Steve Andreas > Articles > Forgiveness

An Experiment

A short mind-experiment can provide you with a very compact experience of these two elements in the forgiveness process:

1. First think of two people in your life:
1. someone you like very much, and
2. someone you dislike very much.
2. After identifying these two people, think of them simultaneously.
3. Continuing to think of these two people in your mind simultaneously, notice how you represent them differently in your mind.
1. First look at your images. One image is probably larger than the other one, one farther away than the other, one brighter or more colorful than the other, one more to your left than the other, one higher or lower than the other, etc.
2. Next notice your auditory experience of these two people. Are there sounds or voices with one image and not with the other, or are there differences in the volume, tonality, or tempo of the sounds or voices, etc?
3. Finally notice differences in your feelings in response to these two images. Besides feeling like for one and dislike for the other, do you feel colder/warmer, more connected/disconnected, etc. with one than the other?
4. Now comes the really interesting part. Try exchanging the locations of the images of the two people in your mind, and notice how your feelings change in response to this little experiment. For instance, I represented the disliked person small, far away, dim, on my right and silent. The image of the liked person was large, close, bright, on my left, with a clear voice. If I exchange the two, the disliked person is now on my left, large and bright, with a clear voice.

Many people simply refuse to do this experiment. Those who are willing to try this, at least for a few moments just to see what it is like, typically feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and want to quickly put the images back where they started. There are four main points that I'd like to draw from this little experiment:

1. The location and other process characteristics of internal images are vitally important in determining our responses to them.
2. Since these process characteristics are completely independent of the content of the image, they can be used with any content, and constitute interventions that are totally content-free.
3. When you tried the experiment of exchanging the images, you found that it was relatively easy to move them around and change how you represent them.
4. Before you would be willing to make such a change permanent, we would have to find some way to satisfy your felt objections to making the change–you would need to be able to feel completely comfortable and safe with the new arrangement. These four main points are true of all therapeutic work. In the following, they are illustrated by an edited transcript of an audiotaped demonstration (2) of the forgiveness pattern with a woman who was angry with an ex-boyfriend.