This article talks about work we do when we are ready to work on clearing the influence of betrayals from our minds and emotional systems. It is about recovering our feelings of safety in the world and moving forward to create better and happier lives. Those of us who are still battling our betrayers, still clarifying our feelings of outrage or still developing our self-defensive skills may feel outraged by the very idea of forgiving. And so they should. Forgiving is something we do “at our leisure,” later when we have the time to think about restoring our emotional systems to a pre-warzone state. Ultimately we want to be positive, creative, optimistic people — without ever forgetting the lessons we learned in our histories. This article is about what we do, when we’re ready to put it all behind us. — Kathy
“Forgiveness is a dangerous passage.” This is a quote from an unknown source on the white board on my office. It’s been there for years and every time I think about cleaning it off, I think “oh not yet.” The temptation to forgive for the wrong reasons is something I don’t want to forget.
In this tenth article of this series on recovering from traumatic relationships, we will discuss the process of forgiving. It is a bridge between the grieving/letting go and the rebuilding phases.
Why bother?
A lot of people have a lot of opinions on forgiveness. Most religious or spiritual disciplines will tell us that forgiving is essential to our spiritual health. On a more mundane level, we may we aware that our friends and supporters are losing patience with our extended healing process, or may be pressuring us to get over it. On a more personal level, we may want to reenter the world without all this emotional baggage that makes us so hyper-conscious of potential threats that we have a hard time seeing or taking advantage of opportunities for good experiences.
In my mind, the only reason to ever consider forgiving is that we want to free out minds of the residue of anger that hangs on after we grieve and let go. There are other benefits we get out of forgiveness, but the first motivation has to be to improve the “quality of life” in our own minds. It’s a matter of our relationship with ourselves.
In addition, I believe there are a few prerequisites to really forgiving anything. The most important of them is that our suffering is fading. (That doesn’t mean that we’re not still dealing with repercussions of some sort, but that the level of pain has diminished to the point where it’s less important than our desire to get over it.)
The other one is that we have the stability and presence of mind to know that we can forgive without getting back into the situation that caused us all this pain in the first place. If we’re still attracted to that situation or others like it, we’re leapfrogging ahead to forgiving before we’ve done the preliminary work of getting angry at our betrayers, developing defensive skills, and facing the fact that there are things we just cannot fix or change.
What is NOT a good reason for forgiving is some sort of social expediency, because we have to deal with our betrayers or with other people who are not sympathetic or pressuring us to get over it. There are other ways to handle that situation.
Here are some of the things we may be thinking as we approach forgiving:
• These angry or frightened feelings don’t have any place in my life anymore. I want to move on.
• I’m ready to find more interests than this bitterness
• I want to clean up my emotional system so I become more positive and optimistic
• I’m starting to remember how I felt before all this happened, and I want to recover some of that joy of life.
• This just isn’t worth the energy I’ve been giving it
But to forgive, we have to overcome one major obstacle. Fear. Forgiving is actually part of overcoming fear. But we have to face it head on too.
Fear and forgiveness
The progress of healing involves us becoming more and more real about what happened and how we feel about it. In anger, we get closer to recognizing our fear, but our reaction is to throw things at it — blame, threats, vengeance, work on fixing things so it never happens again. In grieving and letting go, we accept the specific losses that we have endured. While that is good work, it also clarifies our vulnerability to random events or to specific threats in the world. We may work on accepting that vulnerability, along with our other losses, but it doesn’t change the fact that it exists.
And so now, our increasing awareness of the costs of our vulnerability raises a new issue. How do we live with the fear?
This question makes sense of all we’ve been through to process the trauma. We may have dabbled with fear in our processing. Asking ourselves “what if” this or that. What if no one ever loves me again? What if I am really too stupid to live? But we never sat down to really look it hard in the eye.
Because fear is an extremely uncomfortable emotion. In fact, if we look at all the so-called negative emotions, including shame and guilt, and do enough digging down, we find fear at the bottom of them. Other than love, it is the most fundamental emotion. And it is the antithesis of love or connectedness. We literally can’t feel love and fear at the same time. One will overtake the other.
Fear is designed to stop everything else until it is resolved. It generates the noises of anxiety and need for immediate relief, while blocking or compromising our ability to see into the future, our ability to fully recognize and enjoy what is around us, and our ability to take the normal risks involved in forward movement in our lives. It eats up our energy in a million ways and drives us toward behaviors that are about nothing but self-protection and relief from the mental noise.
This is why facing and acknowledging the fact that we are afraid can be such a powerfully transformative thing, all by itself. It is a form of clearing away all the intermediate structures of trauma-processing and getting down to the center of it in a totally authentic way. So we are no longer lying to ourselves or pretending. So that we are no longer trying to talk ourselves into irrational ideas about being stronger or safer than we are. So that we are finally clear about the fact that the universe whacked us and we don’t know when it will whack us again. It is out of our control.
This is tough stuff, the toughest of the entire grief process, and until we are ready for it, we can’t do it. Our minds won’t let us. We will slip and slide away into denial or bargaining or anger or another round of grieving and letting go, all the things that we know made us feel better than the stage before. And that is fine. Our minds have their own wisdom, and we face this issue when we have the structural underpinning in place to do this. It’s why the healing process is progressive.
But one way or another, when we come to think about forgiving, we’re going to run into this issue. How can I safely forgive if I really don’t know when I’m going to be facing the same thing again, or something worse? Or vice versa, how can I experience my fear if I’m relaxing my angry alert and protection systems by forgiving?
This trauma was nothing compared to the first one
The experience of trauma is built into our emotional histories. In a way, every trauma we experience is a replay of the primal trauma that every child experiences, the transition from life inside the womb to life out of it. It is the fundamental “expulsion from the Garden of Eden” which transfers us from a situation where we are fed, warmed, held, connected to our source to a new situation in which we are separate and dependent for our survival on things that are out of our control.
The developmental activities of the first four years are actually about the child navigating that separation to acquire certain basic intellectual perspectives and emotional skills necessary to healthy personality formation. It is our first experience of trauma processing. It occurs both on a macro level of gradual emotional acceptance of separation from the “source” and on a detail level of dealing with separate events that trigger fear, disappointment and uncertainty. If all goes well, we maintain steady bonds with our caretakers that allow us to ease into independence, self-soothing skills and the beginnings of empathy.
So we “know” what trauma means from a very early age. One way of describing trauma is that it is an unexpected breach of the rules we took for granted. Or the rules we depended on for our survival and sense of security in the world.
A whole series of emotional reactions to this breach are reasonable and normal. All the emotional stages we discuss in trauma processing, as well as others that we have not discussed in depth, such as feelings of betrayal, rejection or shame. If we go back to the nature of the first trauma, it makes sense that we would feel offended. One day our life is one thing; the next thing it’s another. What are we supposed to think? At minimum, it would be reasonable to think we are being unreasonably screwed with.
This brings us back to the primal argument. Because who, ultimately, is screwing with us? To cut a long discussion short, our big argument is not with any one persecutor in this world, not our parents, not our selfish lovers, not with the truck that hit us. It’s with God or the universe, or however we look at the overall intelligence that organizes this place. Because clearly that big intelligence has forgotten that we were previously important enough to have the suite at the center of the universe, and for reasons not made clear, we have been demoted to just one small, helpless life form in this place full things and life forms that clearly do not recognize our centrality.
Welcome to the first time we felt the fear of being vulnerable and alone. And to the basic human challenge of living with those feelings at the same time we experience love, trust, some kind of internal dignity, and the ability to risk moving forward with our lives.
There is no human being who has not been through this. And there is not one of us who doesn’t live with this challenge on a daily basis in some part of our consciousness.
It’s important to know this, because as we move forward with dealing with our own fear, we also know that some people have found ways of managing it more effectively than others.
The cost of doing business.
We have these bodies. They have their own intelligence and they want to survive. Our spirituality has its intelligence. Our intellect has its intelligence. Our emotional system has its intelligence. (See Daniel Goleman’s books on various forms of intelligence for wonderful discussions of this topic.) They are all integrated and mutually supportive, but the body is the instrument and the house where it all plays out, and one of the body’s primary vocabulary words is fear.
We cannot get away from this, but we can decide what we’re going to do about it. And that is where forgiving comes in.
There are a lot of dictionary definitions of forgiving, but for our purposes in this article, we are going to experiment with a new one. That is, making a decision about how much energy we want give to a certain source of fear in our lives.
This is not about minimizing the damage or our struggle to get over it. It is not about condoning other people’s bad behavior or the real dangers we face in the world.
Rather it is about recognizing something about ourselves. We have done all reasonable work to identify the problem, to protect ourselves in the future, to let go of what we have discovered is now gone, and to face our fear. We know what we are afraid of. Now, we consider a decision about reclassifying the issue as something we may or may not run into, something that is (to some degree) out of our control. We begin to consider whether or not we are served by continuing to let fear of this thing drain resources that could be spent on positive forward movement.
Forgiving is not the same as denial, because we make this decision with full awareness of our losses and our future risks. It involves no forgetting. We respect all the information we have gathered, in case we need it again. We respect all the feelings we have gone through, because they are part of the truth of this experience. We just decide to start withdrawing our energy, turning off that faucet, and shifting our attention to other things.
What forgiving is and isn’t
Forgiving is a decision we make and then gradually follow through, adapting that decision to our own comfort level. It is a decision we make from a position of power over the one thing we truly have power over, our own choices. Especially that supreme choice of where we place our attention.
Forgiving is something we do, knowing that we cannot totally control fear, because our bodies have their own agendas and they will generate fear if they feel it is necessary. So it also involves a deal with our bodies that we will listen to their fear, that we will not become airy-fairy pseudo-Buddhists who try to stuff their fear because they think it’s unfashionable. But we make a deal with our bodies that it’s better for the entire organism if we manage our fear, reducing our investments in fear about things we already know about, and saving our big extravaganzas of fear and anxiety for the surprises.
Forgiving is about trust at two levels. First, trust that certain bad things will happen. We can look at this statistically, if we’re inclined. A certain fraction of people we meet will be destructive emotional cripples. A certain fraction of things we buy will turn out to be unusable junk. A certain number of conversations with our relatives will include uninvited comments about our choices, our characters or our weight. Trusting that these things will happen eliminates the surprise factor and enables us to plan around these statistical likelihoods.
Second, forgiving is also a kind of trophy we get for doing the work and coming out the other side of the trauma processing. In that sense, it is about renewed trust in ourselves and in the universe. What was once a huge deal is now fully digested and just a learning experience attached to some unpleasant memories. We are whole again and on generally good terms with the big intelligence that runs everything.
In all of this, you’ve probably noticed how little I’ve talked about the perpetrator. And I’m sure you understand why. Because this is really something between the various forms of intelligence in ourselves, and it is something between us and the big intelligence that runs everything.
But still we need to get down some practicalities too. So here is what forgiveness is NOT:
• It is not condoning or acceptance of anything we find hurtful, unethical, uncaring or anything else that is bad for us. (We may find ourselves releasing negative feelings about something, when we come to understand why it happened, but we don’t have to. This is not ultimately about them. It is whether we’re ready to move on.)
•It is not about compartmentalizing or denial. We are not “stuffing” it or pretending it never happened. We’re not trying to convince ourselves that we haven’t just been through a battle or deluding ourselves that we’re more powerful than we are. We are just gradually shifting our attention away from it, as we feel comfortable doing so. We are gradually reclaiming our interest in other things.
• It is not a reason for re-involving ourselves with people or situations that hurt us. We don’t forgive so we can jump into that pool again. The only reason we would do that is if we have evolved past the point of being hurt by what hurt us before (something that doesn’t often happen) or if the person or the situation has gone through some kind of cosmic surgery and is now something else. Remember, forgiving comes AFTER we have learned self-protection in the angry phase and let go of whatever got us into this situation. If we forgive because we want to do the same thing all over again ”¦ well, you don’t need me to tell you what you’re volunteering for.
• Likewise, it is not a social cure. If we’re forgiving because we’re embarrassed about being such a bore, or because our bad feelings are alienating our families, or because we want to get along better with people who just don’t get it, we victimizing ourselves all over again. We’re giving away our authority over our own feelings, and trying to force ourselves to feel something we don’t, in order to be accepted. If it’s really important that we not communicate the full force of the outrage or grief we’re dealing with – like in a work situation or in court — we can do that. We can selectively choose where, when and how much we share, while we continue to work through our trauma privately. The ability to do this — letting some people in and keeping others out — is good practice in developing the skills of conditional trust.
• There is no reason that we have to forgive people to their faces or even let them know about it. In fact, if we’re really ready to stop wasting energy, we probably won’t. We don’t just stop bothering with them in our heads; we stop bothering with them in real life. We avoid engagement. If we have to spend energy on some kind of mop-up or dealing with continuing drama from their side, we handle it with an eye toward ending all of it, because we want to be done with it.
Finally, forgiving is not an all-or-nothing thing. Nor is it a carved-in-stone solution. We don’t say, “Oh, I’ve decided it’s not worth caring anymore about what he (or she) did to me, and now I have to not care about the new thing he (or she) is doing to me.” It doesn’t work that way. Forgiving is a way of allocating our own resources. If new circumstances require us to grab a sword and slay a few dragons before dinner, then we do it. After we come home and shower, we can decide whether we’re ready to forgive the loss of our afternoon, or if we need to spend more time processing that little irritation.
And if we absolutely feel like we must announce our decision to forgive to the sociopath, here’s a suggested forgiveness note:
I’ve decided not to give you any more attention. I’m not going to track you down, hire a hit man or sue you for theft or mental suffering. I’ve dealt with my losses by myself. But don’t confuse this with weakness. The next time you show up, it won’t be such a pleasant or profitable experience for you. I also advise you to you grow up, for your own sake. Not everyone is as forgiving as me. As Henry the XV said to a murderous friend, “I pardon you, but I also pardon whoever kills you.”
In the next article, we begin on the wonderful topic of becoming who we want to be.
Namaste. The wise emotional accountant in me salutes the wise emotional accountant in you.
Kathy
Dear Kathy,
Thank you for this article. It’s where I am, but couldn’t yet put into words. I’m tied of using my energy in thoughts of the narcissist/psychopath, and I’m ready to use it to improve my life. I’d began to realize that I was keeping this connection to her in my head, and she wasn’t going away: there was Before My Degree and New Career Got Derailed by a N/P, and there was AFTER, and it’s something I had decided to make peace with, because that After is really up to me.
I wasn’t ready before because I was too angry. I needed to be angry, really rip snorting pissed off angry – it helped me find my voice, put a name to what happened, and also to what happened before in my family of origin. It was very helpful for a time but then it no longer was. I’ll use it again if I need it, but right now, I’d rather keep making peace with myself and see what I can find in life that will allow me to get on with finding my way.
Going through all this, and facing my fears, has made life pretty simple: Limited time and limited energy, so choose wisely. And at long last, that choice is about what works best for me.
Thanks so much, Betty, for your response. I keep wanting to go back to this article, and add something more. Because it’s so important to understand that forgiving is about increasing our power over our own lives, not settling for living with pain or letting damage define who we are.
You clearly get this. We only have so many resources in time, energy, ability to focus. Deciding to use them for our own good and for the future we want is exercising our first and greatest entitlement. We own our our own lives.
Yesterday, my sister, who is doing her own healing and occasionally visits this site, told me that she was so proud of me for doing this work and talking about it. I try not to let myself be too vulnerable to compliments, because I also don’t want to be vulnerable to negative judgments, but this came from someone who knows me and sees through me. It meant a lot.
I pass it on to you. I am so proud of you for having come so far.
Namaste.
Kathy
What helped me tremendously was a class I took based on the book”Total Forgiveness” by R.T. Kendall. I got a lot of self power by realizing what total forgiveness is NOT: approval of what they did, excusing what they did, justifying what they did, pardoning what they did, forgiveness does not mean reconciliation. denying what they did, pretending we are not hurt. When I started to understand these principals, I was able to understand forgiveness involves choosing to keep no record of wrongs, refuse to punish, stop telling what they did to anyone who will listen, being merciful, being gracious, not being bitter,forgiving God & ourselves. Whether you believe in God or Karma or whatever, this class took a huge burden from my heart. It helped me to understand the feelings of anger & bitterness were perfectly natural, & I had a choice to let them consume me, or to learn how to come to terms with these feelings, & learn to live again. Along with all I learn here at LF, & all the kind loving people here, I was able to come to terms with how I feel, & get another couple steps down that healin’ road.
Me too, sstiles54. I’d be interested to know what motivated you to take the class.
For me, it was an increasing awareness that my negativity was affecting my life too much. I wasn’t just dealing with anger at other people and my sensitivity to feeling threatened by even small things. The same anger seemed to be fueling all the self-hating voices in my head. And I was beginning to remember that I used to feel more of a spiritual connection, and I wanted to see if I could get that back.
I took an online class with Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project and author of “Forgive for Good.” He’s a great guy and the class is totally non-threatening. The site is http://www.emindful.com and professionals can get CME and CEU credits by taking it.
The course is not for people who are newly dealing with trauma. I think that Fred requires that participants be at last a year past the traumatic event.
It was really interesting to see all the different types of experiences that brought people to the class. Fred himself told a story of feeling betrayed by a friend in a way he just couldn’t get over. Compared to what I’d been through, it seemed like such a minor thing, but it was affecting his life so much that he was motivated to research how people forgive and what they get out of it.
And my experience was a lot like yours. In forgiving other people, I found that I was forgiving myself. I knew that I’d been giving myself a hard time, but I didn’t realize how much until I started to let go of all those demands that I be perfect and never make a mistake.
The course, and that ability to stop giving energy to all those self-critical voices in my mind, lead directly to one of the most important moments in my recovery. That was the day I told them all to shut up — the internalized criticisms of the sociopath and all the older voices that kept me feeling insecure and anxious. And in the relative silence, I discovered a “me” that predated all this trauma and drama, a wise, joyful, open-hearted child with good instincts and a vision of what my life was really about, who had been quietly learning and growing up while I had been rushing around dealing with my anxieties and protecting myself from monsters.
That was the real beginning of the positive phase of my recovery. I tell this story, not know if anyone else can relate to it. I don’t know how many people feel like there is another self, below or beyond all emotional static that keeps us from our true potential.
Maybe other people don’t need to find this. But I did. I needed to find a realization of myself that I could love without reservation. So “taking care of myself” wasn’t just another burden, something to add to my anxieties, but something that was natural and clear. And I could go on to develop things like true compassion, because it was a natural outgrowth of being compassionate with myself.
sstiles54, it sounds like forgiving gave you something like the same gifts, whether or not it played out in exactly the same way.
Again, if you can share anything more about what motivated you to take the class, it might be helpful for other people to know.
Kathy
Kathy:
Many years ago, when I worked as a writer for one of the morning talk shows I was assigned an episode on forgiveness. There was an interesting organization in Wisconsin called “The International Forgiveness Institute.” Two of their key points were: (a) just because you forgive, does not mean you condone the wrong that was done to you; and (b) you cannot force forgiveness. It will come, if ever, only when you are ready.
In my own case I have found that I have gotten to the point I can forgive my parents. I now see that they were very damaged people themselves. I just don’t want to put any more energy in the time they have left on earth being angry at them. That doesn’t make their abuse any less acceptable. That doesn’t mean that I am not any less self-protective around them. What that means is that I have chosen to spend the time they have left on earth with them in a non-anger based emotional context.
The S, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. I am still justifiably angry at him, although I am finding that the anger is lessening because it is too exhausting to live like that. That said, I still have scores to settle with him. As I told one of his creditors who I sent after him “this is just about restoring some balance to the universe.” Perhaps someday I will get to the point that I can forgive him. But, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
BTW: I had emailed you my contact info through your weblink. I remember before all hell broke loose with my mother that you mentioned you were coming into the city. Have an ETA? Would love to get together for coffee — or a nice single malt scotch.
Hi Matt, it will be the 24th of this month, late afternoon or so. I will be footsore from tramping around a trade show in midtown and probably mentally blasted from BS-ing with clients, potential clients, journalists and analysts. And I will probably kiss your feet for giving me a chance to return to earth from all that stuff.
Well, okay, I won’t kiss your feet, but getting together is definitely a great idea. I’ll retrieve your e-mail, which apparently drowned in my daily deluge of spam and get back with you.
You might mentally prepare for a hard sell on the idea that you should be seeing the potential for a bestseller in all this advice your giving here. People have no idea what their rights are and what the legal obstacles are. Some straightforward education the issues you discuss here would be a valued resource, even if you couldn’t dig down into state-by-state statutes.
So that gives you about two weeks to come up with all the reasons why you can’t do it right now. We can debate.
Whew, I really know how to make myself welcome, don’t I?
Regarding the rest of your letter, I understand completely. I actually was able to more or less forgive the sociopath first, but I’m still a little shaky on my parents. Because the clear benefit from the relationship from the sociopath became apparent and reduced my pain. It’s also easier for me to feel powerful in relationship to dealing with him.
My parents are dead. I know they were damaged, and I understand why and how. But the work on undoing their toxic influence continues. I sometimes feel like I’m walking around the subbasement of my mind with a sledge hammer, finding these dysfunctional coping structures, figuring out how they’re made, and then knocking out the two-by-fours that hold them up. It’s my second job. Except for a few minor ones that are stamped with the name of my Catholic elementary school, all of them are emblazoned with the family crest, a picture of Chronos eating his children.
I’ll know my system is clear when I feel nothing but compassion for them. Right now, I might be able to deal courteously with them, if they were still alive, particularly my mother who was mostly another victim of my father. But I don’t think I’d be in the mood to protect them from information about the amount of time and energy I’m have to invest in my recovery. Especially if they made the mistake of trying to minimize the need for it, or make it about some inherent character flaw in me.
As you can hear, I’m still touchy. Not finished with the anger. But I’d like to be. As you say, it’s tiring.
Matt, would you please e-mail me again. I can’t find it. I may have accidentally trashed it in one of my wholesale deletions of stuff in my spam folder.
It would help if you put “Matt from Lovefraud” in the subject line.
Thanks — Kathy
Wow, Matt I applaud you for what you are doing with your parents. I believe that you will be grateful when they are gone that you were able to “forgive” them. Forgive doesn’t mean forget…..Forgiving is just one of those things that if presented to us before we are ready, it just seems impossible to do. Because it DOES feel like to forgive someone is condoning or accepting what they have done. But it really is not that at all.
I went through this about a year before my father died. I found that in the end, had little to do with him at ALL….It was so much more about me, and after he was gone I felt so relieved that I was able to forgive him. I can’t even imagine how I might feel now, that he is gone, if I was unable to do this. My emotions when my father passed were so much easier to deal with after I had gone through the forgiveness process.
Today I am reflecting on the wedding of my oldest son on Saturday. It was a much more EMOTIONAL experience than I ever imagined it would be…..I am still very emotional and I am unsure what is triggering all of this emotion inside of me? It is so complex? Some of this emotion seems “natural” to me, my first born, ending up with his “first” love that he dated in high school. After being apart for many years and “finding” each other again and falling in love…..She is a wonderful person and I couldn’t be happier for him. The church wedding was beautiful, however I shed tears (to my dismay) during much of the wedding. Some of the tears, expected (happy tears) and some of the tears/feelings very unexpected?
My new DIL Gave me a personalized hanky that was inscribed with my name and inscribed “THANK YOU FOR RAISING YOUR SON TO BE THE MAN OF MY DREAMS”……….Well that hanky and its sentiments, I think would make any mother cry. My sweet daughter in law gave me the ultimate compliment.
However for me that “compliment” also played into my emotions of my younger son that I am raising. And for reasons I can’t really explain the complexity of my emotions on the day that really should have been ALL about my “oldest son” were all mixed up inside of me. I had so many moments on his wedding day where I could not have been more proud of him. He really is a fine young man.
My younger son who was his brothers best man had a flawless day. He was on his best behavior the entire day. His best man speech to his brother was delivered in front of 200 people with the confidence of a much older person who might have done alot of public speaking in the past. He NAILED it perfectly. It was unbelievable. He had everyone laughing in the begining and then later crying during the sentimental part.
He had asked me to print it on an index card the night before and he glanced at it & memorized it and didn’t even use the card. ALL of the rest of wedding party that had words to say to the bride and groom used their index cards! And they are also a full 10 years or more OLDER than my 16 year old son. Everyone of them was somewhat nervous, (hands shaking, clearing of the throats, eyes down etc) during their deliverance and my 16 year old was up their smiling, pausing at the right moments and giving EYE contact to the listeners. Wow I had never seen my youngest son so comfortable with an almost all adult audience. (most of whom he didn’t know,)
I was very proud of him and almost was able to question myself……What the hell am I worried about? His flawless behavior on his brothers wedding day is EXACTLY why their is no ONE in my life (as far as my friends or family) that “get it”.
I can so easily question myself when I am in the ” good moment” how his personality can be transformed from Dr Jekle to Mr Hide. And how is this even possible? And it is probably a good thing that there are a few people that recently have SEEN the other troubling side that I often see. Such as the “at risk” counscelor at school, because without someone else at least “getting it” even in much smaller doses, I swear I would have to question my sanity….Even MORE often than I do.
To any unsuspecting onlooker I had alot to be thankful for. Two fine boys. How I wish I could feel that in my heart….That he would turn out to be ok, just like his brother did….
Kathy, Lovefraud and the people who write and post here are applied daily to my heart, and the treatment is working! Chronos ate his kids at our house, too — and I finally got it that I could detest the choices my parents made while understanding that they’d grown up in just such a family, too. That’s were compassion, which is the opposite of shutting down or going grindingly bitter, came in. That stuff, as you’ve said, heals you as you choose to direct your energy to healing, and away from the constant and doomed battle for perfection.
The “me underneath” is still playing gopher : she pops her head up and shows her stuff, usually during meditation, or at moments like this, reading at Lovefraud. Then she disappears for a time. But I’m inviting her out now every day, realizing she’s always been there quietly waiting, and I honor her presence by asking anxiety to take a hike!
This is the one place in my life right now where I can talk about this stuff, which I find to be the treasure of life. NOT all that horrible stuff that happened or is happening to us, but the gifts we can share with each other and the powerful healing we can bring to our own hearts and share with the world. I’m with your sister : Thank you so much for the amazing work you’re doing here!
Witsend: People much wiser will post to you, but please accept my very best wishes, and respect for the courage you’re demonstrating in loving your scary son enough to ask the really tough questions. Allowing yourself to see painful truths about your child — it doesn’t get harder than that.
The rest of you guys : it’s each of us coming together that makes this work. I never got the real power of community ’till I came here. You guys are in my prayers, daily, and on my Things For Which I’m Thankful list at the end of each day.
“NOT all that horrible stuff that happened or is happening to us…” My intention was NOT to discount in any way anyone’s life experiences or stories!
What I’d meant to convey is that for me, the real treasure in my life has been discovering healing and learning to allow it to happen.