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
britneyhammer, honey, long, long ago in the 60s, someone once told me how to ground myself to avoid a bad acid trip. It was to repeat everything I knew about who I was, where I was, what time it was…just the facts.
So here are some facts to ground you. You are living with a lot of mixed feelings. You know he’s a wrong guy, but you also still feel connected to him. You know you can’t depend on him, but you keep wanting to depend on him. It’s really an argument between your heart and your head, and most of the time your head wins, but occasionally you’re heart does, especially when you’re feeling upset and need a “home” to go home to.
Everyone of us has been through this, and we all applaud you for going NC, even though you slipped up, and had to start again. You know you took a step backwards, but it was just a small step. It was just a telephone conversation, just a small amount of poison to get out of your system. You’ll feel stronger faster this time.
You might want to go back and read some of the earlier articles in this series. They might help you understand more about what you’re going through. You’re doing really good work. You’re stopping contact. You’re recognizing that you’re not getting what you want out of it. There’s a difference between succumbing to temptation and getting totally sucked in again. You did the small thing.
But you know that it just prolongs the pain to even talk with him. Detox is hard, but it leads to other things. Right now, you’re dealing mostly with feelings. Later on you’re going to figuring things out so fast it will take your breath away.
You’re on the path, going in the right direction. Try not to beat yourself up. We all did that too, and I know it’s almost hopeless to tell you that. But it doesn’t help, and you weren’t the bad guy here.
It does get better. Really. You’ve got a whole world of people here who will tell you that. It gets better, and your life gets better too.
Kathy
Donna1056, you should not be even thinking about forgiving. This article is written for people who have already been through a lot of recovery work. Forgiving is something we may do, when we get to the end of the road. When we’ve sorted out our pain, and what they did is less important to us than moving on.
Right now you are dealing with the shock and pain of betrayal. You are confused, hurt and your sense of reality is challenged. Our stories are all similar, but there are variations. And your kind of story that is one of the hardest. These are the stories of people who thought they had some kind of dependable relationship, even if it wasn’t perfect, and had it disappear on them in a kind of lightening stroke.
I don’t know if this is your first post, and if it is, welcome to LoveFraud. I’m sorry you qualify to be here, but I’m really glad you found us.
If you haven’t already done it, it would help you to read some of the articles in the archives. Just pick anything that catches you eye, and don’t worry about reading all the responses below it. You’ll see what I’m saying about all our experiences being similar. If you are not sure that you were involved with a sociopath, you’ll probably become sure as you keep reading. He sounds like one.
Getting over these relationships takes some time. If you want to know more about that process, you might find my earlier articles in this series helpful. The one other thing that would probably be the greatest gift you could give yourself right now is to buy and read a copy of “Women Who Love Sociopaths.” It will actually make you feel a little better.
Congratulations to you for not giving him the money. It undoubtedly cost you the relationship, but you’ve already figured out that he left because he couldn’t extract big sums of money from you. It was built into the way you told the story. You might not have totally accepted that as true, but it looks pretty clear to me.
Donna, something really bad happened to you. Like having an asteroid drop on your head. It wasn’t your fault. You’re not the bad guy. But you’re the one left with the bruises. And now your big job is to take care of yourself while you heal.
You’re going to get a lot of good advice here, so I’ll stop talking. I send you a big hug. You’re going to come out of this okay. Most of us feel like we’re smarter, stronger and even happier for the experience. Eventually. Not at first. But it will get better, I promise.
Kathy
Kathy,
In answer to your question about my taking the forgiveness class, I was driving myself crazy with all the pent up anger & bitterness in my head & heart. So many times while reading here at LF, I kept seeing the comment, “Do not let the s live rent free in your head”. That spathhole was in my head 24/7. I beat myself up constantly for being stupid enough to fall for him. I was angry at myself all the time. I just knew I had to learn how to trust & forgive myself again, so I signed up for the class at my church. I still have a stray bad thought (or nightmare) that pops into my head from time to time. It does not rule my life now.
Namaste!
Thanks, sstiles54, that’s pretty much the way it was for me too. I was tired of being so critical and judgmental, but the thing that really drove me into that class was the way being mad at him made me talk to myself.
I want to ask everyone who made this decision. I’m really curious about what brings us to this thing. We don’t have to do it, like some of the other phases of healing. We really choose this one, and in some ways, it’s counter-intuitive.
Like you I have my flashes, especially when I’m tired or stressed. I think that’s when my old abandonment issues rise, and I get mad about being alone with all these burdens. He’s the last person I wanted to be my rock, and it’s him I get mad at. But it always backfires on me, because it also includes me beating myself up for being disorganized, taking on too much work, not being smart enough to do it faster, ad nauseum. And, like you, beating myself up for ever mistaking him for someone who could actually be a partner and not just a cold-hearted user. Eventually I figure out I’ve dropped into that familiar state, and I remind myself that if I climb out of it, things get easier.
I know I’ve mentioned this in other threads, but it was a long time ago. At some point, I figured out a name for the state. And when I told my sister, who was going through her own black depression at the time, she started to laugh, and then I did, and it was the first good laugh we’d had in a long time.
It was the Lugubrious State. And for some reason I associate it with a mental picture of a lot of Nazi soldiers in some Munich beer garden, waving their beer mugs around while they sing sentimental songs about their mothers with tears rolling down their cheeks. Don’t ask me why; it’s just one of those wierd images I carry around. It matches the word Lugubrious in my mind.
Just remembering the name is still so funny to me that it can snap me out of it.
“In the next article, we begin on the wonderful topic of becoming who we want to be.”
Thank you for this article and am waiting for your next one. I know these have been helpful to me when I go through my own personal healing and growth.
As for your topic and thank again from me, forgiving is part of this healing and growth we all must do but as your article states there are guidelines and some practicality to it. Just like life it’s self an issue may look simply at first but in reality it isn’t. Forgiveness I believe falls under this spectrum as well.
Donna1056
Thank you for sharing your story with us. There are many articles here at LF that can help you understand the “why’s” plus all the many members some who are vet’s (veterans) who will be able and willing to assist you in your healing..
Thanks again for sharing for each story here does help yet another one see how this can happen to anyone.
donna1056: Hi. I read your post, it sounds a lot like what happened to me (twice, d’oh!) but I loaned the guy a lot of money (oops, I mean gave)… it sounds like you helped him a lot, be proud of yourself that you did not loan him the money, that you were strong enough within yourself not to do that. If anybody ever asks me for money/help again my head is going to blow off. I hope you will read the articles here and stick with us and talk all this out, you don’t have to feel scarred for life, what kind of person can go out and get married just 3 weeks after meeting someone? A sociopath. Please please keep reading the articles and the posts, it has helped me more than anything else ever has in my life, this website has opened my eyes to myself and to the evil people out there who I never gave much thought about, in fact I don’t think I ever gave much thought about myself, but I do now!
Dear everyone,Ive just bought online a great book, its calld”the Betrayal Bond,”-by Dr. Patrick Carnes It arrived today, and I took it with me on the train into town.So far, Im finding it very good, light bulbs flashing everywhere.Its about how you can get in avery unhealthy ,sick bond with the person who abuses you, to the point where you cant break free. It gives detailed steps as to how to do it. he warns you,-its very hard to do, but to remain in a sick relationship is death to the soul and spirit. Im almost at that point with my 2 daughters, I am angry most with myself for allowing them to abuse me for over 30 years, giving and giving, getting nothing back but more pain, more abuse. I know that I now probably face the hardest thing Ive ever had to do, no contact with my older daughter at all. She is so toxic to me, I cant stand her, she has never, ever said sorry for any of the truly vile and rotten things she has done to me. She is atotal phoney. I know if I ring her, she will find a way to shift the blame onto me, or scream at me over the phone. I just cant face her anyway, and thats a good thing.The other daughter has refused to see me for almost 17 years, and the anger , pain, grief,and frustration at not seeing her 3 kids , ever,has never gone away. I still dont know what Im supposed to have done or not done. How do I ever get over this? Thank you wonderful people for all your love and support, with your help, I CAN do this!! geminigirl.
Another thing that Patrick Carnes talks about in this book, is how, apparently, small monkeys are caught in java. All the natives have to do is make small bamboo cages, with struts just wide enough for the monkey to put its hand in. In the cage is luscious fresh fruit. The monkey puts its hand throught the bars of the cage, grabs the fruit. Now, wouldnt it be logical that when its captors arrive, it simply drops the fruit, takes its hand out, and runs away?, But, it doesnt. It refuses to let go of the fruit, and so, it is captured, and taken away to be sold intocaptivity,or for pet meat. The analogy is plain, we refuse to let go of out manipulative, sick, NS, the price we pay is “being sold down the river, or death, spiritual death, maybe real death if he is a batterer.Our only hope of survival is to let go. Maybe let go of everything. And try ,with our spirits help ,and gods help, to be reborn as new free spirits. WE CAN DO IT!!
James, I totally agree.
I remember something I used to think when I was so hurt in the beginning, and used to talk to my ex-S in my mind. “I am not what you made me.”
It was a recurrent theme in my recovery, as I moved through all the phases. It helped drive me into anger. Because I didn’t want to be a loser. I didn’t want to be a victim. And I resented him and then my father before him for setting me up this way. And I was furious at myself, because that was always a part of it, for not being stronger, not seeing through what they were doing to me, not finding a way to survive it all as the person I wanted to be.
I talk about turning over our “don’t want” ideas to see what we do want on the other side of them. Figuring out what we really want from ourselves and life is something that evolves as we grow up and mature. And in someways, this healing process is like going through that first important personality formation process when we were tiny. At that time, we are making a huge transition from being one with the “source” to being confident that we belong here, can move forward and make decisions on our own, can comfort ourselves when we fall down and endure some pain, and always have a safe home to come home to.
That’s the successful process that ends when we’re four. Virtually all developmental processes recur over and over in our lives. They’re patterns of growth built into our psyches. And grief processing is really letting go of something important we depended upon and learning the same thing. Except as we grow up and mature, that safe home increasingly becomes ourselves and our place in the world at large.
I think — and this is only my theory — for that to happen, this thing we call forgiving has to be the end of the cycle. I’m not sure that’s the right name for it, or if what we’re forgiving isn’t really our perpetrator, but something larger and less defined. Maybe we’re deciding that ultimately it wasn’t really that important. Or maybe that it didn’t really change us in any important way. It was just a lesson. One that was hard. One that we resisted, because we didn’t want it and because we felt it took something important from us. Something we didn’t want to lose.
But in the end, as we realize that we survived it, that what’s left is much more important than what we lost, and that what we gained in learning — mostly about ourselves and the powers we never suspected we had — is more interesting and exciting than what is gone. We are less slaves to something that we thought was necessary to survival, and more free, although more responsibilities come with that freedom. There’s something in this story like those people who decide to climb really big mountains, except we didn’t decide. This mountain was forced on us, but we come back changed. Knowing more about our powers and our limits, knowing things we never anticipated knowing. But because of it, the world is a different place to us, and we are stronger, wiser, more confident, more resilient and less fearful for it.
Maybe we are people who take chances only in a very careful way. We think we take chances. We are very proud of the chances we take, and what we’ve accomplished. But really, we live with caution predominating in our characters more than an orientation toward grabbing the opportunities of life. And so we are a little naive and hopeful that someone else, maybe some big power in the sky or luck or destiny, will toss us the right thing for us. Because, for whatever reason, we’re not inclined to go out and try everything to discover what we like and the paths to our happiness.
And these relationships — which are designed and controlled by people who don’t really have our interests at heart and do not act at all like messengers from a destiny that cares about us — capture our interest and our hearts. We buy in, leap into them, thinking they look safe and good, and being grateful they showed up. Hooray, we think. We’ve been good. We’ve done all the right things. And now we’re being rewarded.
And they don’t turn out to be like that at all. They turn out to be a very large mountain, or a walk in the jungle, or a shipwreck far out of sight of land. And we have to survive. If we were more adventurous souls in the first place, with more experience in failing and getting out of it, we would probably see this whole thing differently. We wouldn’t feel so betrayed. We wouldn’t feel like these people and our destiny are out to get us in such a personal way. But because we’ve been so careful, because so much of our lives has been about making our little sacrifices to whatever power looks after our safety, we feel like we got a bad deal. But we still have to survive.
So, we go through this thing, all the steps of it, trying to ignore it, trying to bargain it into being what we want it to be, then getting mad (which is at last us tapping the resources of our real power to dig ourselves out). But that’s not the end of it. Because in getting active and real about what’s going on while we’re angry, we come face to face with something new. We are not who we thought we were. The world is not what we thought it was. And we are changed. We can’t go back to our comfortable, safe, limited, familiar little world. So part of this process is recognizing that, and letting it go. And even though we have new powers and life is probably going to be more interesting in the future, it’s sad. And we have to go through a ceremony in ourselves of letting go of what isn’t real anymore. Kiss our old selves goodbye. Give away the clothes. It’s sad, but a reasonable trade for our new muscles, our sharper vision, and the way that makes the world larger and less scary for us.
That could be enough. We could be finished right there. We have a story that has all the plot components of a good story or movie. We faced a challenge. We met it and lived through it. We move ahead as new, stronger, better, more free, more grown-up version of ourselves. And the credits run.
But at some point, some of us want to sweep us the set. There’s blood and broken crockery on the floor. All the angry graffiti we wrote on the walls when we were feeling like we were captives or plotting our revenge. And it’s just not how we want to face every day of our lives. It’s another letting go process to consciously decide to clean it up. We’re tempted to keep it all as a statement about what we’ve been through, as a kind of art to tell people who we are. But it’s really just art about something that’s over. A big battle that we won. And the rewards of this battle aren’t all those messy souvenirs. It’s something much simpler, more compact, and it’s in our bones, our attitude about life, our expanded knowledge and confidence about ourselves and the world.
We don’t need all that stuff anymore to tell us who we are. So we clean it up. And in doing that, we have one last opportunity to decide what was important, and what wasn’t. We realize that the mountain or the jungle or the shipwreck were big, bad and educational, but the really important part of it was what we did in the face of the biggest challenge of our lives. The challenge could have been anything. The meaning of it was what we found in ourselves, the resources we didn’t know we had, the discovery that we are so much more than we thought we were.
And yet, in this discovery, we also find that we’re the same. Not different in our fundamental character. Just smarter and more resourceful. In fact, by learning through this adventure, we discover more about who we really were. Because we discover we have discarded some of that old caution, burned up those old habits of making sacrifices to the powers the keep us safe, and found out that we are really more adventurous, more open, more willing to live through failure, more hungry for life than we knew. It is the same us but without the mistaken ideas that held us back.
These processes are not like a big bang. We cycle through them over and over. There are lots of triggers that set another large or small process in motion as we get stronger, more free, more willing to take chances and engage with life, and think it’s actually fun and worth the occasional failure.
But this forgiving thing serves a purpose, because it is the doorway out of the anger and the sadness. It changes our opinion about the whole thing. Gives us some perspective, but also a chance to smile again. Maybe even laugh about it. In the end it was just a lesson. And depending on how hard and painful it was, maybe a great lesson that changes our lives. In a good way.
Finally, I think a lot of us see this coming, even while we’re struggling through the earlier stages of healing. We know that we’re going to get to this. There is going to come a day that the story is over, we’ve harvested the lesson, and it actually turns out to be a good thing. There was part of me that suspected this, and it helped me moved forward through some of the scary parts. In healing from these relationships we are doing something important for ourselves. Maybe at the time, it just feels like surviving. But at the end, we realize it was something else. Something much better than that.
And the story doesn’t even end at forgiving. Once we get there, we can see a little bit more down the road, a few more gifts we get for getting through it. Because forgiving is still really about dealing with what happened to us. Now, we begin to discover what these changes actually create inside us and in our lives.
That’s the fun part.
Namaste.
Kathy