Forgiving childhood adversities: exploring mental health benefits and pathways of influence

Abstract

The term “childhood adversity” encompasses negative experiences such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. These experiences are associated with difficulties in adulthood, including psychological distress. Evidence suggests that the negative impacts of childhood adversity may be attenuated if individuals had some positive experience during childhood, have resilience characteristics, or learn to increase their reliance on adaptive coping strategies and reduce their reliance on maladaptive coping strategies. Forgiveness is a coping response that may reduce the negative impacts of adversity. Researchers vary in their conceptualizations of forgiveness. While forgiveness is generally associated with more favourable outcomes, very few studies have examined the benefits of forgiveness for adults with childhood adversity. The present research examined the associations between (a) childhood adversity, (b) forgiveness of others, self, and situations related to individuals’ childhood adversity, and (c) psychological distress. In this study, the trait- vs. state-forgiveness distinction was adopted—while the former refers to the tendency to forgive across time and situations, the latter refers to forgiveness related to a specific transgression. Forgiveness was organized by “target” to examine forgiveness of others, self, and situations. Mediation and moderation models were estimated and compared to assess the extent to which forgiveness of childhood adversities explains or influences the relationship between childhood adversity and psychological distress. The present study found that the estimated mediation model better explained the relationships between childhood adversity, forgiveness, and psychological distress than the estimated moderation model. This suggests that childhood adversity may undermine ones’ ability to forgive their childhood adversities, which in turn may contribute to increased day-to-day psychological distress in adulthood. Given that the moderation model was non-significant, it may be more important to further understand the causal pathway in which childhood adversity undermines individuals’ forgiveness towards targets associated with their childhood, rather than solely focusing on promoting forgiveness within this population.