The offence may be profound or small but deeply painful. The perpetrator may be a stranger - the driver who caused your accident, the pervert who took your child. More likely, it will be someone close and trusted - the sister who killed herself, the parent who lashed out, the spouse mired in addiction, an unfaithful lover. It may even be yourself. Let all the anger, hurt and resentment you feel for that wrongdoer bubble to the surface. Feel your heart pounding, your stomach churning and your thoughts racing in dark directions. OK, stop. Now, forgive the offender. Don't just shed the bitterness and drop the recrimination, but empathise with his plight, wish him well and move on - whether he is sorry or not.

 

Dr. Robert Enright, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, and an advocate of what many are calling a new science of forgiveness, calls this final step "making a gesture of goodness" to a wrongdoer. It is the culmination of a process that, he insists, "you've got to be able to see through to the end". Many researchers think forgiveness - a virtue embraced by almost every religious tradition as a balm for the soul - may be medicine for the body. They have shown that "forgiveness interventions" - often just a couple of short sessions in which the wounded are guided towards positive feelings for an offender - can improve cardiovascular function, diminish chronic pain, relieve depression and boost quality of life among the very ill.

 

An AIDS patient who has forgiven the person presumed to have transmitted the virus is more likely to care for himself or herself and less likely to engage in unprotected sex. Those more inclined to pardon the transgressions of others have been found to have lower blood pressure, fewer depressive symptoms and, in late middle age, better overall mental and physical health than those who do not forgive easily.

 

Like proper nutrition and exercise, researchers say, forgiveness appears to be a behaviour that a patient can learn, exercise and repeat as needed to prevent disease and preserve health. But the new science worries many in mental health who fear that traumatised patients face pressure to forgive when doing so is premature or ill-advised. "The whole Christian, 12-step mentality has permeated our culture, and the emphasis on forgiveness is part of that," says Dr Jeanne Safer, a New York psychoanalyst and the author of Must We Forgive?

 

"For many patients, forgiveness is a double-whammy: first someone screws you, and then it's your fault you don't want to embrace them in heaven. I'm not against forgiveness; I'm against compulsory forgiveness with no choice."

 

While much of the early work on forgiveness has focused on forgiveness of others, academic psychologists and clinicians are turning up evidence that forgiving oneself may have a more powerful effect on overall health and wellbeing. "Sometimes people hurt us, and we move on, and it might fade," says Loren Toussaint, a psychologist at Luther University in Decorah, Iowa, who with colleagues was the first to establish a long-term link between people's health and their propensity to forgive, in a national survey published in 2001. As he has refined that work with better definitions of forgiveness, however, Dr Toussaint says he has been surprised to learn that those who hold onto self-blame may suffer more. In work not yet published, Dr Toussaint found that men who do not forgive themselves readily are seven times more likely to meet the full diagnostic criteria for clinical depression than men who do.

 

Highly self-forgiving women are three times less likely to have the symptoms of clinical depression - a risk factor for a host of ills - than women who are prone to regret and self-blame. It is an effect Dr Toussaint has seen extensively in combat veterans who come home unable to forgive themselves for what they did, or did not do, in battle. As he says: "The human mind is sometimes an instrument of misery."

 

By Melanie Brandl