Tag: Forgiveness

Forgiving With Integrity

Telling another that they need to forgive is wasted breath.

I commented once in these posts that to tell another person that they need to forgive is to stand in judgement upon them. In effect, that statement says, “I know what’s best for you. Listen to my wisdom. It’s not just that you’re hurting yourself by failing to forgive. You’re also failing to live up to my standards.”

Quite aside from being judgmental, telling another that they must forgive is also pretty useless. “You need to” is essentially a criticism of the way in which someone is handling difficult and likely justified feelings. In essence, the command to forgive says to a wounded person, “Yeah, they were wrong, but if you haven’t forgiven them, then you are wronger”. (Excuse the atrocious grammar! That is an actual statement once made to me by a person whose existence in my life is probably best forgotten.)

Providing such advice, especially when unsolicited, to an adult who is enduring the difficult experience of unforgiveness is simply futile; nothing but wasted breath. The implied criticism merely engages another’s automatic defense system, resulting in irritation and anger–exactly the opposite of what one intends.

Rarely, though, the answer to that officious command is a deeply drawn breath and the words, “Yes, I know that. I even want to forgive. But how?!”

I’ve spent long years working out that puzzle for myself, and the answer that I’ve finally landed upon is this: To forgive, one must also retain personal integrity by speaking both truth and justice.

Even when I don’t believe that I can forgive, or am ready to do so, or even really want to forgive–I say it, anyway. But I also say the rest. I speak with conviction the part that those who so blithely recommend forgiveness seem to carefully ignore: the element that vindicates my feelings; that validates my anger so that I can, at last, release it. I speak the essence that pats me comfortingly on the back and reassures me that I did not deserve this; I state with certainty the words that acknowledge my pain.

When the wounds that I’ve been dealt rerun themselves on the movie screen of my mind, I have finally learned to say, “I forgive you. I do not exonerate you. What you did was vile, wrong, cruel abusive, hurtful, and you bear completely the shame of your behavior. I do not absolve you. You owe a debt, not to me, but to the Universe, and you must work out your own absolution. You must decide and perform your own penance. But I do forgive you.”

This statement allows me (as I have read and heard, over and over again) to forgive the person without excusing what they did. It permits me to forgive without belittling the anguish of my experience. It states that my anger is justified, my pain real, and that I will not blindly lie down like a doormat beneath the feet of my oppressor. It returns to me my personal power: the power stolen from me by another’s terrible words or actions.

I forgive YOU. I forgive the soul, the spirit, the divine spark within you. But I do not exonerate you. I cannot, in fact, acquit you, for you are to blame. Nor can I absolve you. Only a Higher Power can do so. You must achieve that absolution by both acknowledging the wrong you did and working in some manner to resolve the debt you now owe.

Speaking these words with conviction franks the letter of my exercise in forgiveness, while in no way providing amnesty for those who have wronged me. It reasserts my rights while allowing me to extend both mercy and justice to the individual who has harmed me.

It is, in fact, so complete a statement, such a perfect means of clearing the logjam of old bitterness and futile anger, that it astonishes me to realize that it took me nearly 70 years to find the technique; that none of those who prated at me about the need to forgive were able to provide me with this simple key to genuine forgiveness.

Having stumbled upon this, my personal truth and cure, I am at last empowered with the ability to forgive. “I forgive YOU. I do not exonerate you. You are, no matter what your circumstances or reasons, to blame. I do not absolve you. You’ll have to work out your own penance. But I do, absolutely and completely, forgive you.”

Somewhere, somehow, I suspect, even hope, that someone is speaking this exact statement to and about me. I am far indeed from sainthood, and the number of wounds I have dealt others—remembered or forgotten, realized or unrealized—is, I’m sure, legion.

I hope they will forgive me. But they need never either exonerate or absolve me. I accept my blame, and I will work to absolve my offenses.

If this essay struck a note with you, you might also appreciate “Anger and Loss”, which was published April 3, 2018. You may find it in the Archives.

Forgiveness Is Always An Option

Being told, over and over, by multiple people, that I needed to forgive was, in the end, totally counterproductive to the actual process of forgiveness.

I recently attended a six-week support group. Those brief two-hour sessions a week, and some light “homework” assignments following each session, found me freed, freed at last, from an intolerable burden that I had carried for a decade or more: unforgiveness.

Understand, it was not that I did not want to forgive the person who had, undeniably and maliciously, caused me enormous harm. Being raised in an Italian/Scottish family, I was all too familiar with the mechanics of feuding; of carrying grudges. I knew what it was to experience unforgiveness, bitterness, enmity, animosity and hostility.

Even more, I knew very well the toll these emotions took not just upon me, but upon everyone on the periphery of my life: my loved ones and family members. And I knew, as well, that not one iota, not one tiny, minute drop of the acid from those spiteful feelings in any way harmed the object of my anger. Instead, they ate away at my own soul.

Intellectually aware of all these facts, I nevertheless could not put aside the rage that scored my soul to its center. I could not forgive the individual who had wronged me.

Oh, I tried—how I tried! I prayed over and meditated on the problem. I forced myself to carefully recount all the ways in which the person who had harmed me deserved my understanding and empathy.  Each time the bitterness rose like a bile that I could taste in my mouth, I chanted to myself the words, “I forgive”. But the words were hollow and empty; the empathy a mere pretense, fleeting and unfelt. I finally created a string of beads and frequently held them in my hands, whispering my forgiveness as the circlet slipped through my fingers. The exercise did nothing but drain me. All my attempts to forgive merely induced a new anger—anger at myself—and a growing feeling of being inextricably trapped, ceaselessly beating my hands at the silken strands of a web that would not release me.

Worse yet was my reaction to those who told me what I already knew. If I had plucked a hair from my head for each time I heard someone say the words, “If you could only forgive…”, I would have been bowling pin bald!  “I’m trying,” I wanted to scream at them. “I’m trying to forgive. I want to forgive! I just can’t seem to get there.” No matter how well-intentioned, their words hindered rather than aided my healing. Rather than perceiving their concern for my emotional state, I heard them belittling my efforts. Instead of comprehending their hope that I would find healing, I heard them being sanctimonious. I shut my ears to their actual words or their intentions.  Instead, what my heart heard them saying was, “I  have been hurt and  I forgave! I am so much more evolved a soul than you!”

Being told, over and over, by multiple people, that I needed to forgive was, in the end, totally counterproductive to the actual process of forgiveness.

But what I found in those brief few weeks of spilling my guts to total strangers was the unexpected miracle that led me back to a state of grace. Finally able to speak my truth—my rage, my enduring anger, and my unforgiveness–without censure and without judgment, gave me the freedom I needed to find my way to mercy and compassion; to give pardon and grant absolution to the individual who had so grievously wounded me.

If I have learned anything on this long and twisted journey to compassion, it is that forgiveness is always an option, and one that we do not have to choose. I have learned that to tell another that they need to forgive is to stand in judgment upon them. And I have discovered that, for most of us, forgiveness can happen only after the wound we are carrying has been drained of all its poison. Then forgiveness will happen so naturally, so easily, that we will not even realize at first that it has occurred. We will simply awake one day to the knowledge that the burden of rage that we have been carrying has been lifted from our shoulders, and we are no longer enmeshed in the binding web of fury.

If I am ever faced with a friend who is suffering, trapped in the spider’s web of unforgiveness, I now know what I will say. I will tell that person only, “It’s okay. Everything you are feeling is okay. And when you are ready to forgive, it will happen. It will just happen. And that will be a wonderful day.”

The Best Revenge

Their names were (I think) Emily and Linda. Since the events that I recall transpired 50 years ago I may, perhaps, be forgiven for my uncertainty over the names of these two young women–especially as the only reason I have to recall them is that they bullied me—cruelly, continually, mercilessly, and without reason–throughout my first year of high school.

I no longer hate Emily and Linda, although achieving emotional distance took me at least 25 or more years. As adolescents, we are at our most fragile, most sensitive, and the distress induced by viciousness during that period is more telling, and harder to cope with, than it would be later in life.  As mature adults, we have usually learned wisdom, detachment, and survival skills.  Nevertheless, I’m sorry now that I wasted so much precious emotional energy on hating Emily and Linda.  Nothing I ever thought of them—none of my fury, none of my hatred—ever harmed them;  none of things I wished upon them (pain, anguish, failure) did anything more than keep me emotionally bound to my torturers.

And torturers they were.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me!” we used to chant as children when taunted by another child.

It’s a brave, wise shield thrown up in the face of unspeakable cruelty, but it isn’t true. Words hurt.  They wound.  They scar us, less visibly but just as deeply,  as physical assault.  And those wounds and scars can last a lifetime.

I began high school already at a psychological disadvantage, coming as I did from the household of a Borderline Personality Disorder parent.   I had begun developing acne at the early age of 11, and (although I was perfectly proportioned, as I now know from looking at old photos) was told repeatedly by my mother that I was fat.  Neither pretty nor ugly, I might have been called average.  But at 12 and 13, one doesn’t want to be average.  One longs to be pretty, and to be popular, or at least accepted, among one’s peers.

Added to the burden I would carry was the fact that I was just leaving an 8th grade in a parochial school where we girls wore uniforms; I needed all new school clothes.  This was during the height of the hippie era.  Clothes were “psychedelic”, in hot pinks and shrieking lime, and paisley; skirts were short, boots were “go-go”,  and dresses were A-line.  In the midst of all this very definitive and silly fashion, my mother decided to clothe me in my grandmother’s used Chanel knit suits. Those suits were the height of fashion—for a 40-something working woman.  On a 13-year-old teenager, they were the kiss of death.

Plain, covered in acne, in clothes that made me a laughingstock, I entered high school. And Emily and Linda, popular girls leading their clique of sycophants, made the most of it.

There is no point any longer to recalling the things they said, they did to me; the degrading tricks they played on me, the humiliation and mortification piled upon me. day after day . There is no longer any reason to recall how hard it was for me to hold my head up and pretend to ignore their bullying, nor the bitter, gulping sobs that engulfed me when I was alone, nor the many, many hours I spent plotting and visualizing terrible revenge and promising myself that it would happen.  There is no point to any of that, because I was fortunate.  In that era, the local school system considered 7th, 8th, and 9th graders to be “junior” high school.  Emily and Linda were a year younger than I.  When I began my sophomore year in the 10th grade, I was stationed across the street from them, in the high school building.  I no longer rode the same bus.  I moved on, and they were left behind, to torture some other sad victim.  And by the time they arrived at the high school, we were worlds apart, absorbed in a school of almost two thousand young people, in different classes, different rooms. I never saw them again.

Except that I did. For decades,  Emily and Linda lurked in the corner of my mind’s eye, at the periphery of my inner vision, undermining my confidence, dimming my achievements, continuing to torture me–but only, I understand now, because I allowed it.  Trapped in the memories of those painful days, continually rehearsing old grievances, I remained a helpless fly caught in their spiteful web.

Forgiveness, I have learned, does not mean forgiving what was done, but forgiving only the person. Decades later, I realized that Emily and Linda were, in a way, just as trapped in their own web as I was.  Frightened; angry as all adolescents are angry, they chose to victimize me in order to make themselves feel less vulnerable and more whole.

I wonder how well it worked for them.

I was able, eventually, to forgive Emily and Linda, and in doing so, I moved on. And yet I have finally had the revenge I promised myself all those years ago.

The best revenge, after all, is in living well.