Relationship Matters Podcast Number 29 15.12 [Start of recorded material] From Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, this is Relationship Matters. Hello, and welcome to Relationship Matters, the podcast of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. I m your host Dr Bjorn Holmes. Welcome to podcast number 29 and the fourth of five podcasts in our fall 2013 series. With me in the studio I have a now familiar voice, Matt Grasso, say hello Matt. What s happening everybody? Matt, are you excited about the snow we just got? In a word, no. Have you been skiing? I haven t been skiing yet, but to me I m excited about skiing three months of the year. I don t need to ski six months of the year. Actually Matt, I have a more serious question for you. When you re feeling guilty in your relationship, how do you ask for forgiveness? What do you do? Wow. I am a full disclosure person, so I m one of those talk too much people who I just am immediately oh my God I m feeling guilty about this I have to download all my feelings and you have to deal with that, go. Matt, that s pretty good for not having any idea that I was going to ask that question. Well here s the think, it s good for everyone, my wife who has to hear it all the time, probably not so good for her. We ve got someone on the phone from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he s an assistant professor of psychology, I have Blake Riek. Blake, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So the title of the paper is Transgressors Guilt and Shame: A Longitudinal Examination of Forgiveness Seeking and it s coauthored by Lindsey Root Luna of Hope College and Chelsea Schnabelrauch of Kansas State University. The paper is available online at this time and will appear in print in the future. It s free to download from the web page of the Journal of Social and Personal - 1 -
Relationship courtesy of Sage Publications. So Blake tell us how did you get in to this work? Well it comes from two convergent interests, I guess. The first as a social psychologist looking at the fact that we spend most of waking hours in some type of social situation and a lot of those involve relationships, invariably there s going to be transgressions, there s going to be, whether intentional or not, transgressions, there s going to be some types of offence and yet most of those offences don t end up destroying or breaking the relationship. We navigate our way through them and I was interested in how do we do that, how do we maintain it in the space of our senses and so forgiveness seeking and forgiveness granting was an obvious way that we do that. The other area of interest was more of the theological area of forgiveness, a lot of religions have forgiveness as a cornerstone in their world view and as a Christian myself I was interested in that, but interested more in how does that psychologically work itself out. So those two areas kind of converged and I started to look for some less explored areas in forgiveness. So your interest is not in the things that are a deal breaker, but the little things in everyday life that we have to work our way through. Right yes, because those are much more common and so how do we then get past that and not by forgiveness as we don t do it by getting rid of the feelings or by saying that it wasn t a big deal, but buy saying, Yes it was a problem, but we re going to move on from that in some way, shape or form. So what did you guys do in this research? Well one of the things that we had realised is that a lot of the forgiveness research previously had been fairly one sided and by explaining about one sided is that it looked at the forgiveness from the perspective of the victim. So how does the victim forgive, what incentivises them to, what are the outcomes of forgiveness and people like Mike McCullough at Worthington, Charlotte Witvliet and a host of others have done really wonderful work on that to show the benefits of the victim forgiving. But there has been relatively little research on forgiveness from the perspective of the transgressor, so the person who did the offence and so we wanted to attack it from that angle and look and see well what motivates someone to seek forgiveness, why would they do that and so we decided to look in to the research and we saw that there could be a number of factors. Maybe we thought guilt would be a major factor and so we went about getting subjects who had committed some type of offence and ask them about that and then tracking them over time to see if their earlier feelings of guilt and other factors of the transgression would predict forgiveness seeking later on down the road. - 2 -
Can you give us some examples of what types of transgressions we re talking about here? Yes, they actually varied quite a bit. The majority of them were in friendship situations and then the second highest category was romantic or ex-romantic relationships because some of them didn t maintain the relationship. But they ranged from fairly minor incidents to a prank that went a little too far to actually cheating on their significant other and so people were actually quite frank. We had them write about these offences and rate them on a number of different scales and yes there was quite a bit of variability in there. Okay, so what did you find? Well we found that certain factors about the transgression, like how severe it was and obviously as you can imagine they ranged in severity, but how severe it was, how responsible the person felt, how much they were ruminating or dwelling on the offence. Those types of factors were associated with increases in guilt and then those increases in guilt were associated with later forgiveness seeking behaviour because it was longitudinal we were able to track that over time and not just get a snapshot but see it over a period of a month to show that guilt was driving the forgiveness seeking rather than vice versa. So you re basically saying that, I mean I think of guilt often as perhaps as not a particularly useful emotion, but you re basically saying it is. Yes, I mean that s what s interesting about guilt is that it s actually a very pro-social emotion, it s not a pleasant one, we don t like it, but it s actually an indicator that something is wrong and so that something is wrong in the situation assuming that sometimes guilt can be non-deserved, you feel guilty about something you shouldn t. But a lot of times it s a diagnostic, it says, Hey something s wrong with this situation, this relationship. What s important to do is distinguish between guilt and shame which we often use just as interchangeable terms, but they actually mean something different. Shame is more of an overall negative evaluation of the self, so I m a horrible person and I m worthless or something along those lines and that s actually not very helpful at all. Guilt is I did a bad thing, so I may still be a decent person but I recognise that what I did was bad and in our study we measured both guilt and shame but shame did not have any impact on forgiveness seeking. There was no relationship there, but guilt does. So guilt actually as bad as it feels motivates us to restore relationships. Shame may make us withdraw and doesn t really help us in that. So disentangling those two things seems to be very important. - 3 -
Got you, so with guilt often comes a correction and with shame you just sit there and beat yourself up and really do anything to make the situation better. Yes, that s one of the things our study found was that guilt was the driver of, Hey I m going to try to reconcile, I m going to say that I was wrong, I m going to try to say this is what I did and I know it was wrong, I want to keep this relationship. But shame had no relationship with forgiveness seeking, no relationship with these restorative behaviours. Blake, in our last podcast Harry Reis enlightened us a lot on compassion and compassionate love within a relationship. I m curious, how is compassion and compassionate love related to guilt? Yes, well we didn t have specifically compassionate love, but we had something probably similar, a very similar concept of relationship commitment and so I would imagine just in our study the more committed you were to the person the guiltier you felt when you offended them which lead you to seek more forgiveness. But I would imagine compassionate love would be a very similar thing, the more I love this person the guiltier I m going to feel when I hurt them. If I do an offence against my wife I feel much worse about that than I do if it s just a random acquaintance, right, and so that s going to make me feel guiltier but that, while it doesn t feel good, it s actually a good thing because that says, Okay now I need to fix this, I need to make this better some way and so that commitment or as you mentioned compassionate love those things can definitely motivate forgiveness seeking. I guess where I m coming at, and you mentioned this being tied to different types of religions and I certainly see differences between Judah Christian religions and say Buddhism for instance and those kind of things, and almost feel like guilt to me feels more almost centred around the person that is transgressing, that somehow they want to fix something about the relationship but that it almost comes from a slightly selfish standpoint. Whereas to me compassion almost comes slightly more from an altruistic standpoint and we could argue a lot whether altruism really exists, but that s kind of the things that get conjured up in my mind when I hear those two words. Yes, I mean I think that commitment increases forgiveness seeking above and beyond the effect of just making you feel guilty. So it s not just that you feel guilty, it s also because I want to continue this relationship I ll seek forgiveness so even if I don t feel that guilty if I m highly committed I may still do that and so that s a very kind of selfish view of it. But there is also this idea that s been shown of empathy and things like compassion and empathy and those things, taking the victim s perspective, also seems to make people feel guiltier and realise what I did was wrong and so I think it s probably - 4 -
a combination like a lot of things of both a self-serving I want this relationship to last because it s good for me, but also I m in that victim s shoes and I realise that this was really bad and so it s probably a combination of both of those things. Yes I m kind of thinking from almost a reconciliation standpoint. This has been one of the debates in the forgiveness research is well are they the same thing, forgiveness and reconciliation and a lot of people argue, and I would agree, that you can have one, you can have forgiveness or reconciliation without the other. You can reconcile but still hold this forgiveness or lack of forgiveness in your heart, what s referred to as pseudo forgiveness or you can forgive somebody but not reconcile maybe because it s not safe, may be because that person is no longer available, may be they ve passed away and so they are separate but they are in so but with forgiveness seeking obviously you are probably seeking to restore some relationship, so there is much more of a reconciliation focus with forgiveness seeking than perhaps forgiveness granting. Fascinating. If you have one piece of advice for our listeners out there what is it? Well one of the things is communication is going to be really key as the victim can let the transgressor know listen this really was a big deal, that person will then realise the severity of it or realise their responsibility which will make them feel probably guilty and I m not necessarily recommending a guilt trip but just being honest with feelings that are out there, can communicate what the victim is feeling which then will let the person know oh something is wrong here and then it seems that that s enough to prompt, or at least increase, the chances of forgiveness seeking taking place. Matt, what do you say? I mean I think at some point people who do something bad and feel guilty probably still don t have the guts to go and rectify it even when they re feeling that guilt. So that would be, you know, you need guilt followed by courage I think to set things right. Yes, you need to be brave, absolutely. And that s tough, brave is hard. Yes, forgiveness seeking definitely does put you you re putting yourself out there because it could be rejected if you say, I m sorry, please forgive me and the person doesn t, I mean that s almost worse and it makes you feel worse perhaps. Although we have some on a different study, some tentative evidence that even just the act of - 5 -
seeking forgiveness, whether it s granted or not, actually does reduce your guilt so you do feel better but it still is somewhat risky. So the word from Vermont is, even on snowy days, to be brave and to face up to what you ve done and to communicate and to make yourself vulnerable. Only through that vulnerability can you really have true intimacy with someone else. What do you think Blake? Yes, I mean I think that s a big part of it. I think just looking at the perspective of the victim, looking at what you ve done in an honest way without generalising that too, Oh I must be a horrible person, I mean that s the danger. But being able to look at it in a way that says, This is what I did what was wrong, but I am able to try to at least fix it or if I can t fix it at least express my remorse for that. Which requires that the victim also thinks that the transgressor as also a human being that makes mistakes and is able to take a step back from it and look at it more objectively in the bigger picture. Yes and that s why empathy has been one of the major factors that leads to forgiveness granting is just that act of being able to empathise with the transgressor makes you more likely to forgive. Well Blake this is awesome, but we have some time constraints, I want to thank you so much for enlightening us with this. Thanks for having me. Relationship Matters is a production of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and Sage Publications. You can subscribe through itunes by searching for Sage podcasts or access the series from the web page of the Journal. Send us e-mail at jsprpodcast@gmail.com, follow us on Facebook by searching for Relationship Matters or follow us on Twitter jsprpodcast. The music you ve been hearing is by Urban Delights, more at urbandelights.net. Thank you for listening and remember we re talking relationship matters because relationships matter. [End of recorded material] - 6 -