Lawyers as agents of forgiveness
By Kenneth
Cloke
“Woe unto
you also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye
yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers …. Woe unto you,
lawyers! For ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in
yourselves, and them that were entering ye hindered.”
—Jesus, Gospel of St. Luke, 11:
46, 52
|
Cloke |
Whatever your
religion, these words strike home. What are these burdens? What is this key of
knowledge? In part, the burdens are destructive adversarial approaches to
conflict, and the knowledge is our growing realization that legal advocacy can
be unnecessarily divisive and harmful.
What might we
do differently? As lawyers, we can develop non-adversarial collaborative
practices, promote the use of mediation and after encourage forgiveness.
What is
forgiveness? Forgiveness is a method for releasing ourselves from the
burden of our own false expectations, from the pain we have experienced at our
own hands and the hands of others. Forgiveness is reclaiming our life-energy, releasing
ourselves from negativity, blaming and judgments, including toward ourselves. Writer
Annie Lamont said forgiveness is “giving up all hopes of having a better past.”
Forgiveness
does not mean we condone or agree with what others did. It does not mean we can
change what happened or erase the pain we experienced. What’s done is done. What
we can do is release ourselves from adversarial emotions and recriminations.
The purpose of
forgiveness is to free ourselves from the past, reestablish control over the
present, and move toward a more positive, healthier future. It is a gift to ourselves,
our peace of mind, self-esteem, relationships with others and emotional
wellbeing. It requires us to surrender our need to be pitied, to be right, to remain
connected to our opponents by negative intimacy.
Forgiveness
requires us to accept responsibility for our role in conflict, for our words, actions
and feelings, even for our pain, loss and humiliation. It means accepting
responsibility for the consequences of the choices we made, including the
choice of anger. While anger looks powerful, it leaves us feeling
frustrated and powerless. While forgiveness looks weak, it leaves us
feeling stronger and less vulnerable to the harmful actions of others.
Forgiveness
cannot be forced or coerced. It must be offered freely. It is a choice, a power
we have independent of how others behave. Yet it is not something we do for others, but to free ourselves from endless anger and pain. Anger hurts not only
the ones it is directed at, but the ones who wield it. By not forgiving those
who hurt or wronged us, we continue to inflict on ourselves, by our own
actions, the pain they initiated.
Most of us have
not learned techniques for encouraging forgiveness, yet we all know that it
begins in the heart. All we need in order to begin is to want to be
released from the pain of the past. Forgiveness requires:
- Remembering in
detail what happened and how it felt
- Understanding what the
other person may have thought happened and how they may have felt
- Identifying all the
reasons for not forgiving them, and all the expectations we had of them that
they did not meet
- Choosing to release
ourselves from all the reasons for not forgiving them and from our own false expectations
-- or identifying what it will cost us to hold on to them
- Designing a
ritual of release, completion and closure, for example, asking them to shake
hands or burning our lists of what they did wrong
After
forgiveness comes reconciliation, in which we open our hearts and are able to
be in our opponent’s presence without being angry, frightened, off-balance or
vulnerable.
What does the endless
anger produced by adversarial litigation cost our clients? It costs them their
lives. As Henry David Thoreau reminds us, “The price
of anything is the amount of life you pay for it.” By encouraging our clients
to reach forgiveness and reconciliation, we can reduce this price, lessen the adversarial
burdens we have laden them with and offer them a key, not only of knowledge,
but of wisdom.
—Kenneth
Cloke is the director of the Center for Dispute Resolution in Santa Monica. He
has served as a mediator, arbitrator, attorney, coach, consultant and trainer.