The impact of invalidating emotional experiences in childhood on forgiveness in close relationships

Effective emotion regulation is essential for interpersonal contexts in which people need to prioritise prosocial motivations over self-protective motivations, such as forgiving someone after a transgression. However, people who grew up in emotionally invalidating home environments where their reactions were dismissed may struggle to appropriately respond to transgressions as well as experience difficulties with emotion regulation, including reactivity, inhibition and suppression. Across three correlational studies (Ntotal = 691) that examined forgiveness towards a partner’s transgressions (i.e., infidelity, Study 1; participant-generated, Studies 2-3), we found that people who reported that they grew up in emotionally invalidating environments were less forgiving, espousing less benevolence motivations (Studies 1-2), and more avoidance (Studies 1-3) and revenge (Studies 2-3) motivations after a transgression. Serial mediation models suggested that these associations may be explained by the indirect effects of negative emotional reactivity and lower self-control. People who experienced relatively greater emotional invalidation in childhood were less likely to forgive their close others for transgressions, in part because they experience more intense reactions to their negative emotions and are less able to engage self-control. This collection of studies provides important insights into how people who believe they have been invalidated by caregivers in the past feel about forgiving their partners in the present and further supports existing literature on the negative consequences of invalidating emotional environments on the self and emotional processes.