Customer Reviews

The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found this book perceptive and personally helpful.

Robert Karen is careful, at the beginning of the book, to make clear his intentions. He is not using forgiveness as a blanket application nor is he discussing the forgiveness of great atrocities (the Holocaust, 9/11, etc.) or the forgiveness of such terrible violations as sexual, physical and verbal abuse. He is exploring, rather, forgiveness as a step towards wholeness: the recognition that people can be both lovable and infuriating, that we ourselves can be flawed and yet worthwhile. Karen is encouraging the reader to move beyond "good guy--bad guy" tags, to accept that people--our parents, ourselves--can be imperfect without being the enemy.

This acceptance and recognition, Karen makes clear, is a process. He is not advocating forgiveness as something easy or instantaneous or even, sometimes, appropriate. Forgiving, from Karen's point of view, is a dialog, whether it is a dialog with another person or with our past. The hallmark of this kind of forgiveness is honesty--to honestly admit, "This is how I feel, this is what I'm doing, this is what I experience." Karen is not interested in "fixing" problems: "Okay, I won't do, feel, experience that anymore." He is interested in illustrating the achievement of being able to say, "Okay, I feel this envy or this malice. I don't like it. That's also part of me. I'm a whole person."

Wholeness is the object of Karen's book: how to achieve personal wholeness through recognizing the potential wholeness in other people: "I can still love someone even though they are flawed." In this, Karen accesses a deep truth, call it religious or ethical or whatever (and why should religion and ethics be removed from mental health?): to try to act towards others how we would like them to act towards us.

Karen uses a number of movies, books and current events as examples. Although some of these are applicable, and they are all very interesting, these object lessons are less credible and less applicable than his therapy work and personal experiences.

Recommendation: Buy it.

I've just finished reading this terrific book, and I'm ready to give it to my sister, my parents, a long list of friends and even (maybe) my ex-husband.

Robert Karen is a wonderful writer. This book is like having a conversation with your most intelligent and intuitive friend, the one who tells it to you straight and also makes you laugh through your tears.

Karen takes us to the deepest reaches and farthest frontiers of intimate relationships. Using novels and movies -- from Chaplin to Aldomovar, Shakespeare to Dostoevsky -- Karen holds up a mirror and exhibits us our universal struggles, as parents and children, siblings, friends, lovers and partners. Robert Karen is a great storyteller. This is most evident in the way he brings his own therapeutic practice to life. Moment-by-moment, he shows us his patients as they transform their disappointment, shame and rage to understanding, compassion, and love.

I can't recommend this book enough. It's a gift!

Although I rarely write reviews of books, I was compelled to do so here upon reading the review by the reader Out west. His or her claim is that Mr. Karen is mistaken in conflating mental health problems with moral immaturity. Wrong! Mr. Karen never makes the claim that those suffering mental anguish are morally *immature.* On the contrary, he claims that people can become *stronger* in their practice of the virtues, particularly forgiveness, for their own good and the good of those around them. This is an ages-old idea, going back at least to Aristotle. Neither Aristotle nor Mr. Karen are passing judgement on anyone, only claiming that all of us should be challenged to grow morally. With regard to the reader's claim that Mr. Karen has broken the rules of psychotherapy by introducing forgiveness into the inner sanctum of the profession, I have this to say: So what? Who cares? He broke the rules??!!?? Heavens, what might happen next? Penicillin was discovered by breaking the rules; the Wright brothers discovered flight by breaking the rules; Michael Jordan broke every rule of conventional basketball to give us a better way. Rule-breaking is no sin, especially for such a pragmatic science as psychotherapy when good results are obtained. Mr. Karen gets good results. Don't condemn that.

I didn't expect to carry old wounds and hurts from childhood into adulthood. Foolish on my part, but I hoped experience would bring peace and perhaps some understanding.

Reading THE FORGIVING SELF helped me realize I not only carry the pain, but it influences the way I feel about myself today.

What Robert Karen has achieved in his book is so important. In beautifully written prose, funny, charming and insightful, he helps us understand how to LET GO! To send the pain and hurt away for good. Or at least to come to terms with it. To accept that we had and have every right to be angry and hurt. But not to let it go on spoiling our life in the present.

Karen helps us understand that to forgive those who have hurt us, to forgive ourselves for the pain we've caused others, and to accept our humanity, warts and all, is the road to true freedom of the heart and mind. PEACE, it's wonderful!

GO FOR IT!

My husband and I read this book aloud to each other. As we read, it became the vehicle for lengthy and intense discussions about our own relationship and our relationship with others. The book goes way beyond forgiving; it provides insight into how we approach intimacy with the important people in our lives. The most important message is that we each have emotions from our childhood that we carry into our adult relationships, and once we are able to recognize them, we have the power to make profound changes in our lives with others. Dr. Karen uses not only his knowledge of psychoanalytic theory but real life examples from his clinical counseling along with tangible examples from literature and films. We highly recommend reading this book aloud with a significant other; it provides the foundations for a journey worth taking together.

As a psychiatrist with a spiritual background, I have read many books about healing emotional wounds. In this book, Robert Karen quite simply has provided the best summary of how we get wounded, and what is required to truly heal and move on. He is very articulate, very human, and very informned in his approach. For me, the book started a bit slowly, but it soon became a can't-put-it-down read. I am impressed with how he weaves traditional psychoanalytic theory (which I don't always agree with) with more contemporary ideas about the value of moving out of old emotional wounds (See Carolyn Myss, Why People Don't Heal and How They Can). I agree with other reviewers on this site, as I plan to order several copies and send them to people I care about.

The interview with Robert Karen, mentioned below by R. Heiserman, can be found in its complete form at the following url: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E2DA143DF931A15756C0A9679C8B63&sec=health&spon=

Here's some of what was left out:

Q. Most people think about forgiveness as a virtue, even if they have
trouble being forgiving themselves. But is it always a good thing to forgive?

A. We aren't saints and we aren't meant to be. Forgiveness that comes out of a sense that ''I should forgive because it's right,'' or forgiveness that is compliant or automatic is worse than no forgiveness at all, because it covers something over and leaves people less connected than they were before.

One of the misconceptions about forgiveness is that if you are a nice person, you just do it. What gets overlooked is that forgiveness usually entails an important internal process, and that this process can go on for a long time and needs to be respected.

Q. You write about forgiveness as a pro cess that involves not only the injured person, but also the person who did the injuring. Why is that?

A. Forgiveness too often gets framed as an issue of a victim and a wrongdoer. There are certainly many cases of that, small and large, where it really is important for one of the two people to say he's sorry. But in many if not most situations where people have been in conflict, who needs to forgive and who needs to apologize is often a tossup. Everyone shares the blame to some extent.

Q. Is it possible to forgive when you are still very angry?

A. I think one of the great causes of grudges is unexpressed anger. It's really tragic for any two people when anger is replaced by silence. That's when you get the festering resentments and a growing number of subjects that are being avoided. When it gets bad enough, in a marriage for instance, you can have people who say they're just bored with each other. But boredom is often the sign of a silent grudge. The alternative, in my mind, is that we learn to express our anger and do it in a positive way, maybe even enjoy it.

Q. What does ''enjoying our anger'' mean, exactly?

A. Anger is not just about destructiveness. It's about connecting, about showing we care, about self-expression. Through anger we voice our protests. And without protests, there is just silence and grudge. The trick is to have your passions -- which are often quite murderous -- and yet hold onto this other idea, that this person who just infuriated the hell out of me is someone I care about. So while I'm attributing the worst motives to him and telling him how much I wanted to strangle him, I'm also trying to remember that there's probably more to the story than meets my rageful eye. Maybe I played a part in this, maybe I'm reading it wrong, maybe I'm over-reacting. And no matter how bad he was, it's not all there is to him. That's what it means to be able to tolerate ambiguity and ambivalence, which is one of the hallmarks of maturity and is also the basis for the capacity for forgiveness.

Q. But some ways of expressing anger are more constructive than others, aren't they?

A. I think it's hard for people to get anger right. People have very poor models of how to be angry in a warm, creative, connected way. We've been brought up, so many of us, to think it's a bad thing. So anger gets suppressed through silences and tones or it comes out explosive. And we have this tendency to just let ourselves go: screaming, denouncing, humiliating, impugning character. But anger doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to plunge into our worst inner places.

Q. There's been quite a bit of research over the last few years on the health benefits of forgiveness. Do you think that forgiving makes people healthier?

A. It's probably true that being a good forgiver correlates with lower blood pressure and less internal wear-and-tear. There's plenty of evidence that our emotions affect our physical well-being. But talking about it this way bothers me because it suggests that the only reward to leading a healthy emotional life is that you live longer. Also, linking forgiveness with physical health can be confusing to people. What's healthy is finding a way to embody and live through our secure and loving selves. But being able to live more through that part of yourself is not something you just decide to do. It develops out of a real struggle with your own psychology. It's not like, ''Well, I'm going to be more forgiving now because my blood pressure is too high.''

Q. Are there some situations where it's better not to forgive?

A. I think there is a big difference between forgiving and welcoming someone back into your life. You can recognize that this is a person whom I love and whom I've cared about tremendously and I really want the best for him, and I've pretty much forgiven him for whatever hell we've gone through, but I can't live with what he does any more. I can't stay married to him, because it's too hurtful and he doesn't seem to get it.
There's a wonderful Nina Simone song called ''Don't Smoke in Bed.'' She's leaving the guy a Dear John letter and she ends it with, don't smoke in bed, honey, I don't want you to hurt yourself. And at the same time she was leaving.

Q. People like to think that they are angry for good reason. But don't the roots of anger sometimes go further back than the immediate situation?

A. We all have these inner dramas, which have been discussed in psychoanalysis as transference or repetition, where we experience ourselves as a child with a parent. You become this powerful parent and I become this powerless child. And all it takes is your being critical or using the wrong tone to put me in that place I've never fully worked out of. And a lot of the fury we feel toward other people has to do with rekindling those inner dramas.

Q. How do the emotions of childhood play out in adult conflicts?

A. There's an example in the book of a woman who needed to go to a clinic to get tested for breast cancer and she asked her husband to come with her, but in a way that made it sound like it didn't matter one way or the other. He had a very busy day, and was also very angry with her about something that happened earlier. So he conveniently overlooked the importance of being with his wife when she was having her cancer test.
She was crushed, absolutely crushed. And was crushed in the way a child feels when a parent just doesn't care, which was how she felt about her mother, that her mother was interested in everyone else but her. I think there was legitimate cause for anger. But all the neglect and deprivation of her childhood came pouring out at her husband. The punishment in no way fit the crime.

Q. A common theme in our culture these days is revenge. Is there ever a time when getting even is the right thing to do?

A. All I can say is that I certainly have it in me to want revenge. I would hope that in most cases I wouldn't act on it. But there are some cases where you could act on it, and if the crime was vile enough there's nothing anyone can say about it. I think of a case for instance, where someone murders a child. For most of us it's much easier to understand the revenge motive than it is to understand the will to forgive in a case like that. Although those who are truly able to forgive, or at least struggle mightily to do so -- and there have been some touching examples of that in recent years, one of which I describe in my book -- are an amazing inspiration. And I do think they represent the better way.

Q. What if someone finds it impossible to forgive, no matter how much he wants to?

A. If you can't find it in your heart to forgive, it's better not to fake it, better to see where your feelings take you, than to force yourself into an unnatural type of forgiveness. The important thing is to stay conscious and stay concerned. Then, too, there are cases where you never forgive and you don't want to forgive, but the relationship was marginal, and it doesn't really interfere with your life that much--so, big deal.
But if it becomes a gnawing resentment that lives with you, then you've never gotten over being a victim. And, in that way, not forgiving can be a horrible burden for the person who doesn't forgive.

Q. But forgiveness doesn't come instantly, does it?

A. Usually, it takes some time before we rediscover our love of someone who has hurt us in a really big way. First comes anger, and, for some, a sense of persecution. We go through all the typical, horrible stuff to which human nature and human psychology are prone.
But if we are able to live creatively with ourselves, we do get over our resentments. Even though this bad thing happened, we want to hold onto our connections. We want to return to the warmth and the goodness and live in that better place.

Several morons have written lengthy reviews dissing this book. The fact is it is a well-written serious work on forgiveness. Dr. Professor Karen has obviously researched this subject in all its complexity and thought deeply about it. He has produced a meritorious work. It may not be the best book on the subject (I'd recommended Dr. Luskin's book), but Dr. Professor Karen has made a worthy contribution to the subject. I give it a 5, and I could certainly understand a critic giving it a 4 if he/she didn't like it. But a 2? Come on! That shows a vindictive person wrote it.

By ERICA GOODE
Published: May 22, 2001, New York Times

Dr. Robert Karen had some misgivings when he began researching a book on forgiveness seven years ago.

''I thought the topic was kind of square,'' he said. ''It seemed like an issue that was moralistic and sappy and all about religion and being nice.''

But as he listened to his patients and his friends talk about their experiences, Dr. Karen, a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan, discovered that he had stumbled into an area of extraordinary psychological depth.

''I realized that I was working with a subject that is everywhere, that tells us everything we need to know about our characters and how grown-up emotionally we are,'' he recalled.

In writing ''The Forgiving Self: The Road From Resentment to Connection'' (Doubleday), Dr. Karen found himself traversing a landscape of anger and loss, love and resentment. It was familiar territory: his 1994 book, ''Becoming Attached,'' explored bonds between parent and infant, and the legacy in later life of ''insecure'' attachments in childhood.

That was Dr. Karen's first book after receiving his doctorate in clinical psychology from City University of New York in 1992. Before that he was a full-time writer.

Q. Most people

"What we do in the realm of forgiveness says a great deal about both how we mourn our losses and how well we have separated psychologically from our parents, two fundamental issues in emotional health and development." Dr. Karen's long introduction is unusually astute: "There are many reasons why forgiveness may be difficult, impossible, or wrong." Addressing both the wronged and weary and the ashamed and hiding, he has written a psychologically sophisticated exploration of the complex dynamics of (the usual suspects of) authentic relationship and forgiveness -- not at all as "misty," sentimental or politically correct moral virtue -- that deserves your unsentimental attention.