Why Forgive and Forget is Bad Advice

Forgiveness is a core virtue across religious traditions the world over, but the concept seems to present a paradox. Forgetting past hurts can feel potentially catastrophic, making us vulnerable to similar offenses in the future from the original perpetrator or from others like them. But letting go may bring us peace from feelings of resentment, anger or hate.

The memories of these hurts can haunt people for a lifetime, often leading to repeated violence or perpetual war, some of the worst scourges of humankind. Duke University memory researcher, philosopher and cognitive scientist Felipe de Brigard has been studying the relationship between memory and forgiveness since the early 2000s with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. He has just won a MacArthur Foundation grant to continue pursuing that work.

Read more: “Are Some People Addicted to Revenge?” De Brigard has specifically looked at how forgiveness and memory intersect for people living in a mountainous region near the northern coast of Colombia called Montes de María. Thousands of murders took place in this region from the 1980s through 2000, primarily at the hands of right-wing paramilitary forces. But because of how Colombia’s transitional justice and reconciliation process has proceeded, many of the paramilitary soldiers who demobilized and confessed their crimes are now living back in the same towns and rural districts with their former victims.

I spoke with De Brigard about what forgiveness does to the emotional weight of a painful memory, what his research tells us about how memory works, and what makes some offenses unforgivable. People are often told to “forgive and forget,” but your research into how forgiveness affects memory suggests this is bad advice. Forgetting is a tricky term.

It’s unclear exactly what people mean by that. The memory and forgiveness project is an offshoot of another project that I had been working on for almost a decade, which capitalizes on the fact that every time you remember a personal event, you risk changing the memory itself. Most of the research on this process looks at the negative consequences.

Typical examples are that the person sees someone mug someone else and then the cop comes and gives them some misinformation at the time of recollection, saying, “Oh, did you notice if the person was African American?” or something like that. Then that information, along with the biases of the individual, taint the content of the original memory such that when they remember it, it comes up as if the perpetrator was an African American. I wanted to know, are there any positive consequences of the interaction between memory and imagination?