’s family situation made escape paramount; emotional survival trumped some of the nuances of forgiveness.

Subjectivity was a topic ubiquitous among the component themes that were subsumed by delineation. Returning to the three dimensions impacted by early relational experience, it is fair to say that affect, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity factor into each superordinate theme.

However, it could be argued that affect is central to accountability, and subjectivity is similarly central to delineation. In the previous chapter, references to introjective process often refer to the crisis of self that I have viewed as poorly delineated self/other representations. In the data,

112 Forgiveness and Relational Experience there are numerous examples of troubled delineation. As noted, this often resulted in the need to reconsider lived experience to contend with understandings of self predicated on introjects. This is evident in Willow’s narrative and Ellen’s; both participants were able to consciously push back against components of selfhood based on harsh introjects. Other participants like Hannah, Diane, and Marty utilized varied iterations of avoidance to protect their personhood. These compensatory interventions, while part of meaningful processes of forgiveness for some of the participants, fall short of integration.

The overlap in the interpersonal and intrapsychic is notable in delineation. Like the affectivity ideally addressed in forgiveness, early introjects are resonant due to the point in developmental history during which they emerged. This might account for the unconscious manifestations of self-other confusion noted in the transcripts. In addition to those noted in the previous chapter, a tendency to slip into the second person was noted when participants spoke of their experiences with misattuned caregiving. For example, while describing her experience with her mother, Willow explained: “with your mom, you feel like they should be the one to protect you.” This shift into the second person could be viewed as a soft sign of adaptive dissociation (Bromberg, 2001) and possibly an expression of the need for separateness.

The volitional, often compensatory manner in which participants enacted delineation illuminates a shortcoming of forgiveness noted in the literature. Smith (2008) suggests that forgiveness is overly reliant on compromise, making it inappropriate for psychoanalytic work. I argue that Smith undervalues compromise. In the following discussion of the final superordinate theme, compromise will be reframed as a tool for constructing meaning reflective of a wellformulated narrative based on empathic understanding of self and other.

113 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Universality. As data collection was completed and analysis began, it became increasingly clear that a series of emerging themes centered around understanding and equality.

These were among the components of the final superordinate theme of universality. This theme can be characterized as the last piece in the process of forgiveness. Accountability calls for a volitionally attenuated affectivity, allowing for an acknowledgment of the relational nature of reality. Delineation builds on that relational framework by reframing separateness as enhanced subjectivity, allowing for an empathic view of self and other. Universality can be viewed as the perspectival shift resulting from the processes of accountability and delineation. Reflective of an increased capacity for intersubjectivity, this superordinate theme refers to an orientation to the other that is untethered from the template created by early relational experience and serving the advancement of an egalitarian interpersonal position. The data suggests that the resulting perspective allows for a view of the other grounded in compassionate understanding rather than the fear born of early relational abidance. This perspective applies to relational experience at interpersonal and cultural levels.

For many participants, understanding was identified as a defining feature of forgiveness.

While characterizations varied, the data suggests that understanding connotes an experience of insight aiding in subjectively authentic meaning-making. To clarify what makes understanding unique in this context, the theoretical framework provided by the depressive position (Klein, 1935) is again useful. Lived experience is qualitatively altered through the attainment of the depressive position and the capacity to interpret experience (Ogden, 1986). Working from this view, the shift from object to subject allows one to become the author of their narrative (Ogden).

This is consistent with participants’ experiences with forgiveness, in which understanding reflects personal truth. The resulting meaning can provide narrative coherence, facilitating

114 Forgiveness and Relational Experience forgiveness. Understanding emerges from the data as an element of perspective grounded in subjectivity. In this context, subjectivity connotes the achievement of the capacity for interpretation (Ogden), allowing for a reordering of lived experience (Stern, 1983) into a satisfying personal narrative.

Understanding creates an armature for forgiveness that allows for an altered interpersonal orientation. The data suggests that the understanding potentiated by forgiveness informs a perspective rooted in mutuality reminiscent of Gadamer’s idea that “knowledge of the universal can emerge from the experience of the individual'' (2013, pp. 359-360), Themes in the data related to collectivity and a reduction in judgmentalism were numerous in participants’ descriptions of their experiences with forgiveness. Ellen described her experience of forgiving as “seeing the bigger picture and seeing [others] as equal…as human, and as fallible;” Diane mused that “[p]erhaps forgiveness is an acknowledgment of an equality between people.” This gives forgiveness an ethical context. While seemingly leaning into a more theological formulation of forgiveness, I would argue that Diane’s ideal of forgiveness is based on an orientation to the other outside of traditional frameworks of meaning based on the moralfinancial linguistic overlap (Graeber, 2011). Further, universality draws from an interpersonal perspective deliberately decoupled from early relational affects and consistent with the peace and separation in and between intrapsychic and interpersonal life. Attenuated affectivity resulting in a sense of self less defined by harsh introjects and an experience of the other less informed by projection creates an enhanced appreciation of self and other. This appreciation is grounded in reflexivity and an implicit acknowledgment of collective suffering (Bollas, 2018).

While the previous two superordinate themes focused on forgiveness as applied to attachment figures and essential others, universality refers to a broader interpersonal orientation.

115 Forgiveness and Relational Experience The post-attachment theory literature strongly supports the significance of early relational experience in developing interpersonal patterns. Additionally, many theorists (see Benjamin, 1990) suggest that impairment of intersubjectivity–the capacity for recognizing self and other as subjects–can be traced to experience in early relational life. The data indicates that the process of forgiveness can facilitate a perspectival shift that enhances intersubjectivity.

The empathy implicit in the theme of universality is reminiscent of Buber’s (1958) formulation of relating, which viewed experience as inherently relational and relating intersubjectively as a transcendental connection to something bigger. Intersubjectivity, a term attributed to Husserl (Cooper-White, 2014), was a key component of transcendental phenomenology. These associations to divinity are germane to this exploration of forgiveness.

Some debts cannot be equitably resolved in a moral framework built on financial concepts.

Hence, forgiveness becomes impossible, making its achievement transcendental, divine, an act of selfless charity or devout beneficence. According to traditional meaning-making frameworks, the empathy required for intersubjectivity must be located in the realm of divinity. My interpretation of the data suggests that the shift towards universality entails a capacity for mutuality that only appears divine when viewed through the lens provided by a traditional framework of meaning-making. Applying the critical theories of the conceptual model leads to a formulation of universality as a perspectival shift away from the template created in the attachment relationship without the need for divine intervention.

Universality’s emergence from the data was particularly relevant given the sociopolitical climate during data collection. During that time, the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic was in effect, causing distress and uncertainty that pundits weaponized as the 2020 presidential election neared. During the proposal for this dissertation, it had been decided that data

116 Forgiveness and Relational Experience collection would include an acknowledgment of the uniqueness of this time in history and an exploration of its impact on participants’ thoughts regarding forgiveness. In interviews, participants often referenced the sociopolitical climate without being prompted, and the general thrust was that cultural events reinforced participants’ positions. The data shows that the change in perspective that this superordinate theme seeks to conceptualize is applicable at the cultural level. The participants’ narratives suggest that engagement in the process of forgiveness of early relational figures can facilitate a changed interpersonal perspective.

Validity and Limitations The collection and analysis of the data in this study were conducted in accordance with the values of IPA methodology as laid out in Smith et al. (2009). Among them is a high level of analytic rigor and a nonjudgmental position during data collection. The interviews were designed to provide as much space as possible for participants to share their lived experience.

During the recorded interviews, I took contemporaneous notes, and once transcribed, I spent an extended period with the data. Issues of trustworthiness, as laid out in Bloomberg and Volpe (2016), were addressed as follows: Credibility. My biases were tracked through journaling and note-taking, culminating in their clear identification. Additionally, the use of polarization (Smith et al., 2009) during data analysis allowed for a consideration of differences and similarities in the data. Lastly, I engaged in consultation with panel members along the way, including sharing notes related to my clinical lens's evolution.

Dependability. As noted, collaborating with panel members during the consolidation of themes allowed for an audit of my analytic process. Further, ample verbatim transcript selections were provided to prevent an overreliance on my interpretation.

117 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Transferability. This dimension of trustworthiness was adhered to in a manner consistent with qualitative research. By this standard, preference was given to theoretical transferability rather than empirical generalizability (Smith et al., 2009). As a result, a reader can compare their experience to the analysis.

The interview experience was well received by participants, and some reached out after their interviews to express their appreciation. One participant shared that the themes discussed in the interview were revisited in her personal psychotherapy. The positive reaction from participants suggests that insight was gained through exploration rather than coercion and that meaning was constructed dialogically (Orange, 2011. Gadamer, 2013).

Implications for Social Work Practice Before I began recruitment for this study, in consultation with my chairperson, I shared the suspicion that almost anyone interested in participation would be a good candidate. This was based on the assumption that the subjective experience of misattunement is ubiquitous. As it turned out, all those who responded met the clinical criteria for inclusion, and seven of the eight screened individuals participated in the study. Part of what I take away from this is that the framework for identifying mental illness is profoundly flawed. An understanding of the impact of social factors on mental health is part of clinical social work practice. However, the data suggest the need for an increased focus on the pathogenic nature of existing frameworks of normativity. The oppressive social systems on which psychiatric taxonomy is predicated have created a framework for understanding mental health that can often perpetuate injustice and minimize a vast sum of emotional suffering (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009; Ferguson, 2017).

Psychiatry has a troubled history with regard to culpability as it pertains to early relational experience. This includes object-blaming trends that have linked the psychotic process

118 Forgiveness and Relational Experience to early maternal failures (Gabbard, 2014). This pattern risks codifying long-standing oppressive frameworks. As exemplified by this study’s participants, a clinical approach that embraces accountability is a good alternative and is likely already practiced by many clinicians.

Suggestions for Future Research The extensive quantitative research on forgiveness offers a window into its phenomenology, but additional qualitative study of the subject could be helpful for clinicians.

Essentially, forgiveness emerges from this data as a process that can potentially discharge affect rooted in early relational experience. Among the arguments questioning the usefulness of forgiveness in clinical practice is the suggestion that it adds little to the extant psychoanalytic literature (Smith, 2008). I agree; the imposition of forgiveness or any other subjectively determined concept on a patient is questionable. However, for those who have used the concept to make meaning–for good or ill–there is the potential for significant therapeutic value in its exploration. With that stated, further qualitative study untethered to traditional assumptions about the moral correctness of forgiveness could offer more insight into the experience.

Specifically, the phenomenology of letting go–colorfully illuminated by the participants in this study–hints at the potential of lived experiences to provide examples of affect regulation and intrapsychic integration.

Revisiting the Original Study Assumptions The following is a revisitation of the assumptions stated in Chapter 1 in light of the findings.

1. Forgiveness is a process that results in a reduction of anger toward another.

119 Forgiveness and Relational Experience The affective change potentiated by forgiveness is well supported by the data.

Anger, dysphoria, and similar affects were notably diminished for participants who engaged in a process of forgiveness that entailed a letting go of affects– including anger– tied to early relational experience.

2. Despite the expected outcome, forgiveness lacks clarity as a linguistic shortcut referring to a complex process.

The need for more clarity regarding forgiveness is addressed in the previous review of the literature. The data suggests that the linguistic shortcuts typically deferred to are grounded in traditional meaning-making frameworks. Further, participant narratives suggest that forgiveness is a dynamic and longitudinal process that is subjectively determined.

3. Therapy clients--either consciously or unconsciously-- can refer to forgiveness in a manner that obfuscates personal meaning.

The potential to default to traditional frameworks of meaning depersonalizes forgiveness. The data suggests that personal meaning is obstructed by rote adherence to conventional frameworks.

4. Forgiveness is not therapeutic without personal meaning.

The data shows that meaning-making is highly subjective and relationally determined. Therapeutic utilization of forgiveness would necessitate an exploration of subjective meaning.

5. Forgiveness may have a meaningful role in the narratives of those who have struggled to integrate parts of their early relational experience.

120 Forgiveness and Relational Experience The data suggests that forgiveness can provide conceptual coherence to personal narratives.

6. Misattunement in early relational experience is subjective; it is self-defined by the individual who experienced it.

Consistent with evolving views of trauma (Gabbard, 2014), misattunement is subjectively determined. Standardizing human suffering through an overreliance on traditional frameworks of meaning is pathogenic in itself.

7. The type of relational experience being studied is ubiquitous, affecting adults who have “been abused, neglected and violated…inescapable aspects of even the best ‘good enough’ growings up” (Gottleib, 2004, p.670).

The appropriateness of all potential participants screened for the study supports this assumption.

Conclusion The early relational experiences of the seven participants in this study reflected a subjectively determined experience of suboptimal attunement from caregivers that spanned a broad spectrum of attachment failures. The participants identified these encounters with early misattunement as consequential, as illustrated in their narrative on affective, subjective, and intersubjective dimensions of experience. The data supported a conceptual formulation that views early relational experience as a source of patterns of affect, understanding of self, and capacity to recognize the subjectivity of the other. The three dimensions impact each other and evolve with the attainment of more and more experience.

Experiences of forgiving, as well as experiences of difficulty with forgiving, were shared and explored with a range of results across cases. Participants who identified as having forgiven

121 Forgiveness and Relational Experience their caregivers, and those who did not, communicated an understanding of the mental health benefits that could be gained through a subjectively authentic process of forgiving. Most notably, the attenuation of affect—often identified as ‘letting go’—was seen as a beneficial outcome. This actual or potential benefit was recognized across all cases. Participants’ lived experience demonstrated the potential of forgiveness to potentiate an intrapsychic phenomenon leading to a separateness from introjected early objects. The lived experience of the participants also suggested the possibility of an enhanced understanding of self and other, resulting in an egalitarian interpersonal perspective.

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135 Forgiveness and Relational Experience

Appendix Consent Form

136 Forgiveness and Relational Experience

Institute for Clinical Social Work Research Information and Consent for Participation in Social Behavioral Research

I,_____________________________________, acting for myself, agree to take part in the research entitled Exploring Forgiveness in the Context of Early Relational Experience.

This work will be carried out by Steven Siegel, LCSW (Principal Researcher), under the supervision of John Ridings, Ph.D. (Dissertation Chair).

This work is being conducted under the auspices of the Institute for Clinical Social Work; Robert Morris Center, 401 South State Street; Suite 822, Chicago, IL 60605; (312)935-4232.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate how forgiveness is defined and utilized by individuals who had suboptimal connections to their caregivers. It is widely accepted that a lack of rapport in the early attachment relationship is extremely consequential. This research study looks to adults with this type of attachment history to provide a unique perspective on the topic of forgiveness. The results of this study will provide an addition to the clinical literature on the topic of forgiveness and may be used by practitioners to inform treatment interventions.

Procedures used in the study and duration The Principal Researcher will conduct one or two 60-90 minute interviews with each participant via online videoconference. The interviews will be audiotaped, and participants will be identified by false names of their choosing. The taped interviews will be given to a reputable transcription company that is fully compliant with privacy laws. If transcripts of interviews are shared with the members of the Primary Researcher’s dissertation committee, all professional and legal privacy protections will be observed. In appreciation for their time, each participant will be emailed a $20 electronic gift card.

Benefits

137 Forgiveness and Relational Experience There are no direct benefits to the participants in this study. This study will contribute to the existing knowledge on the topic of forgiveness and stands to provide some benefit to clinicians and other researchers.

Costs There are no costs associated with participation in this study.

Possible Risks and/or Side Effects This study poses minimal potential risk to participants; any risk would be in the form of possible emotional discomfort as a result of discussing personal information. Participants will be notified during the pre-interview process that personal questions will be asked as part of the study.

Participants are encouraged to share only information they feel is relevant and non-damaging to their own emotional well-being. If you experience emotional distress following the interview, a list of resources, including psychotherapists will be made available.

Privacy and Confidentiality Data from this study will include your chosen false name. Data from interviews will be stored on the Primary Researcher’s private computer and transferred by email (on an as-needed basis) to my committee chairperson’s secured email account and computer. All audio files containing data will be permanently deleted upon completion of the research study.

Subject Assurances By signing this consent form, you agree to take part in this study. You have not given up any of your rights or released this institution from responsibility for carelessness.

You may cancel consent and refuse to continue in this study at any time without penalty or loss of benefits. Your relationship with the staff of ICSW will not be affected in any way, now or in the future, if you refuse to take part or if you begin the study and then withdraw.

If you have any questions about the research methods, you can contact Steven Siegel at ssiegel@icsw.edu or Dr. John Ridings (see contact info below).

If you have any questions about your rights as a research subject, you may contact Dr. John Ridings, Chair of Institutional Review Board; ICSW; Robert Morris Center, 401 South State Street; Suite 822, Chicago, IL 60605; irbchair@icsw.edu.

Signatures For the Participant I have read this consent form, and I agree to take part in this study as it is explained in this consent form:

138 Forgiveness and Relational Experience Participant Name (please print): ___________________________________ Participant Signature:__________________________________________ Date: _____________ 1. Would you like a summary of the results of this study?

Yes: ____ No: ____ For the Primary Researcher I certify that I have explained the research to _________________________ and believe that they understand and that they have agreed to participate freely. I agree to answer any additional questions when they arise during the research or afterward.

Researcher Name (please print): ___________________________________ Researcher Signature:__________________________________________ Date: _____________