Forgiveness

Forgiveness has become a quick and easy thing for many people, but at what costs?

I have always thought of forgiveness in a religious sense since I was brought up by a Catholic mother and an atheist father who did nothing to intervene. I was taught that anyone and everyone should be forgiven, that it was a wise and virtuous thing to, after all, Jesus forgave everyone who ever hurt him, right?

Since deciding to stop contacting my parents, I've been aware of the current notion in popular Psychology that deciding to stop contacting them and not forgiving them for any of the evils committed against me and my siblings in the most vulnerable years of our lives is an unhealthy thing to do. Forgiveness is sort of seen as something someone can just snap their fingers over and all the anger, sadness and pain they feel about their abuse will just disappear.

I want to address here why this is not the case, why forgiveness is not a case of the three magic words being spoken and suddenly everything being fine and dandy. Since finding Daniel Mackler's videos on youtube I've seen forgiveness in an entirely different light, one that I think is important to share.

When watching him he talks about forgiveness and forgiving, at first I felt anxiety when he said that "forgiveness comes with working through all the pain," I experienced this anxiety because implicit in his statement I thought he was also saying "after working through all your pain you will again have a relationship with the people who abused you." On thinking about it though I realised that he was not saying anything of such, and was not preaching forgiveness in a way I had so often heard.

Mackler, I have come to realise, is quite correct. People say that if you forgive then you will let go of all your anger and misery towards your abusers, what these people who take this route are really doing is totally shutting off a whole chunk of themselves, they are not resolving their pain, anger and sadness, but instead burying it, where it goes out of awareness and goes beyond the control of the victim, resulting in re-infliction of this trauma on innocent victims. It is important to remember that like any other feelings, feelings resulting from abuse do not simply vanish when one decides to ignore them.

In saying "I forgive you," before we have really dedicated ourselves to working through the pain we have hidden for so long since our childhoods, we are doing what Mackler refers to as forgiving 'prematurely.' It is akin to an obese man who smokes and drinks and never exercising standing in the mirror and saying "I am healthy." As long as your pain and misery remains unresolved and buried, it still exists, and until it is gone you cannot even begin to forgive maturely and genuinely. Unfortunately, this pain does not disappear by willing it away.

Though our abusers may wish that we could forgive them immediately, the reality is that trauma inflicted on us in childhood will take years and years to resolve, and even after resolving it, it's no guarantee that you will wake up one morning and think "wouldn't it be great to go and speak to Mum and Dad again?" If anything, you are more likely to want to go on with your life seeing that there is no need to go back to these relationships once you have resolved all of your pain and anger.

Forgiveness quite rightly involves not having pent up rage towards your abusers, and it also means that you aren't required to have a relationship with them in order for you to have forgiven. I have come to see forgiveness as a change of mental and emotional state that happens inside the victim, it is not an action or spoken words, even if the abusers attempt to 'earn' the forgiveness of their victims, it cannot be done until the victim has resolved all of his or her pain.

For far too long abusers of any extremity have been able to get away with beating, hitting, slapping, screaming at, withdrawing affection from, shaking, shoving, ignoring, and manipulating their children, the current view of forgiveness only helps abusers let their actions get away with out consequences. Because childhood pain is by far the most intense of all internal pain we will ever experience in our lives, it is a lovely fantasy we have created to imagine that we can simply get rid of it by forgiving prematurely.

This view very much needs to change if we are not to re-inflict these traumas on our own children or any others who happen to come into our paths.