Forgiveness Is Not (and Never Was) a Panacea

There is no panacea for improving physical or mental health. No one experience, intervention, or treatment method works for everyone in every situation, including forgiveness.

Source: Amanda Ann Gregory/Adobe

Some consider penicillin a universal cure for all infections caused by bacteria. Although penicillin has saved many lives, it has limitations. Some patients are allergic to it, and many bacterial infections have become resistant to penicillin. Is penicillin beneficial for some patients in certain medical circumstances? Yes. Is penicillin beneficial for all patients in all medical circumstances? No. It is not a panacea.

Forgiveness has been viewed as a panacea that cures anger, resentment, revenge, trauma, physical ailments, and relational conflicts. How often have we heard these statements?

• Forgiveness will free you!
• If you don’t forgive, you are harming yourself.
• Forgiving will improve your physical and emotional health.

Is there evidence of a relationship between forgiveness and physical and mental health? Yes. Many studies indicate a positive correlation between forgiveness and health. Is there evidence that forgiveness causes improved physical and psychological health? No, there is no such evidence.

Correlation vs. Causation

Yu-Rim Less and Robert D. Enright conducted a meta-analysis study that concluded that the more people forgave, the physically healthier they reported to be. Does this study indicate that forgiveness causes improved health? No, it doesn’t. Instead, this study shows a correlation, a statistical relationship between one variable (forgiveness) and another (health). This study found a positive correlation as those who reported forgiving were likelier to report being physically healthier. If this study showed causation, one variable (forgiveness) causes another variable (health) to change, we could explore the concept of forgiveness as a panacea—after more research is conducted.

Correlations are never alone sufficient to prove a causal connection between variables. That is, just because forgiveness positively correlates with health, it does not indicate that forgiveness causes good health. To use an often-cited example, there’s a positive correlation between sales of ice cream and drownings (that is, as sales of ice cream increase, so too do occurrences of drownings). However, it is absurd to say that ice cream causes people to drown. In this case, the positive correlation between the two variables is explained by an underlying cause for both of them, namely that ice cream sales and drownings both increase during hot summer months when people are more likely to consume ice cream and go swimming.

I spent years researching forgiveness for my book, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery On Your Own Terms, and I found no study that indicated forgiving will improve health or that forgiveness causes an improvement in health.

Consider Alternative Explanations

A correlation study shows the type of relationship that two variables have (positive, negative, or no) but does not explain this relationship. Yu-Rim Less and Robert D. Enright’s study indicated a positive relationship between forgiveness and health, as those who reported forgiving were likelier to report being physically healthier, but they cannot explain why. We could guess that forgiving improves your health. But we should consider other explanations for this relationship? Consider these alternatives:

• Healthier people are more able to forgive than those who are less healthy.
• Healthier people are more likely to benefit from forgiveness than those who are less healthy.
• Healthier people are less likely to have experienced physical or psychological trauma, which negatively impacts physical and mental health. They are, therefore, more able to both forgive and be healthy.
• Healthier people who forgive have certain positive personality traits (agreeableness, compassion, etc.), and these personality traits—not forgiveness itself—improve physical well-being.
• Healthier people tend to be wealthier or more privileged, and wealthier or more privileged people are less likely to belong to oppressed or marginalized populations, which means they are generally less susceptible to stressors or to the negative emotions and dispositions that would disincline them toward forgiveness, as well as less likely to suffer from the kinds of wrongs or injustices that are the most difficult to forgive.

Which of these relationships are accurate, and which are not? We don’t know. Therefore, we cannot recommend forgiveness to everyone to improve their health, as we cannot say that forgiveness causes improved mental or physical health. Sadly, forgiveness advocates state or imply that forgiveness is a panacea, and this confuses people looking for a way to improve their health.

Can forgiveness be beneficial? It can. Is it proven to benefit everyone? No. There is no panacea for improving physical or mental health. Instead of searching for a panacea that doesn’t exist, I suggest finding what helps to improve your health and embracing whatever that may be.