Forgiving the Ex
posted by Solangel Maldonado
It seems that Americans are giving a lot of thought to forgiveness these days. We are asking ourselves whether we should forgive Eliot Spitzer, bailed-out bankers, and the Bush administration’s practice of torture. Oprah and the Mayo Clinic have sections on forgiveness and, a few weeks ago, Case Western Reserve Law School held a symposium on “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and the Law” where the keynote speaker, Jens Meierhenrich, analyzed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. I want to focus on an area where I think forgiveness matters most—at home.
It is no surprise that some (possibly many) divorcing spouses feel angry and vengeful during and after the divorce. This anger may be healthy at first. It might motivate a battered spouse to leave her abusive partner or push a husband to leave an unfaithful wife who is unlikely to change her behavior. Anger is a sign of self-respect and belief in one’s self-worth. However, anger that endures for months, years, even decades, is not healthy. Studies have found a correlation between long-term anger and high blood pressure, poor cardiovascular health, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders.
Anger towards a former spouse also negatively affects one’s children. Angry parents are less likely to agree on custodial arrangements and are more likely to denigrate the other parent to the children, or to deny or interfere with the other parent’s access to the children. Angry parents sometimes withhold child support and in some cases, launch a custody battle out of spite. As many as 25% of divorcing families are characterized as high conflict and their children are stuck in the middle of their parents conflict and hostility for most of their childhood years.
Children of angry parents are also more likely to be subjected to poor parenting. Not surprisingly, positive parenting skills (such as responsiveness and understanding of children’s needs) tend to decrease when interparental hostility is high, while bad parenting practices (such as yelling) tend to increase. Angry parents may also displace their anger towards the other parent onto their children.
Interparental anger also increases the likelihood that the nonresidential parent (usually the father) will abandon the children emotionally and financially. Approximately 30% of fathers who do not live with their children have little or no contact with them. Although there are many reasons for the lack of contact, the nonresidential father’s relationship with his children’s mother might be the strongest predictor of post-divorce paternal contact. One reason is that fathers are less likely to see their children if they have to deal with a former spouse whom they despise, despises them, or both.
So what does all of this have to with forgiveness? Well, a lot. Legislators have spent a lot of time and energy exploring ways to reduce the anger and bitterness that characterizes some divorces. The no-fault divorce movement was motivated, in part, by a desire to reduce the acrimony and hostility of divorce. It was believed (naively, if you ask me) that eliminating fault (e.g., adultery, cruelty, abandonment) as a ground for divorce and excluding evidence of marital misconduct from the divorce proceedings would “enable parties to end their marriage as amicably as possible.” Similarly, one of the primary goals of mandatory mediation of custody disputes is “to reduce any acrimony that exists between the parties to a dispute involving custody or visitation.” N.C. Gen. Stat. Ann. § 50-13.1 (1999). Most recently, many states have required divorcing parents to participate in parenting classes that teach them how their negative attitudes and behaviors towards each other affect their children. The hope, again, is to reduce (or least control) the interparental anger and hostility that negatively affects children.
Despite these legislative efforts, many divorced parents are still angry. In fact, some studies suggest that custody disputes have increased in recent years, thereby fueling parents’ anger towards the other parent. Maybe parents need to learn to forgive. Numerous studies suggest that forgiveness reduces anger and that people can be taught, or at least encouraged, to forgive those who have unjustly hurt them.
In my next post, I will describe how lawmakers can use the numerous forgiveness interventions psychologists and other social scientists have applied in other contexts to help divorced or separated parents at least try to forgive each other.
April 24, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Posted in: Family Law
Print This Post
Responses (5)
Michael - April 25, 2009 at 6:22 am
Like a lot of great ideas — at first they seem almost too simple. Llewellyn wrote a long time that law should aspire to strengthening the group in how it resolves conflict (The Cheyanne Way). From this “strengthening” standard, “compensation” as a remedy falls short, because it assumes that exchanging money solves the damage to relationships. I rhink your post on forgiveness fits really well inot this way of thinking. I agree that forgineness should have a stronger value in itself as a remedial goal — and as lawyers we should better understand developing dialgoues about achieving forgivenss.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 25, 2009 at 8:54 am
Yet more reason why the “therapies of desire” (e.g., Stoics like Epictetus; cf. the studies of Nussbaum and Hadot) and “spiritual exercises” (e.g., St. Ignatius Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ or Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices or the spiritual regimen of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra) found in in theistic and non-theistic religious worldviews and traditions as well as in non-religious philosophical traditions are absolutely relevant to our daily lives (see John Haldane’s essay, ‘On the very idea of spiritual values’ in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful [2000]: 53-71; as John Cottingham reminds us in The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value [2005], ‘In the history of philosophy, the epithet ’spiritual’ is most commonly coupled not with the term ‘beliefs’ but with the term ‘exercises.’).
There would appear to be compelling evidence that it takes just such disciplined forms of “mind training” to transcend the myriad deleterious effects of “passions” and vices (what the Christian calls ’sin’ or the Buddhist sees as the effects of a kind of ‘grasping’ [desire gone wild if you will] or attachment and ignorance). To the extent that contemporary forms of psychological therapy or psychotherapy are capable of prompting growth in the psychological awareness, ethical living and self-knowledge essential to personal transformation, they too can be enlisted in this arduous endeavor. However, I think we should be sensitive to the fact that the aforementioned traditions remind us how difficult it is to subdue the passions and transcend “deadly sins” like anger or envy (in fact, I suspect anger is only part of a larger ‘emotional complex’ in situations like your describe here) and thus to learn to learn the art of forgiveness exemplified in the parables and sayings of Jesus in the Gospels (cf. Anna Wierzbicka’s What Did Jesus Mean [2001]).
That said, I look forward to the subject matter of the next post.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 25, 2009 at 9:38 am
Professor Maldonado,
I quickly skimmed through your excellent paper, “Cultivating Forgiveness” and highlighted the following passage:
“Consequently, any Healing Divorce program must educate participants as to what forgiveness is, what it is not, why they should forgive and how. This may be taught in six to eight weekly, small group sessions led by mental health professionals, including graduate students, familiar with the forgiveness literature and interventions. It is unlikely that all divorcing parents will want to participate in forgiveness education, especially since they are unlikely to be familiar with the benefits of forgiveness or what the process entails. Given that many divorcing parents are angry and could potentially benefit from forgiving their former spouse, participation in forgiveness education should conceivably be mandatory for all divorcing parents in the same way that parenting education is mandatory in many states. However, due to limited resources and the logistics of training thousands of mental health professionals willing to conduct forgiveness sessions, states might want to mandate participation for high-conflict parents only, at least initially. While parents might resent a compulsory program, they might feel differently after completing it as did most parents who resisted parenting education initially, but later reported that it was beneficial.”
In so far as “mental health professionals” may not subscribe to or be familiar with the worldviews (individuated as ‘lifeworlds’) of those participating in such programs might this not be an obstacle to its success? In other words, and for example, let us say a devout Muslim couple is enrolled in such a program: would the “therapeutic discourse” be conducted in the language and terms familiar to this couple?
And perhaps your experience is far different from mine on this score, but I’m not sure why one would want “graduate students” to play a prominent role in such processes, given their relative lack in most cases of just those sort of life experiences often christened conducive to the requisite knowledge or wisdom in such matters.
anon - April 25, 2009 at 4:21 pm
But there is obviously a relationship between the law’s refusal to recognize the harm done by adultery and anger. When you can sue another for even the most trivial non-family harms, the law’s odd forgiveness of adultery and psychological abuse is pretty jarring. Moreover, we don’t expect victims of breach, tort, or crime to forgive – - though it may benefit them and their family members if they can move on – - since we recognize that the breachors, tort(ers), and criminals have done evil. Until very recently in our society, adultery was a moral, civil, and criminal wrong. It’s not surprising that lay intuitions haven’t followed coastal progressive views about the (un)importance of fidelity as quickly as such elites might have hoped.
Moreover, though it may be that the inability to forgive has some detrimental effects on some children, I really tend to doubt that science is replicable or general. Children, like adults, adapt. And the harm may be caused by the adultery in the first instance: why not simply make the law deter the conduct by making it civilly remediable again?
That is, before we adopt a paternalist & very intrusive state action to change individual preferences & reactions to adultery and other kinds of bad marital conduct (psychological abuse, for instance), I’d like to see a better justification. Or at least a reason that we ought to treat marital harm differently from any other kind of legally cognizable harm out there. The stating telling people that they must forgive (on penalty of losing rights to their children) strikes me as a really quick way for the state to lose legitimacy & for judges to face recalcitrant parties. That a lack of forgiveness – potentially – affects kids’ relationship with wrongdoing spouses doesn’t strike me as sufficient to justify such a radical form of paternalism.
AYY - April 27, 2009 at 3:21 am
“We are asking ourselves whether we should forgive Eliot Spitzer, bailed-out bankers, and the Bush administration’s practice of torture.”
Oh good heavens. I guess the purpose of that was just to find a way to sneak in a Bush bash, because it’s doesn’t have anything to do with what you go on to say. You could have mentioned something about forgiving Obama for his working relationship with Bill Ayers, but I guess we’ve already forgiven that.
Leave a Reply