The Power of Forgiveness, According to Neuroscience
When I was a teenager, my grandmother, a very wise and educated woman, took me for a walk at a local park and told me that I should forgive someone who had caused a great deal of chaos and sadness in my life. I first thought, “How insensitive!” At the time it sounded like an incredibly unsupportive piece of advice. Now, decades later and after pursuing a PhD in Neuroscience, I’ve finally come to see the wisdom in her request.
Forgiveness. It’s not something that scientists discuss often. Yet, in today’s tit for tat, incredibly divisive world, it’s a word or an act that perhaps deserves more attention.
We’ve all been there. To that place where we’re reliving our anger, pacing and steaming and ruminating about that thing that he or she did to cause so much suffering in our lives.
Sometimes it feels like life throws a lot of hard punches, and it’s usually the people that we let into our little worlds who always seem to hit the hardest. But, before reaching for that vice, whether its ice-cream or bad 80s movies or whiskey, let’s examine what’s really going on inside your brain before, during and after the insult.
If you could look inside your head you’d find a little happiness gauge. It’s part of the limbic system, or emotional processing center of the brain, called the nucleus accumbens. When it is activated by pleasurable things, a message from another area, the ventral tegmental region, activates the nucleus accumbens to excite neurons in the euphoric, pleasureable, or happiness pathways. When the nucleus accumbens receives a message from another region, such as the amygdala, which is a strong emotional center for the brain, it activates circuitry of the unhappiness pathway, or registers emotional pain or aversion. One of the reasons drugs of abuse are so addictive is that they stimulate the nucleus accumbens to cause the brain to perceive a sensation of euphoria.
On a normal, average day, your little happiness meter, your nucleus accumbens activity, bounces back and forth slightly between more happy and less happy as you do things like enjoy your morning coffee, or get stuck in traffic. But what happens to your happiness gauge, or your brain health for that matter, when someone does something particularly harmful to you?
What happens to your brain will depend on two things: one, how harmful you perceive this action to be; and two, how you decide to respond.
Let’s take the example of a relatively minor infraction. Let’s say you asked for the weekend off a month ago to spend it with your family because it’s your daughter’s birthday, but your boss insists that he needs you to work that weekend. You know that he’s doing it just to frustrate you.
What’s going on in your head? For most people, this would be really irritating, it might even make you pretty angry. Initially, there’s an immediate shift in the happiness gauge toward less happy as an expected reward (daughter’s birthday weekend) is rescinded. But now you have two choices as to how you respond to this perceived insult. You can think positively and use this as motivation to find a more supportive employment situation, to start your own business, or to get that degree you’ve been putting off: to take control of the thing that’s causing you suffering, and thus, deflate its power. Or, you can choose to remain angry through the whole weekend, and then for several weeks afterward, ruminating about the intended cruelty, and feeling like you have no control over your life.
In the first case, the dopaminergic happiness gauge returns to normal soon after the insult, and perhaps even perceives an increase in self-reliance and determination as heightened reward, or more dopamine. Forgiveness is beneficial for your brain.
In the second case, ruminating about the abuse is like being a rat in a cage that keeps pressing a lever to get a drink, except that instead of getting the sugar water, it keeps ingesting a toxic substance. Lever press, toxic substance, over and over. This is what ruminating on a negative outcome does to the nucleus accumbens, it stimulates it over and over again to activate pain sensors in the brain, reduce feel good neuromodulators like serotonin, and continue to push that happiness gauge further into the negative uncomfortable, miserable levels.
There’s a model that is often used to study depression in laboratory animals: social defeat stress or learned helplessness. Essentially, two mice are put into a cage, one acts as a bully and attacks the other repeatedly until it stops doing mouse like things, exploring, grooming, even when the bully is no longer present. Ruminating on all the ways that others have harmed us further results in reduced healthy neurotransmitter levels in the limbic system, and also reinforces that pattern of thinking until the cruelty becomes hardwired into our daily perception and behavior. This can also lead to thinking that we have no control over our situation or circumstances. Those are the kind of thoughts frequently associated with depression or anxiety disorders. In this case, it’s not the original insult that hurts the most, its ruminating, holding a grudge, not letting things go, that can cause the brain to become unhealthy.
Even in cases of severe harm that was caused by someone else, people have often found some relief, perhaps even peace, by using their pain, sorrow, and grief to help others.
Francine and David Wheeler, who lost their 6-year-old son, Ben, during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, embody this philosophy when they say, “Our job now is to make our hearts bigger than the loss that we’ve suffered.”
Victor Frankel survived 3 years of the most incomprehensible suffering while imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, but he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Forgiveness is not about saying that someone shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. Forgiveness is about saying that someone else’s actions are not going to define who I am. That even in the ugliest moments in life there are lessons that can be learned so that others might benefit. Meaning occurs when suffering is transformed into assistance; Healing, when inner strength grows in place of scar tissue.
How do you forgive someone?
Sometimes it’s easy to get stuck on recurring thought patterns about the nature of the person who committed the evil act. We say, ‘This person is evil.’ Or, perhaps use other choice words to describe them. We almost never say, ‘This person did something evil.’ After all, we are all capable of causing others harm, and few people can safely say that they’ve never intentionally or unintentionally caused someone else pain. Even the greatest heroes have flaws.
The question of why someone did this evil thing has perhaps as many answers as there are people on the planet. But, neuroscience can help us to understand the brain-wiring underpinnings of some evil acts.
The neuroanatomy of a psychopath looks completely different than a normally wired individual. Functional brain imaging studies show that when psychopaths are shown images that are highly emotional, their amygdala, a region that responds to fear and may play a role in empathy, doesn’t respond. Psychopaths also have a hyperactive nucleus accumbens, which means that they perceive or process reward versus pain much differently.
A normally wired individual who sees a puppy on the side of the road with a broken leg, will feel sadness or pain or generally bad for that puppy, and their empathy will cause them to activate their prefrontal cortex to make a decision to help the puppy. Then the amygdala responds to that decision to be helpful by activating circuits associated with feelings of satisfaction, maybe even pleasure.
When a psychopath sees the same puppy, they may feel bored and see the puppy as a way to relieve that boredom. They may lack functioning circuits that allow them to feel compassion, connection, or love for the puppy. The result is that they use their prefrontal cortex to make a decision to relieve their boredom or cause some pleasure. They then throw the puppy over a cliff and their amygdala, ventral tegmental area, and nucleus accumbens activate circuits of pleasure and release the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Essentially, parts of the limbic system, which are responsible for signaling pleasure, pain, or empathy when others are in pain, are wired oppositely in psychopathic individuals. Some may feel pleasure when causing pain, whereas normally wired individuals feel pleasure when relieving someone else’s pain. This difference can be seen in fMRI scans.
What makes someone a psychopath in the first place? If Victor Frankel is correct that we all have a choice in how we behave or respond to a situation, how is it even possible that someone would have a brain that is hard wired for evil behavior? Current research points to two possible causes. The first is that it has been evolutionarily advantageous to be a psychopath, or at least to have a number of psychopaths in a society. For example, during war, the side that has the most psychopaths is at a severe advantage. I’m reminded of the battle scene from Game of Thrones when Ramsey Bolton (a psychopath) uses Jon Snow’s compassion for his brother as a weapon against him to put him into a vulnerable position and do great harm to the fighters on the Stark side. War creates a selection bias in favor of psychopathy. And, if a significantly higher number of psychopaths in positions of power is at all telling, it would suggest that genetically speaking wars don’t end when the battle is over. In fact, there is a gene called “The Warrior Gene,” which processes neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, all of which are essential for normally functioning emotional centers in the brain. The warrior gene mutation is associated with antisocial behavior. The genetic composition of ruthless fighters gets passed on to ruthless leaders in our society; so, the war is simply transmuted. A different battle-field. Same merciless behavior.
Aside from genetics, the environment, particularly early in childhood, is a significant factor in influencing whether a child grows up to become a psychopath. The brain grows very quickly during childhood when circuits are being wired the fastest, so a child with negligent or abusive parents, or who is exposed to violence, or suffers from emotional or physical abuse is much more likely to have circuits that have wired for survival in those situations that persist in adulthood. For example, if a child learns that the outcome of a compassionate act is violence or bullying, then that child’s brain may naturally allow compassion circuits to atrophy. The famous, but ethically questionable, experiments of Harry Harlow showed that rhesus monkeys who were deprived of their mother, or were socially isolated early in development, had severe deficits in social behavior.
Of course, not everyone who does something to cause harm has the most extreme brain wiring diagram of a psychopath. In fact, most have likely made a choice, despite being capable of compassionate behavior, to do something harmful because its advantageous to them. Or perhaps it was simply a mistake and they had no intention to cause harm. In some cases, it might be that their brains are in fact wired to cause harm, either genetically or by environmental conditioning. And, in some cases, there may be a combination of circuits and neurotransmitters that aren’t functioning optimally because that person is suffering in some way, or is afraid of suffering.
The mystery is that most of the time we don’t get to know that exact reason that someone has hurt us. It may be helpful in processing that harm to know that at least in some cases it may be that someone has in fact suffered abuse or neglect as a child, and their empathy brain center has atrophied. If you imagine that person as a scared or confused child, and hold them in that space, it’s more difficult to carry resentment towards them. If that doesn’t work to let go of that rumination, really ask yourself how thinking about all this negativity is actually serving you. If you take a deep breath when you think about letting it go, then go with that.
Finally, if you need a more selfish reason to be selfless, consider this: Forgiveness is a form of compassion. Brain imaging studies of people who practice loving-kindness meditation have been shown to have enhanced signals from regions of the brain associated with empathy, such as the amygdala. These are the very same regions that neuroscientists have shown to be hypoactive in psychopathic individuals. So, neurologically speaking, the best way to avoid becoming like the person who harmed you is act compassionately — forgive them.
That we exist on this planet means that our ancestors won or survived enough wars to pass on our genes. So, we’re all sort of scared and confused children just wandering around this battle field of messy-messy humanity. The best thing that we can do for ourselves, for our own brain health and function, for the people around us who depend on and are influenced by our behavior, for our community, and for humanity in general, is to not let evil actions define us, to not let it integrate into our own behavior, to focus on compassion. To forgive.
