ON FORGIVENESS AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
This time of year there is an upsurge in articles and social media memes that present forgiveness as the only way to clear out residual and sometimes crippling negative feelings one may have toward others who have intentionally or unintentionally made one a target of cruelty and malice.
Perhaps this happens due to a collective anticipatory apprehension about sitting down to dinner with family to celebrate a string of holidays during which we are commanded by the culture to be “happy”. At the same time we are inundated by faulty cultural assumptions that familial love and togetherness exist almost alone at the apex of human relationship desire and accomplishment (or lack of it).
Personally, I think this has more to do with selling tchotchkes and bad fruit salad with marshmallow cream than it has to do with the state of reality of the American family, its possibilities and its shortcomings. And I have nothing against forgiveness. I would never disagree with the widespread belief that forgiveness does indeed offer one path to clearing out the self-destructive inner grinding machine of anger at others for what they have done to hurt us.
But forgiveness is only one path and it may not even be the best path toward detoxifying from a goodly amount of the interpersonal poisons that are passed along and/or inherited as a matter of course in the practice of loving others and one’s self … or just in the act of living with people in community in the world.
At this point I think it is important for me to offer a disclaimer relating to my interest and perspective on forgiveness… and what I think about forgiveness as the exclusive method toward the aim of promoting self-healing from interpersonal and other kinds of trauma experienced at the hands of other human beings: there are things that people do to one another that are unforgivable.
For almost 35 years I worked as a social worker, most of it in the public sector with community mental health services. For almost a dozen of those years I also worked as a family counselor in a hospice organization.
Before that I don’t think I gave much thought to the practice and outcomes of forgiveness, and whether it was, in fact, as is often claimed (especially this time of year) the best and even the only way to keep from letting how others have mistreated us from eating a terminal hole in our hearts and souls.
But I did have my own list of grievances, as anyone does. I have been fortunate and resilient enough to be able to go on without dwelling too destructively on the people, groups, and communities that have burned an imprint on my soul. It is a common enough skill and is called to the fore in situations that are perhaps more often than not much more destructive and traumatic than the ones I experienced. And I, by no means, wish to minimize my own. They have been hard enough, thank you. As the great psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl said: “Everyone has their own Auschwitz.”
In my work I was able to flesh out the kinds of cruelty and the kinds of people who were best able to manage life in a satisfactory if not exemplary manner after it has been irrevocably altered by abuse perpetrated by another. I don’t think it would be productive or timely for me to call up a detailed accounting of the various people and situations in which I found myself acting as mediator and healer to recuperation from trauma. That being said, I can more succinctly come up with a few words that aptly describe the kinds of situations I was routinely made privy to.
Devastating. Murderous. Torturous. Blindingly and numbingly double-binded. Gruesome. Cruel beyond all reckoning, Monstrously, bloodily, selfish. Stupendously self-aggrandizing and hurtful. Shattering. Obliterating. Astoundingly agonizingly heartless.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
It didn’t take me long to recognize that people could, in fact, instigate pure evil in others’ lives in ways that left marks so brutally present and un-erasable that urging, insisting by inference, that victims of such acts work to forgive was in itself an act of cruelty.
Some things are unforgivable. I remember being quite upset about something I discovered about a client that was even more disturbing than usual. Something he had survived at the hands of a parent. A wise mentor matter-of-factly told me this: “Some things are unforgiveable”.
I should add that early in my career I did a little research project among my caseload, which consisted of mostly men that showed that over 80% of them had documented histories of serious and brutal abuse at the hands of relatives. My caseload was made up of some of the most challenging “cases” in the attempts to re-integrate people with persistent symptoms of mental illness back to life in the community.
Some things are unforgivable. I think we should all start there. Not just because we may be professionals working to help others who have been designated as the primary victims of such acts, but as our own self-healers and as the defacto healers of people we love dearly who may struggle daily with the long-term aftermath of being mistreated.
If we start, instead, with the idea that forgiveness is a desired outcome, the only or best outcome, for someone whose hurts are deep and lasting we run the risk of propelling ourselves into the role of re-traumatizer, of making the act of forgiveness a requirement for healing when the people we are in healing partnership with (including ourselves!) are no where near being ready for such a leap and may, rightfully so, never be.
The process of healing and letting go of potentially self-defeating and -defining rage toward a perpetrator and his or her acts is a long and arduous one. It can be life long… and may in fact also be a defining characteristic of the subject’s potential and greatness. It may resist the dissolving power that forgiveness assumes, for reasons that have everything to do with the process of healing and completion and the imperfect act of forgiveness.
If we assume forgiveness is the most desirable outcome, and push for it before it is possible if it is possible at all, might we not be reacting out of our own discomfort with a sometimes grueling recovery process or with the presence of the reality of human-to-human cruelty that defines much of how the human race and its individuals have, in surviving it, accomplished transcendent greatness in the midst of abject misery and evil?
Not forgiving does not equal not healing.
Forgiving is only one way of innumerable and highly individuated ways to prime the pump of healing and what is called recovery.
And it is a damn good one. Don’t get me wrong… if it is available. If it is appropriate to the circumstance and nature of the process of healing.
What is interesting is how in our culture, in taking forgiveness off the table of the required goals toward healing, we are left with little in the way of an ongoing narrative. There is an assumption made by those who strongly recommend it that the ability to forgive is practically the only way to demonstrate that one has moved along significantly enough to declare that he or she is healing.
But that is exactly what I want to do. Take forgiveness off the table and ask: What else is there?
Certainly there are a great number of people who survive, heal, even thrive, who are willing to admit that there are things that were done to them that are unforgiveable. I know people who have either not made it a point or don’t have time to make forgiveness a central fulcrum in their journey to reclaim wholeness or make their scars more flexible, or they outright admit there are things that were done that are unforgiveable. One would hesitate, even be ill advisably presumptuous and condescending, to suggest that someone's healing process is incomplete because they have not forgiven.
Let us start by recognizing the power in admitting: some things are unforgiveable.
So, you ask, if not forgiveness then what?
One of the problems with making forgiveness a requirement of healing is how narrow a scope of possible intervention that leaves; how many people it leaves out of the conversation who have managed to make great progress in their own recovery when, in fact, we should be trying to pull in as many perspectives and methods of healing as exist.
What do people do who make tremendous inroads into their own personhood, sans forgiveness, once past the trauma inflicted on them? People who aren’t focused on forgiving their perpetrator/s, but just on reclaiming their life-lihood?
If forgiveness becomes a part of the package, and it works for them, so be it. Good for them.
But the same goes for those others to whom forgiveness is not central or is impossible because there are things that are unforgiveable. Their work is just as important and just as successful. And, as almost anyone who has survived and thrived after great trauma might tell us, the work of recovery is a life long process, with forgiveness or not. The illusion that forgiveness absolves the perpetrator at the same time that it releases the traumatized from the clutches of some inner sweatshop of recovery work short-circuits the entire endeavor.
There is power and transcendence in the work toward recovery, however it is approached and whatever tools and methods any one individual employs.
Personally, I think that “letting go” is a much more accurate and all encompassing, defining, aspect of moving toward wholeness after trauma than forgiving, even if forgiving has been employed as a way to reach letting go.
Personally, I think that to be effective forgiveness should be asked for.
I know many will disagree with me by saying that forgiveness is for the person forgiving, not the perpetrator being forgiven. That may be so in a certain percentage of people to whom forgiveness has proven to be integral to their ongoing process of letting go, but certainly there are many, perhaps a greater percentage of people moving into and through letting go, who have no need to forgive and recognize the circumstances of their trauma and the people involved have no will or ability to ask for forgiveness, no real presence… because what was done was unforgivable… because forgiveness for a situation that produces such devastating trauma often enough denies clear and precise enough indicators of who perpetrates and what is ultimately to blame.
Still, one must go on. One DOES go on.
It is okay not to forgive.
Maybe forgiveness will present itself as a reasonable action in the future. Maybe not. Maybe you will still move through and into your recovery, and at times do it brilliantly. Maybe you will awaken at some time in the future and realize you needn’t concern yourself with forgiveness. Maybe you will have found you without it.
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