Just wanted to share this great article by Sandra Lee Dennis on forgiveness.
For a long time it was my intention to write a blog post about forgiveness, which I would cheekily call “The F Word,” but I never got around to it. Now I feel kind of thankful that other people are writing similar posts so that I can simply read theirs!
Here’s Sandra’s:
Just Forgive! – by Sandra Lee Dennis, PhD
The trauma, confusion and heartache of betrayal often get worse before they get better. When your trust shatters, it can leave you spinning for a long time. After a while a kind of desperation sets in to find a way out of the pain.
In the ensuing quest to recover as quickly as possible, you will soon discover, as I did, an apparently straightforward remedy. Most everything you read, from self-help to depth psychology to the wisdom traditions—and just about everyone you talk with—will advise you similarly.
When you have been badly hurt by someone, in order to heal, you must simply forgive, let go and move on. Just forgive and you will have the magic remedy that will wipe away the brokenness, stop the pain, and give you back your life, or so you are told. What could be more obvious! Encouraged by this chorus of well-wishers, I was inspired, and forgiveness became my new quarry, the sought-after Holy Grail.
Premature Forgiveness Only Covers the Problem
Striving to forgive too soon, or maybe ever, depending on the circumstances, turned out to be a self-defeating quest. Even if we imagine we have arrived at this saintly state of mind, premature forgiveness almost guarantees we will bypass our own suffering. When what we need to do to move forward is to embrace, not bypass, the pain.
I speak from experience, because, believe me, I tried to forgive. I fervently included forgiveness practices as part of my regular meditation and prayer times. Sending the man who left me loving kindness and wishes for healing, acknowledging his pain, and detailing my own transgressions became an integral part of my routine, second only to brushing my teeth. In addition, I spent two years daily working the exercises in A Course in Miracles—the primary focus of which is forgiveness—as well as meeting weekly with a support group. Despite all these efforts, I still felt horrible.
My traumatized state of mind repelled my exertions like oil does water. My psyche would have none of this forgiveness nonsense, and demanded more potent medicine. Outside the time of sustained attention on my practices, and sometimes even with a fierce focus on them, my mind kept reverting to resenting, blaming and hexing him for what he had done. Frankly, trying so desperately to forgive only showed me how far I was from being the spiritual, kind, forgiving person I imagined myself to be.
Forgiveness Grows in Mysterious Ways
When we take forgiveness to heart as an ideal—and who doesn’t want to be a kind, forgiving person?—we may naturally, anxiously, skip over the distressing thoughts and feelings that our soul is calling us to traverse. Before true forgiveness can emerge from the ashes of broken trust, we need to wrestle with and listen to the messages in our own suffering. This means it may take many years of acceptance of our resentful, miserable, unforgiving selves before the heart softens and forgiveness comes quietly, almost magically, to fruition.
For most of us shattered trust brings with it a call to the work of complex grieving. We must grieve before we can forgive, and there is no timetable for that grief. True forgiveness, as a station of the heart, not simply a movement of the rational mind, becomes then an ideal to aspire to rather than an accessible way of being in the world.We may wish to forgive, even set an intention to forgive, but like so much else that involves our depths, forgiveness grows underground in mysterious ways that are not in our hands.
Meanwhile, let’s direct some of that loving kindness toward ourselves as we pass through this dark night testing and stretching of our hearts.
Adapted from Love and the Mystery of Betrayal by Sandra Lee Dennis, PhD—now available in print and ebook.
And here’s the comment I left:
I tried very hard to bypass my anger. The first thing I did (within 3 months of my own betrayal experience) was go to a Non-Violent Communication class. I kept getting triggered and felt far more violent than non-violent, so I quit the class, feeling like a failure.
Then I was going to all these bodyworkers and energy healers, because I had totally somatized my experience, and listened to them all tell me I needed to forgive in order to heal. And this was before I’d even gotten in touch with my anger! It was like blackmail: If you want to heal, you have to forgive. If you do not forgive, you will not heal. I felt doomed. Finally, I had someone tell me that really the only way to heal was to feel the emotions. That you couldn’t bypass them — you had to go through them. What a relief!
After time I did want to forgive, for my own peace of mind, but I think that happens as a RESULT of healing, not the other way around. Once you acknowledge and feel your feelings, then you can move through them and start to let go of what you’re holding on to (and holding against the other person).
To me it feels hard to be a “spiritual” person (I’m not hard-core spiritual, but spirituality is important to me) and hold onto what I think is true about forgiveness. Because everyone is spouting the need for forgiveness and it’s hard to think differently and feel okay about it. It’s funny how seemingly open-minded spiritual practices can also feel so narrow minded. Having acceptance for people’s unique processes is SO important!
You can read more of Sandra’s posts about love and betrayal on her blog at www.SandraLeeDennis.com.
All these prescriptions, pat answers and milestones that therapists mandate, as if they know how life works, annoy me. I don’t believe there are clean lines of delineation, some barrier we have to jump, that deposits us in another place.
I think it’s better to move forward without some measuring stick, prescription or imposed task to fulfill. For me that means the eventual receding of the fixation, anger and helplessness. And it means doing my best to understand my perpetrator’s view as a flawed human being. It means experiencing the event as history, as opposed to the present.
I’m a believer in time, distance, and distraction and pursuit of other goals. Nothing I could do through therapy could shortcut this.
Thank you so much for this! I have often felt as though forgiveness is a vague definition, an illusive feeling, and something I have been unable to make, force, beg, meditate, or mantra into my heart.
I want to know how it feels to make the transition into forgiveness. I want to know what it is like to live there. Is it fluid or solid? Do you stay there once arrived, or do you fluctuate? I want others to explain to me what forgiveness feels like without using the word forgive or letting go. The best analogy in my mind, is that explaining the feeling of forgiveness is like trying to explain color to a person who is blind.
How do you explain “brown” to someone who has never seen it? It’s difficult. I would say it’s like the slosh of your shoes on a muddy day, or the feel of coffee grounds, or that twinge of dirt in your mouth from lettuce not washed enough. Is that brown? They feel like brown to me.
What is the feel of forgiveness?
What a great question! I’d love to hear people’s answers to this.
I imagine it’s different for everyone. For someone who is a long-time meditator or who is perhaps a bit more “enlightened,” I imagine it’s much easier for them to “do” forgiveness — but maybe not. Personally, I think of it as a practice, much like meditation, that you never actually “get” but just keep practicing. I think of forgiveness as being in acceptance of what is, rather than fighting it or struggling with it or resenting it. It’s when you reach a place of acceptance and are not fighting your reality, trying to make it be different than it is. I’ve heard forgiveness described as letting go of the hope that the past could have been different than it was — and letting it be what it actually was. It’s not about condoning bad behavior, it’s not about forgetting — it’s about letting go of your attachment to it and your need for it to have been different. Which makes it a choice. And you may have to make that choice over and over again. Maybe you never “get” it, but have to keep practicing it, like a habit you want to incorporate into your life, until it gets easier. But I don’t think you ever get to a place where you can automatically forgive anyone at any time. At least, not if you’re a normal human! You still need to allow yourself to have your feelings and acknowledge them and accept them. And then allow that the other person had a different experience and their own feelings — whether or not you agree with them.
To me, forgiveness is really about acceptance, and I think that’s something we can all access — after we accept our own experience and feelings. To me, acceptance feels like ease. Relaxation. It feels light rather than heavy. It feels like a release of something you’ve been gripping tightly, perhaps for a long time. It feels like peace. And then there are days when I find myself back in struggle and anger and resentment, and I need to honor my feelings and honor my self and, when I’m ready, practice letting go again.
Anyway, that’s what I think.
I love that – the day came when I stopped hoping that my past would be different. And it made my present better.
I think I have more trouble with forgiving myself than I do with forgiving abusive therapist. Or maybe it is that I am in the place where I need to throw my anger onto him, where it deserves to be, and less on me.
I will keep trying, keep getting better at loving myself, at feeling acceptance, relaxation and this fluid forgiveness. You are so right – it is all practice! Thank you for your thoughtfulness and insight. Your words have helped me.
I love this post and these comments. I have grappled with the idea of forgiveness throughout my own journey to heal. I think early on I didn’t want to have to be angry about what happened. I considered myself pretty non-confrontational and I wanted to believe that I could somehow “rise” above feeling the anger about what happened. It was all wishful thinking though. The anger had spilled into every other area of my life by the time I finally allowed myself to feel it… I mean really feel it.
Looking back, I have cringed when I have heard people say to others (or me) who have experienced this awful abuse, “You just need to move and forgive”. Just that statement alone reflects the complete inability to understand the seriousness of what has happened. It has made me angry when I see “Inspirational” sayings that make it sound like all we have to do is “decide” to move on and everything will be great. Moving on before fully processing all of this isn’t moving on at all. It’s attempting to “forget”. And just like the worst experience in anyone’s life, you can try to “forget” it, but you can’t really.
I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this but I have lost interest in forgiving my abuser. It’s odd because for a while it was so important to me to be able to forgive him. And I am deeply connected to my religious beliefs so it isn’t that I don’t think forgiveness is important. For some reason as I have made my way through all of the healing from this, I stopped caring about being able to forgive him. I really don’t know why this is and I am hoping someone else has experienced this and can help me understand why I have come to feel this way. I have forgiven myself and my naivete with regards to all of the horrible things he did. That part was important to me.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Michelle
This is the best I can hope for and I’m grateful to read your comment. My therapist has abused his powers in ways I never expected he would. He took away appointments I had and gave them to his new star-patient who advertises her many diagnoses in a blog and on a twitter site. She brags on the Internet about having allegedly been “Sexually abused” by both parents (!), having a “complex PTSD” and she brags about her habit of cutting herself (if it’s even true, at one point she wrote she would like to color all her scars and show them to the world!!!) and she claims to be suicidal. All in an aggressive, self-advertising way, displayed all over the Internet. People who really are at danger don’t do this. She is a fraud.
The therapist is unable to see that this is nothing but an attention-seeking narcissist who probably flatters his ego in her sessions. I don’t know what else could have made him turn against me in the brutal way he did.
When I found out that he had canceled one of my appointments to give it to her, I addressed this problem. The therapist became furious and terminated my therapy. This from a person whom I had seen many years, to whom I had paid a lot of money and whom I had held in the highest esteem.
When I realized that he was dumping me, I apologized to him. I apologized, tried to take all the blame myself and I begged him to continue. He didn’t go back on his decision. He sarcastically suggested that we might have one appointment after many months during which we might discuss whether either of us would see a way to continue treatment and that was that.
I have never been treated so sadistically and revengefully. This person- this other “patient” – seems to have power over this therapist. I should never have gotten into this situation with these two strange people.
I will not see him again, I will not stoop as low as to take the bait to see him one more time and then be turned down again. I have lost interest in him and his sadistic version of “therapy”.
But I still find it difficult to let go. I am full of resentment, I find it difficult to focuse and I sleep badly. Which is why I like your post so much. If one day I will be able to forgive myself, I think I can get over him and all his actions. Why should I even consider forgiving him after everything he did? At this point he has managed to make me feel utterly worthless, no doubt he knows this and he enjoys it. I still find it difficult to wrap my head around this kind of sadism from a therapist.