Author: Christiana Harous
Harous, Christiana, 2025 Travelling Down the Bumpy Road to Self-Forgiveness: Narration as a Vehicle for Offenders “Working Through” a Recent Interpersonal Wrongdoing, Flinders University, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
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Interpersonal wrongdoings are upsetting. They involve offenders violating the norms or values of a relationship in ways that harm or hurt others, and they can also have negative implications for offenders and their relationships. If left unresolved, wrongdoings can lead to problematic rumination, pervasive feelings of shame, reduced relationship satisfaction or relationship termination altogether. In contrast, if offenders undertake the cognitive effort of “working through” their wrongdoing and feelings of guilt, they can achieve genuine self-forgiveness and greater personal and relational wellbeing. Despite the proposition that “working through” guilt is essential to offenders’ genuine self-forgiveness processes, this concept (and the mechanisms involved) remain vague.
In this thesis, I argue that narrating the story of what happened may be part of what it means for offenders to “work through” their wrongdoing. Using real-life narrative data, I take a bottom-up, mixed-methods approach to develop a conceptual and theoretical framework for how offenders may naturally use narration (and re-narration) to “work through” a recent interpersonal wrongdoing; differentiating between narration that benefits genuine self-forgiveness and narration implicated in less adaptive processes of defensiveness and self-condemnation.
Across seven studies, using a combination of qualitative, cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental methodologies, a conceptual framework of offenders’ narration is developed together with a quantitative tool to assess these narrations. This research is guided by three questions: (1) What types of narration do offenders naturally use to story their wrongdoing? (2) Do these narrative types reflect, or influence, offenders’ self-forgiveness processes, including how they develop over time? (3) Does narration serve an emotional processing function that affords the “working through” of guilt?
Overall, findings suggest that self-selected offenders – individuals from the United States who declare having committed a wrongdoing against another – narrate in four conceptually distinct ways, which have differential implications for offenders’ self-forgiveness processes. Redemptive narration, which centres moral learnings, may promote the acknowledgement of shame and guilt by facilitating cognitive empathy and increasing offenders’ beliefs they are capable of change. Self-trust that offenders can act differently next time is, in turn, associated with genuine self-forgiveness and a greater willingness to make amends. Past-contextualisation may contribute to offenders’ moral learning through causal explanations and understanding of their behaviour. Self-distancing narration, which abstracts from the incident and considers the bigger picture, may downregulate offenders’ feelings of shame and guilt in a way that promotes (rather than reduces) moral engagement. Self-contextualisation, which relates the wrongdoing to offenders’ self and values, appears to have ambivalent implications: instructions to explore how the wrongdoing relates to their values reduced offenders’ defensiveness; but when arising naturally, such narration was implicated in a defensive doubling down on one’s actions as congruent with the self. Overall, this work (a) highlights that narrative engagement may be key to the “work” required in “working through” wrongdoing, (b) provides an initial framework for offenders’ narration, and its different functions, soon after a wrongdoing and (c) suggests future research in the field may benefit from more experimental, prospective and dyadic studies that employ experience sampling and person-centred transitionary analyses.
Keywords: self-forgiveness, working through, narration, narrative meaning making, interpersonal wrongdoings, interpersonal offenders, interpersonal transgressions
Subject: Psychology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2025
School: College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Supervisor: Michael Wenzel