The False Narrative: The
Need for Forgiveness in Order to Heal
The path to healing from
trauma and grief is deeply personal and can be fraught with contradictions and
confusion.
I have carried a great
deal of anger surrounding the circumstances of my youngest daughter’s life
challenges and death. Her mental illnesses and addiction issues took her into terrible
circumstances and into contact with some horrible people. Over the years she
shared details of some soul shattering experiences with me, and after she died
I received confirmation about the worst betrayal of them all.
It has been my experience
that many people do not have any idea how truly bad life can be right here in
America. I don’t want to share those horrible stories here or anywhere else,
but I will say that the cringe-worthy, frightening, nauseating kind of things
you see in movies or read in novels or social media posts really do happen to
people you know and to people who live in your community. Making that statement
isn’t a quest for drama, nor is it an exaggeration. There are monsters in this
world, and most of them are human.
There are many victims of
those events and those monsters; the individuals who experience them, their
families and friends, the communities that absorb the impact, the EMTs, the
police officers, the social workers, the emergency room personnel, the
detectives who work countless hours to build a case. The list goes on and on, moving
out in endless ripples that create small waves for some and tsunamis for
others.
In the midst of all that overwhelming
motion, victims are often told that they should forgive the person who caused
the harm. They are told that forgiveness is the only path to peace, that in
order to heal, to move on, to become whole, they must forgive the offender. And
if the offender has found religion, found Jesus or Odin or the Divine in any
form, the victim especially must forgive them and welcome their presence in
community.
I had been hearing that
call for forgiveness for 50 years, and after Beth’s death I wanted to believe
it because I wanted to finally move away from the pain her years of suffering
had caused. I was willing to grab hold of whatever seemed like a viable means
to do that. Three years after her death, three years of feeling and processing
and thinking, I have come to a point where I call bullshit on the topic of
forgiveness as a means to healing.
There are times when
forgiving someone may be a healthy thing to do, as when persons in a healthy,
balanced relationship have a serious conflict or disagreement and then come to
a resolution of the matter. There are times when an individual’s faith allows forgiveness
to bring peace. But there are times when forgiveness is a toxic tool, the use of
which is driven by misperception, laziness, selfishness, and power imbalances
present in outdated patriarchal religious, legal, and community systems.
Who benefits from
forgiveness, overall? What falsehoods are behind that mask? Sometimes victims
are urged to forgive an offender because it makes it easier for everyone else to
move on with their lives, and because the existence of their pain and trauma is
an inconvenience to others. Harm caused creates an imbalance that is felt as an
energetic negative. Individuals and communities, consciously or subconsciously,
perceive that imbalance as a debt that must be paid to restore wholeness to the
individual and to the collective. The presence of that debt is, consciously or subconsciously,
discomforting and disturbing, and so the whole presses for balance to be
restored to itself above the needs of the individual victim. Salving the conscience
of the people who cause harm or those who are made uncomfortable by anger and
grief should never be made the burden of the person who has been wronged or
injured.
The act of forgiveness implies
that a debt has been settled or released, and the suggestion that the victim
must release the offender from that debt creates an unnecessary burden on the
one who has been wronged. It creates a false narrative that forces the victim
to give yet another thing to someone who has already stolen things of
immeasurable value, and creates a disturbing cosmic sense of the balance of debts
owed and paid. Furthermore, there are circumstances in which any debt owed by an
offender is owed at a level beyond human constructs; when the injury caused is
so grievous a matter that the debt created is held by the Divine, and so the
matter of forgiveness becomes a matter between the offender and their own
Divine.
Contained within the
grief of losing someone are multiple boxes. One box holds anger and all the
other negative feelings directed towards the external factors that influenced a
loved one’s death. Another box holds all the questions that can never be answered,
all the regrets and unspoken or unaccepted apologies, and all the
misunderstandings and miscommunications that were never quite sorted out. But
there is also a box that holds the love, the happy memories, and the hopeful
dream of one more sunset, one more conversation, one more smile somewhere on
the other side.
Comes a time, and it is different for each person, when one realizes
that the weight of what is held within that negative box is overwhelming, that
its presence causes weariness, that one cannot rise against its pull. With that
realization comes the choice to be made: which box makes life better? Which one
is worth carrying? Which one is it time to put down?
It is possible to experience compassion without forgiveness. It is possible
to have an understanding of circumstances without forgiveness. It is possible
and healthy to focus on healing one’s self without carrying the responsibility
of healing others, and forgiveness is not a necessary step on that path.
