Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, I succumb to weakness and I type my problem into the magical box on the internet otherwise known as Google.
I have found some of the worst possible advice in this way. Because as it turns out, most of the results that turn up are written by people who also don’t know what to do, or alternately by people for whom life is quite simple, black and white and absolute. And because I don’t believe life is simple (I mean, yes, I can spout out aphorisms like “really all anyone wants is to be loved” and even mean them, but that doesn’t automatically cancel out all nuance), this advice is really really terrible for me. Which makes it quite mysterious that I still type my questions into the Google box, but apparently not only am I not simple, I’m also not always rational.
One of the topics I can reliably find bad advice about is forgiveness. I’ve been meaning to write about it for some time, actually, but it seemed like such a can of worms that I procrastinated instead. Until now.
To get this out of the way, yes, forgiveness is freaking fantastic. Letting go of old grudges, old hurts, etc. is healthy and good and takes a huge weight from the shoulders. I am less a fan of the moral weight that forgiveness has acquired in our culture (ie you have to forgive people to be a good person, more on this later), but from a purely practical perspective, forgiveness can be quite empowering and allow us to move forward and free ourselves from old, harmful stories.
Photo Credit: D.Munoz-Santos via Compfight cc
Where I disagree with a lot of conventional wisdom is when we begin to talk about the process of forgiveness. Because there seems to be this idea out there that forgiveness is simple and quick, that we can decide just like that to forgive a person and then it’s done and everything is rainbows and ice cream cones. This belief reinforces the idea of forgiveness as virtue and putting pressure on the person who for whatever reason is in a position to forgive, because why can’t they just get over it already?
But emotional and psychological processes aren’t cookie cutters. We have such a desire to believe that everyone works the way we work, but in fact, we all have our own ways of dealing with things and processing things and thinking about things. And different situations call for different responses that might need to go along with the forgiveness and therefore need to be worked out at the same time. And sometimes forgiveness isn’t instant, isn’t fast and easy. Sometimes difficulty with forgiveness is not a sign of a resentful personality or a desire to make things unpleasant for everyone else. Sometimes forgiveness is messy and complicated, because human relationships are sometimes messy and complicated.
Forgiveness doesn’t look the same every time either. Sometimes we verbalize forgiveness and sometimes we don’t (or can’t). Sometimes forgiveness causes a renewed closeness in a friendship, and sometimes forgiveness happens after a friendship has already ended. Sometimes forgiveness teaches us that a friendship can’t keep going on the way it has; it teaches us the need for change. Sometimes we can’t forgive until we find a way to be safe and respected with a person, and sometimes we forgive at the same time that we say goodbye. Sometimes forgiveness is surprisingly easy and sometimes it takes years. There’s no one blueprint and no one timeline.
Forgiveness is not owed; it is given. And it is something that happens in our own hearts, not because we’re supposed to and not because someone else pressures us into it. Forgiveness is born not from judgment but from compassion, and not only compassion towards the person being forgiven but also towards the one doing the forgiving.
Forgiveness isn’t always simple. When it isn’t, it’s hard but it’s also okay. It’s part of life, this process of feeling and grieving and holding on too tight and learning how to let go and figuring out what you want your next steps to look like. It doesn’t have to hold a value judgment; it is just the work you are doing at the moment.
The Practical Free Spirit 
This seems to me like another shard of the problems we face because feelings are feminized (and therefor bad) in our culture. The burden for forgiveness is, ultimately, a plea for rationality. They did something wrong. They apologized. You forgive them. Life goes on.
Except life doesn’t always go on, and sometimes no amount of rationality will smooth away the hurt of a situation. And this is where the discussion can fall apart, because people have a hard time saying, “I understand you are repentant, and I respect that, but I’m still in pain and I’m not going to be able to move forward until that fades.”
We so demonize emotions. Which leads sometimes to people pushing for you to “just get over it”, or on the other end of the spectrum, the “that’s just how I feel and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Both of these stances are there to shut down the discussion. Even if all the discussion needs to be sometimes is, “I feel this thing and it’s going to take me some time to deal with it.”
Oh yes, very interesting. I agree with you that forgiveness is very much involved with emotions; otherwise we could indeed just do it on demand. And our culture is very uncomfortable with emotions a lot of the time, particularly the so-called negative ones of anger, fear, grief/sadness.
I also think we’re not taught how to deal with emotions and more specifically, what the process of forgiveness can look like.
That also assumes that the person who hurt you is willing to admit that they did something wrong and ask for forgiveness. I’ve seen a lot of emphasis placed on the importance of forgiving someone who’s hurt you even though they are no longer in your life. Forgiving an abuser, for example, is supposed to be vital for your emotional health, and (like Amy said) it’s supposed to be this thing that you can just magically DO. I spent all the years I was with my abuser pretending that I wasn’t hurting, and I feel like it’s just as important to acknowledge my hurt and let myself BE hurt before I can even think about forgiveness.
I agree with you that emotions are feminized and demonized, though – and that’s part of the reason why emotional abuse is so hard to identify.
I completely agree that before you can forgive, it is very important to give yourself the space to feel all your feelings, whatever they might be. Sometimes this takes a long time, but it’s so very worth it in the long term.
It is never very profitable to talk about the F-word. It is probably more beneficial to talk about trust. Because, in the end, this is what is most damaged in a situation where forgiveness is needed. I trusted something to be solid/real and poof! it was an illusion/lie/hallucination? This applies to the obvious “cheating spouse” issues, but also to things as simple as harsh words. When we talk about trust, we can then talk about processes, behaviors and positive actions which both sides can take to regain/increase it. But these are my questions: is it possible to trust someone without forgiving them? Or can there be forgiveness without trust? I think the second one is quite possible. I have left behind some deep pains (forgiveness) but I would never engage that person at the same level of trust as I had before the events. The first question is harder. People will screw up. Your forgiveness of faults will be required many many times over (e.g. teenagers!) but trust can still remain. Perhaps not? Not sure….
Leo Campos
Very insightful, Leo. I love how I write these posts and then you guys come over with your brilliant thoughts and make me smarter. 🙂
I think you’re totally right that forgiveness has a strong connection to trust. And maybe some of the responses I was talking about that can go along with forgiveness have to do with assessing trust levels and how to go forward taking them into account.
Your questions are really interesting too. I agree that forgiveness without trust happens all the time, and I can think of several examples. Trust without forgiveness, on the other hand… I suppose that can happen too, but examples are eluding me. I do think that often forgiveness is harder when trust has been severely compromised.
I don’t think trust necessarily always comes in to play with forgiveness, so I can forgive someone without having ever lost trust in them. The hurt might have been slight, and / or seemed inadvertent, for instance. Trust without forgiveness, then, might be if someone hurt me in a small way, but they don’t seem repentant so that I don’t want to forgive them, yet I still trust them to be who they are (good at what they do, not a jerk in other circumstances, whatever). Or even if it were something big, I might expect the person was already a jerk yet not want to forgive them for it. If I got in a shark tank with blood on my leg, and a shark bit my leg off, I might still trust the shark to be a shark but might not forgive the animal – even though it would be my own stupid fault for temporarily forgetting the nature of sharks. That might not seem like a rational answer, but then we aren’t really rational that often.
These possibilities, though, involve a hurt without a loss of trust, so no need to give trust back without forgiving someone too. I think the biggest hurts are connected to a loss of trust (I’d rather lose a leg to an attack from a shark than, for instance, from my grandmother), so trust to me seems the crucial part of why we struggle with forgiving the worst things done to us. Or perhaps forgiveness is more than one thing: Letting go of a hurt being one version of it, letting go of a betrayal and putting trust back in to the betrayer being the heavier (and not always advisable) form.
More important, I think, is finding a way to forgive ourselves when we feel guilty of something. I think any hurt we feel guilty of is going to feel like a betrayal of ourselves, since we think we know ourselves and therefore think we should know what mistakes we’ll make before we make them (or, worse, that we should have been ready to handle things we had no control over happening). This can only erode our trust in ourselves, which I think may be a good portion of how we can lose self-respect and self-confidence (“confidence” itself meaning “with faith”, after all). It’s true that we don’t owe forgiveness, except to ourselves – and maybe not even then.
Maybe that’s where giving trust without forgiveness comes in. I could see someone saying, “I will trust myself, again, despite what I’ve done, because I need to trust myself if I want to change – but I can’t forgive myself for my transgression, not yet.” Or saying the same to someone they care about who needs to change, too.
Thank you Amy. This is something I’m working on myself, lately. I’m finding forgiveness is not an easy switch to turn on and off. You can say “I forgive you” only do discover mess of hurt and triggers hooked inside the heart are not nearly as accommodating.
Yes, exactly. We can’t just turn off emotions on demand…or at least, many of us can’t. They have to be dealt with one way or another.
For me, a lot of forgiveness comes with understanding. I need to understand why it happened, before I can forgive it.
Was someone angry, were they just overwhelmed and doing the best they could, did they intend to hurt me for some reason, an what reason?
It’s still rooted in emotion, I think, but if I can see where the other person was coming from, I can begin to forgive. If I don’t understand, then it’s all emotion and it gets too tangled.
I always like to understand to. But I’ve also learned that sometimes I have to let go of wanting to understand because I simply do not have (and cannot get) enough information.
I must say, that it is very true. The thought of forgiving seems simple. I am glad you posted this because it spoke to me at the right moment. Thank you.
[…] been wanting to write that post on forgiveness I published last week for a long time. But I kept punting it for other ideas because I was afraid to […]