Let It Go: Forgiveness Among College-Going Young Adults

My B.A. (Honours) Psychology dissertation, submitted at Lady Shri Ram College in 2020, examined the concept of forgiveness among college-going young adults — what they took the word to mean, when they granted it, and what they believed it cost them.

What the enquiry was after

Forgiveness is one of those constructs that everyone uses confidently and almost nobody defines the same way. In the research literature it is generally treated as an intrapersonal process: a reduction in avoidance and revenge motivation towards someone who has caused harm. In ordinary speech it is frequently confused with three other things entirely — reconciling, excusing, and forgetting.

That gap between the technical construct and the lived one was the interesting part. Young adults in the study consistently understood forgiveness as something owed to the other person, and therefore as something that could be withheld as leverage or granted as capitulation. Very few initially framed it as something that might primarily serve them.

Where it led

This work is the beginning of the line of enquiry I am still following. The questions are continuous: what has to happen inside a person before they can release a grievance, what it costs them to hold on, and whether letting go is a precondition for growth or one of its consequences.

Forgiveness, in the end, turned out to be a study of endings — of how people finish with something that has hurt them. My doctoral work asks the same question with the stakes raised.