What Is Known about the Forgiveness Process and Couple Therapy in Adults Having Experienced Serious Relational Transgression? A Scoping Review

Abstract

Forgiveness as a psychological process is a promising approach to integrate into couple counseling to help couples recover from serious relational transgressions (RT). And yet, there is still no consensus in the literature to better understand the processes couples must get through during couple therapy to mutually forgive each other. The aim of this paper is to conduct a literature review on forgiveness and couple interventions. To achieve this, a keyword search in six databases resulted in the retrieval of 35 references. Study selection and analysis were guided by a scoping review framework. Further, the majority of documented RT concerned infidelity. However, only 34% of the retrieved documents are empirical studies. From the whole corpus emerges the observation that forgiveness is a complex, iterative, non-linear process requiring significant investment from both members of the couple; it can be grouped into six subprocesses that are more or less sequential. For future studies, it would be interesting to validate if forgiveness processes differ according to RT experienced.

Keywords:

• Forgiveness
• couple therapy
• scoping review
• relational transgression

Notes

1 This criterion was considered because a comparative study showed that there is no correlation between hypothetical infidelity and real infidelity (Harris, 2002).

2 For each result, there are often more than 5 authors who have advanced the same idea, but for publication reasons and ease of reading, a maximum of 5 references are cited for each key idea emerging from the literature.

Additional information

Funding

This study was made possible through financial support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) (Québec Research Funds—Society and Culture); #197498).