Editor’s note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.
If someone is continuously harming you, and refuses to stop, should they be forgiven? This is a question that I hope you will try answer at the end of this post.
My dad is a convicted serial killer. He killed 4 people and told me about the crimes with great pride. He used me, his favorite son, to help him destroy evidence when he felt that I might be a risk. He made me a part of this so that I would not go to police. He abused my mom, and brothers and sisters.
This is not the place to try to make one experience with a sociopath out to be any worse than another, they all bring about the same feelings of shame, guilt and often times depression. The question really is”¦”what do we do with these experiences?”
As far as I can tell, based on my own experience, is that we have only two choices. We can let go through forgiveness and find freedom that we never imagined possible turning this nightmare into a net gain that becomes a gift, or we can resist the lesson and continue to punish ourselves for the rest of our lives.
This is The Choice.
How does it make you feel when you think of the pain that was caused by your experience with a sociopath? Take a few minutes to look within yourself and be honest about how it makes you feel to think about the events that happened to you as a result of your encounter with a sociopath.
If you feel sick, sad, guilty, or regret the past, ask yourself who is harming you with these thoughts and feelings right now. If the sociopath is not in your life at this time and you are still feeling this pain, where is it coming from and why is it still there? Finally, if you still feel this way, are you not continuing to give the sociopath the power to control your life and poison existing relationships?
These are tough questions and the answers did not come easy for me. As long as I was not willing to let go of the past, I continued to suffer. As a result, I had paralyzing migraine headaches, chronic back pain, nightmares, irritable bowel syndrome and other illnesses that plagued me as a young adult long after my father went to prison.
I “thought” he didn’t deserve forgiveness. In fact, I was sure of it. That is because I did not know what forgiveness is. What I did not realize was that it was not him that I was hurting, but me.
Once again, forgiveness really has very little to do with the other person. It does not condone the behavior, release them from their responsibilities or say It’s OK to harm people. What forgiveness really does is release us from an emotional prison that we have created for ourselves. We hold the key and don’t even know it; because “we think” forgiveness tells the perpetrator that what they did is OK. Forgiveness is only accepting what already is and what cannot be changed.
There is A Miracle that awaits us when we do this and it changes everything. Our perspective changes, our outlook upon life improves, and happiness is restored.
Why are so many of us so unwilling to let go of the past? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know this, a simple willingness is all that’s needed to make The Miracle possible. God will show you the way if you ask for His help with a sincere willingness to be free of the past.
Part of the Miracle is that when we let go of the past, we stop repeating it. Freedom has all kinds of rewards and the end result is gratitude for the experience because of what it really offered. Listen to those that have found their freedom from forgiving others (and themselves) and you will see this Truth.
Today, The Miracle for me is that I have learned The Truth about suffering. The only thing that has the power to harm me now is my thoughts. This is where all suffering comes from. Freedom from this comes from letting go of the past.
I have none of those physical and emotional illnesses today. The one thing that changed everything for me was a decision to learn about and pursue forgiveness. I first had to accept that I knew nothing about what forgiveness really meant.
This helped me to learn a little bit about exactly who was hurting me and why. If I cannot forgive him for hurting me, then how can I forgive myself for continuing to hurt myself with the experience long after it happened? I have forgiven myself, but I needed to see the benefits first, trust the process, and forgive my father to be able to do it.
My dad is still on death row and is no threat to me or my family. He cannot harm me anymore. When I forgave my father, all I really said was “you can’t hurt me anymore.”
As for me? I still have do work daily to keep from hurting myself with negative thoughts, but at least I am aware of who is really doing the hurting now and know what to do about it. Awareness is a great spiritual gift. I have found much of heaven and am grateful.
I will continue to write weekly here, but for those that are interested and willing to go more deeply into the process of letting go, please join A Course In Forgiving (begins January 19, 2012). I did not come here to promote The Course, but to offer it to those that feel moved to do something more about the pain in their lives.
There is no fee of (optional donation of up to $25.00) for the six week online course. This Course is designed to guide participants through the Step by Step Spiritual Process of Letting Go with weekly lessons, readings and exercises that are intended to open the pathway to healing and Peace.
If interested, please visit www.victorythroughpeace.com and click the link in the left hand column titled “Six Week Course Online”. For those that participate, I will be available by phone and email to share experience in addition to this weekly blog on Lovefraud.
Peace.
Travis,
You and I are lucky, in a way, because the sociopaths we dealt with can no longer hurt us. Yours is in prison, and mine is bankrupt on the other side of the world.
Some of our readers, however, aren’t as lucky. Many, for example, are attempting to co-parent with sociopaths, which is a joke, because the sociopath’s only concern is hurting them – usually through the children.
But I think your message can help those readers as well. Because through releasing the emotional attachments, we decrease the sociopath’s ability to hurt us, even though we still have to deal with them. It also helps us find the strength to counteract the sociopath’s destructive behavior.
I am glad you are offering your course to Lovefraud readers.
While sometimes it is tough to forgive people of the ‘crimes’ they commit against us, once you have done it, the world, your world, is a much better place. Their sins are not our burdens to carry or to pay for on judgement day.
Travis,
When I finally overcame the mind-bending propaganda that my egg donor’s view of religion, and therefore The definition of “forgiveness is pretending it never happened, and restoring trust to some one you knew would continue the bad behavior” was overcome, and I realized that “forgiveness” does NOT mean either restoring trust OR continuing the relationship with the person who acted badly….THEN I could truly start to heal.
My experience has also been that I must continue to feed this forgiveness because if I dwell on the past injury and pain, I can rip the scab off both the forgiveness and the pain, AND I can ferment the bitterness in my heart again! So in order to maintain my peace, maintain my joy, I must feed the good inside myself, and NOT feed the bitterness of soul!
Thank you for bringing this VERY IMPORTANT topic up! It is I think one of THE most important rungs on the ladder that leads to peace of mind and joy of spirit!
Ox drover – I absolutely love your constant reference to forgiveness not being related to Trust! This is so important, because, it often seems to me that people are fearful if they forgive they will be victimized again.
Paradoxically, it is through forgiveness that we wind up protecting ourselves from future encounters with sociopaths and harmful relationships.
@Travis Vining
Being a woman of faith who recently married a sociopath “pastor”, I am really appreciating your posts here on Lovefraud! The marriage was ended when I filled for an annulment based on fraud. Long, sad, painful story similar to so many here…it still amazes me how unrepentant, diabolical and malicious a sociopath can be. My ex spath, like many others, is a very skilled liar, he lied about almost everything he ever told me and he continues his predatory ways online trying to dupe the next woman into a fake relationship on his blog, in the church, and on Twitter right now. I have forgiven both my parents for their extreme issues and my abusive alcoholic first husband. Now I am working very hard on forgiving my sociopath non-husband number 2. I have made some progress toward forgiving the ex spath but I think I am stuck in unforgiveness for the church leaders that believed him and didn’t believe me when I told him about who he really is and how abusive, crazy, and cruel he was to me behind closed doors. I was on church staff, I have a strong faith, I have a passion for helping people to realize how much God loves them and how that can help them overcome pain and heartaches of life. I loved my working in ministry. I have worked in Recovery Ministry, Singles, Children’s Ministry, Tech Booth Ministry, Women’s Ministry, Angel Tree, Food Ministry and Prison Ministry. Every time I felt like I could be the hands and feet of Jesus and simply love on people, I felt such joy. I am stuck in the fact that I saw so much dysfunction and bad motives in church leadership in the last four years of my church life I have not been able to go back to church. I have tried several, I feel unsafe in church. I realize it may be some kind of PTSD, but it breaks my heart. I strongly believe that God wants us to be in community with believers in order to have the fullness of life that he wants us to have. I go to a small Bible study with some rock-solid women friends, but I feel UNSAFE every time I try to go to church. I am praying for God to show me my path. I am not working at the church anymore but that is a good thing because the last church that I was involved with is very very sick. I am not sure if this is a un-forgiveness issue or PTSD or a little of both. I want very much to forgive them all and I am praying for God to help me with that because I don’t have the strength to do it on my own. I trust that God will show me where and when to go and I have felt God strongly supporting me through all the pain and chaos of the last few years.
Because I am not working right now I have been working on helping my dad clean and organize his house. After everything fell apart financially for me, I moved into a cabin next to my dad’s house. I am thankful to have a roof over my head, a warm soft bed, hot showers and food to eat…and oh yea INTERNET! When I moved in here I moved from a much bigger place and used the largest room here as a storage room for my stuff. Bear with me it is such a long complicated story…married the spath “pastor” a few months after moving in here. I had known him for 2 years and I thought he was a real Christian and I thought he loved me, I was GREATLY DECEIVED! Long story short, after 9 months the hellish non-marriage it all came to a head when I called the sheriff twice in two days. First call was because of his extreme spiritual, psychological, physical and financial abuse of me and the second call was because I had him served with a restraining order the next day and that day while I was at work he trashed our house, ripped the mini blinds off a window, broke the heads off of my figurines of women that I had collected, robbed me of my most valuable or loved possessions (that I owned long before I met him and earned with my hard earned money) and locked me out of our house. I had come into the painful reality that he was lying about almost everything and just using me as a meal ticket while he tried to suck the life out of me and abuse me into submission to him. One of the many things that disappeared that day was a stained glass window that I had made long before I had met the spath. Later in counseling, more than once (yep I got sucked in again by his fake apologies and love bombing) he denied taking the stained glass window and said he knew nothing about it. So I was wrestling with forgiving him and trying very hard to do the right thing while I knew he was still lying to me. IT FELT LIKE THE TWILIGHT ZONE! It felt like a nightmare that I couldn’t escape from. He just sat there and lied and lied and lied to various pastors and counselors, lied right to their face without the slightest bit of conscience! So evil! So…back to my point… I had this storage room full of stuff from the move and I decided to make it into a living space and clean up and weed through all my stuff. It felt really good to purge my home of any and all reminders of the evil man that had broken my heart. Well guess what I found in the storage room tucked behind a dresser…yep, the stained glass window that I had made so many years ago. When I first saw it I was thrilled because I it had sentimental value to me. When I pulled it out from behind the dresser I discovered that he had intentionally and with tremendous malice had shattered it. After all these months of no contact and healing I felt a wave of pain begin to rise up in me. The years of lying, abuse and cruelty were crying out for some shred of justice! For the millionth time WHY WHY WHY would he be so cruel, but God quickly intervened and reframed my thinking. Thank you Jesus! God opened my eyes to how hugely impotent he the spath truly is in every meaning of the word! Yes, this object had sentimental value to me and it hurt that he lied about it and so many other much more important things and he destroyed it and hid it away for me to find later on, but the spath was trying to destroy me, he was trying to do me great harm and this is the best he can do, how pathetic, how impotent he truly is. God simply took away the pain of my ex spath’s evil intentions and used the very thing that the spath meant for evil to show me on a very deep level the reality of who my ex really is. It was very healing! I will make a new stained glass window and this one will be better than the one before! It is just a thing, a replaceable thing. The damage that sociopaths do to our souls is the most difficult to heal and overcome. It is the Love Fraud that hurts the most. I strongly believe all things can be forgiven because I have done it myself and I have seen other people heal and overcome their broken hearts.
Thank you To Donna and Travis and all the others here on Lovefraud for sharing your journey and helping us to understand what forgiveness really is because when we understand the truth about forgiveness we are making progress towards a better life, better relationships, healing and personal joy. Here’s to new beginnings and new life in the new year! ; )
Dear Hosanna,
Yep, Jesus himself warned his followers that there would be “wolves in sheeps’ clothing” come into the flock, they would climb over the fence, not enter through the gate, they would tear and destroy the sheep…and that is what happens with these “false prophets” these predators who come into churches and destroy.
At the time Jesus was alive, the Pharisees and the Sadusees were the “wolves” in the Temple….they pretended to be HOLY and yet they were the ones who conspired to have Jesus crucified to shut him up from telling people and showing people what hypocrites they were!
So this kind of religious “leadership” has always been with us and always will be with us (not just Christians but in all religious and beliefs) and my own small congregation also turned on me, and the minister was later arrested for pedophilia! Yep, they are such hypocrites but you know, there will come a day of judgment when they will be parted from the “sheep” and they will receive JUDGMENT from an angry God I do believe.
We can rest assured that they will get what they deserve…we may not see them get it NOW but they WILL ultimately get what they deserve, so keep that in mind.
I know that forgiving them, getting the BITTERNESS out of your heart toward these terrible men and women is difficult, been there myself, got the tee shirt…but find you a small congregation, or a friend or two and worship at your home. “Where there are two or three gathered together in my name, I am there.” (paraphrased) so it doesn’t have to be a BIG “church” just a couple of people who love God and love each other.
God bless. (((hugs))
Travis I had pounded into my head from my youth that “forgiveness” meant “restore trust” and it never made sense to me….and I always FAILED to be able to “forgive” becuase I couldn’t trust someone without any remorse no matter how hard I tried, they always failed me, and I failed to “forgive” to suit the egg donor…well, when I realized that forgiveness does NOT equal restoration of trust, or restoration of association. Then it was closer to being POSSIBLE TO DO.
Like Yoda says “there is no try, just do” and you can DO it. But when the task is IMPOSSIBLE to start with, there is nothing but try and fail. With a reasonable definition of “forgiveness” there is the ability to DO IT.
@Oxy
Please understand that I do not have any expectations of perfect people (regarding church leadership) because none of us are perfect. And it would be crazy to seek the “perfect” church, because they are composed of imperfect people. My experience was very personal and very painful. Even as bad as my experience was, we are all aware of much worse, it breaks my heart to think of the tremendous harm that wolves in the church have caused other people. The church is not God. The church is a body of people, not a building or a denomination. It isn’t a bad witness about God and His purposes, it is a bad witness regarding some sociopaths in the church. Sometimes people have a very hard time separating the two. It is especially destructive when the abuse comes from spiritual leaders. I have been admonished by Christian friends for speaking out about it. I wrestled with telling ANYONE because it is such a terrible witness, but God encouraged me to speak the truth about what was going on. Who knows…maybe God allowed this to expose him in the church, he has certainly been knocked down in the process. I don’t know, I may never know the whys of it all, I just need to let it go, all of it!! I agree Oxy, the bible is full of warning of false Christians in the church. I think for me it is just a matter of time, I trust that God will show me where to go in His time.
Real forgiveness is a beautiful thing! Here’s to only trusting the trustworthy!!
Thanks again for your insight! I am learning a lot and these lessons are not taught in college! ; )
I like that. I also agree with the comments about Jesus. He did warn against leaders of the church. He was real, and taught with the people. Nothing like churches today. They do have value, but I agree to be cautious. I have heard it said that a church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners!
A friend of mine also said…”I don’t like people that lie about God”. I like that too. For me…I do not enjoy conversations with people that worships rules and not grace, love and forgiveness.
Thank you for posting Hosanna.