I need help learning forgiveness

December 10, 2020 2:56 PM

I do my star sign Taurus a huge proper being as stubborn as I am on this subject but I'm kind of worried I dont know what's best for my heart and spiritual peace. I have several horrible instances of betrayal in my memory and time is no friend to wounds of dignity. I tell myself "let's forgive them" as a show of my maturity, But I close my eyes to pray that I am at peace with it and the minute I relive

The shitty thing they did I can not find my will to see anything but karmic chaos reign down for years. I have perspective. I mean I know I'm not perfect and everyone who does me wrong is just living their lives. It cant always be a deliberate act and i cant use that hatred for them as a boomerang of attachment. I just dont have the ability to forgive someone that doesnt show contrition. I honestly want to forgive those that damaged me beyond repair but I just cant say if I saw them again I'd be at peace which makes me sad. I dont want my soul to remain on the earth with this worldly darkness keeping me from dying and being at peace. (To give a more specific idea I have had a man I was dating wait til I fell asleep, tied me to his bed and had sex with me. I woke up 18 hours later still tied to the bed. I am 22 years past hatred and rage but I just had a dream about this man that made me kick and scratch my pillow) if I dont know how to forgive him I feel I will always be a victim and one of "the meek" who inherit the earth after The Rapture. This may be coming off as way too Are You There God Its Me Margaret but the point I want to make is when you have no reason but salvation to forgive the ones who damage your faith where do you start? Is it avoidance? Or do you just say I forgive and hope it sticks? I really want to let things be ok

posted by The_imp_inimpossible to Human Relations (22 answers total)

I've had to adjust my personal definition of forgiveness. It used to be "I forgive them - I accept what happened in past."

Now, it is "I forgive them - I accept that I cannot change what happened in the past."
posted by Juniper Toast at 3:11 PM on December 10, 2020

I don't forgive anyone who hasn't demonstrated that they hadn't meant to hurt me, and/or that they are sorry that they did.

The rapist you describe - I don't even know you, and I sincerely hope he gets hit by a bus, like for real. I can't imagine forgiving that. It isn't in my emotional vocabulary.

But what I have found helpful is simply stop letting these folks take up space in my brain. My life on earth is finite. My minutes are finite. The more sadness I let them cast over me, the more they win. The less I can think about them, the happier I can be, the more I win. Every minute I can spend doing something other than ruminating on them is a win.
posted by fingersandtoes at 3:27 PM on December 10, 2020

There's a book you may want to read - it has a lot of different perspectives on forgiveness, the many forms it might take, the many ways it can be manifested, and even a couple of arguments about when you shouldn't.

One of the perspectives that most affected me was the notion that sometimes "forgiveness" isn't the kind of "aw, that's okay" thing I think you're assuming it needs to be. Sometimes it is just you deciding "you know what, dwelling on this isn't going to do me any good, so I'm just going to close that page and move on."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:01 PM on December 10, 2020

You thank your rage for looking out for you, helping to protect you from future harm, and then you go back to whatever you were doing (assuming you are appropriately applying your experience - thinking about whether you're doing that can also be calming, knowing that you're safe now). A therapist you jive with may help you process things in a way that works for you.

My understanding of forgiveness is that it doesn't absolve people of consequences and it doesn't mean you never think about it again (how could you control that?). It means you set down your grudge so you can move on and make space for new things in your life, with whatever you learned from the experience.
posted by momus_window at 4:01 PM on December 10, 2020

A lot of your concern seems to be that you see forgiveness as a necessary step to salvation. Without knowing your religion, I don't know if that's true, but there's a number of faiths where it's not necessary to forgive everyone. Maybe encouraged, but not necessary. So some of this question might be best discussed with your religious leader.

As for myself, I have neither forgiven nor forgotten some people, but I do feel "at peace". For me, it's more of a moving on. Yes, that person was a pimple on my life, and I am still momentarily angry thinking about it. BUT, my current life is improved enough and full enough that I spend most of my time thinking about the present and the future, and am happy.
posted by sdrawkcaSSAb at 4:04 PM on December 10, 2020

this has some interesting thoughts about forgiveness:
The Way of Mastery, Book 1: The Way of the Heart lesson 3
posted by mrmarley at 4:25 PM on December 10, 2020

Why forgive someone who has harmed you? What you can’t do is let them invade your mind day in and day out, but forgiveness is not necessary.
posted by heyjude at 5:03 PM on December 10, 2020

Yes I agree with some of the above. You mention Taurus which isn't affiliated with any religion from what I understand. I think that the concept of forgiveness comes from a very toxic place in our (Western, I'm assuming you're in the USA) culture that stems from everyone inculcated in our version of christianity that guilts you into feeling compelled to "forgive" those who wronged you. Why, to be more Jesus like? Jesus is the gold standard I suppose. If you're not "Christ-like", you're human scum and a sinner and you're gonna burn in hell like the sinner you are, sinner. This is also very patriarchal in my opinion, forgiveness usually requires someone with less power to forgive someone who had more power and abused it through cruelty and / or neglect, so either conscionable or unconscionable. Men have often been served by this, as the (I'm assuming) man would be served by your "forgiveness". Women should forgive and then we can all continue to ignore the Missing Stair of a person who raped you because that's the Easiest Simplest Way and because Men Can't Help It. Well, we know that's garbage-y bullshit. Forgiveness should serve YOU and so only YOU can define what it means to you. And it's OK and even, I'd argue, HEALTHY to be angry, even after all this time, about the event that you mention that's so brutally inhuman and soul-crushing. The fact is, parts of you that are sacred were cruelly tampered with by this person who harmed you, and they did it willfully and in a pre-meditated fashion. That's just terrible! I cannot understate how terrible! There is absolutely nothing acceptable about what that person did and they themselves are completely unacceptable! I am sure you weren't the last, either. There are many approaches towards your SELF that you can take here, and that's the key-- because this is about YOU. It's not your job to forgive, amend, or fix a monster or what a monster does or did. It's about how you find your ways to grace inside yourself with the pain that you experience.

"What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle."
"In the blackest of your moments, wait with no fear."
"The cave you fear to enter may hold the light you seek."
"The wound is the place where the light enters you."
"These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them." (~Rumi, all)

Interrogate the concept / source of your notion of forgiveness. Burrow into your pain. Your most sacred self is hiding there, waiting for you to see Her, she's been hiding since those moments of violation. Free her. Free HER. Not anyone else, not anyone else.
posted by erattacorrige at 6:27 PM on December 10, 2020

You don't have to short circuit your healing from trauma. What that man did is traumatized you, and your anger is appropriate under the circumstances. If it still haunts you, then you may wish to consider trauma focused therapy to help you digest it and maybe eventually you'll feel something besides anger but not for him or for your salvation. No, only for your greater chance at peace. And if you don't find forgiveness comforting then it's not the path you need to try to force yourself to take. F@#$ him.
posted by crunchy potato at 6:40 PM on December 10, 2020

I need to be succinct here. I am a person with a great faith in the Spiritual Overseer and also Doctors of Psychiatry. I am tormented by wrongs done to myself when it was my Faith and belief in Holy Religious Entity that made me not fear knowing someone, letting myself lull in comfort by trusting them and eventual seething with homicidal rage over being betrayed by the person I thought I knew in Abstract Diety's light. I dont want to forget them. I need to pass through this wanting to eye for an eye gouge so I dont carry the thoughts of violence over into my death. There wont be peace to rest in if my life is still so revenge driven. Trust me. I know better than to acknowledge dickheads after they dog me. The forgiving is for me to move on not them.
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 11:36 PM on December 10, 2020

I've found acceptance to be a more helpful concept for me than forgiveness. As fingersandtoes said already, forgiveness is for people who clearly didn't intend harm or have shown genuine remorse.

When I say acceptance, I'm talking about "radical acceptance" which I am familiar with through DBT, but I know it has its roots in mindfulness/meditation. It's about accepting reality for what it is, with the idea that suffering is caused by pain+nonacceptance of that pain/situation.

I was fundamentally mistreated, let down, and put through hell by my parents when I was growing up (and even after I grew up, before I learned to set boundaries). But I've come to accept that my parents are extremely limited people, and i can see how their upbringings and shortcomings led them to act the way they did.

My mother has made attempts to acknowledge and somewhat change, and I've forgiven her to a certain extent. My father never has, so I haven't forgiven him, and I don't feel the need to, because I am mostly at peace with that part of my life. It doesn't eat away at me the way it used to. I'm not filled with rage the way I was for years.

I still have my moments. It's a lifelong process. A therapist and/or a religious leader who shares your faith sound like they might be a big help and comort to you as you work through this.
posted by litera scripta manet at 3:16 AM on December 11, 2020

This may be something for you to think about - Sir Anthony Hopkins once said in an interview that he has a priest for a friend, and asked him once what the shortest prayer in the world was. His friend, surprisingly, said the shortest prayer is "Fuck it."

"That's a prayer?"

"If you think about it, yes, it is. When you say 'Fuck it', you're saying 'that's it, I give up - God, you take over'."

So maybe start thinking about the person who wronged you that way. If you start just saying "eh, fuck them" when you find yourself thinking about them, not only will you get that gut-level satisfaction of saying "fuck them", but that may start you thinking like "that's it, I'm done with them, it's not my issue any more." I'm not saying that this is the kind of thing that you only will have to do once or twice, mind you - but said often enough, it may bring you to a place where when you say "fuck them" you mean "that's it, I give up - God, they're your problem now."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:42 AM on December 11, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/16/india.gender

In this article, like 200 Indian women were raped and in the courthouse for this man, one woman yells "we can't both of us live in this earth together" and it's stuck with me. Reminds me of your anger. I think it would be really helpful to find a community of people who have survived something as soul shattering as you have. You need to feel SEEN for what happened to you. Once you feel seen, actually seen, the need to rage out will slowly ebb away.
Also, I think it's not healthy to just trust people without cause for that. Blindly trusting people you just met or are newish in your life is not safe. It's just true. Trust has to be built over time, over many small instances of bonding and red flag revealing. So knowing who to trust and how and why is a big thing. Children don't know these things so we have to surround them with adults that have been vetted. But as an adult, yeah, it's so important to honor those red flags you notice popping up, to tell your friends and family "I am going on my first/second/third tinder date with xyz person, here's where I'll be" etc etc. People are the greatest danger that people will face in this life. Most (all?) Danger I've ever faced has been due to people.

Forgiveness: "for" + "give"--- to give, for to give. Fore give. Give up. Forward on. It's about yielding. Casting the ring of power into the fire at Mordor. You make the choice. This is such a corny example but Frodo's heart was pierced by a wraith and he nearly kept the ring of power. He nearly became a wraith as well. He would have if he held on to the thing that cursed him and turned it into an integral part of himself. In order to escape that fate, he had to Give Up, to Forego, to destroy the ring. He Forewent it. Forgiveness. Else, the destruction of self.
posted by erattacorrige at 5:20 AM on December 11, 2020

If your faith is very important to you, and your faith also comes with mandates to forgive and to cultivate a loving heart despite wrongs done to you, to turn the other cheek etc, then you may find value from therapy with a Christian oriented psychotherapist who has a background in trauma. I guarantee you aren't the first Abrahamic follower to struggle with this after being victimized.

As it turns out, there's a lot of scholarly work floating around on google that attempts to engage the idea of forgiveness amongst Christians when there has been abuse (pdf file). Your struggle to follow a mandate to forgive in light of normal human reactions to violation isn't new. Perhaps you'll find more comfort from religious oriented examinations of this complex subject.

And maybe for now the first step is forgiving yourself for having normal human emotions towards someone who victimized you.
posted by crunchy potato at 6:45 AM on December 11, 2020

OP never specifically identifies as Christian.
posted by erattacorrige at 8:04 AM on December 11, 2020

Yes, this is why I mentioned greater cultural influence as opposed to a specific hierarchy...

Hope you feel better, OP. Don't punish yourself, bottom line.
posted by erattacorrige at 10:34 AM on December 11, 2020

I noticed they don't identify as Christian, but it's my understanding that Abrahamic tradition covers the majority of beliefs that resonate with what OP is saying. I am not familiar with any non- Abrahamic belief system that stresses the concept of forgiveness as a key to successful transition into the hearafter but I realize this could be a lack of cultural competence on my part. OP if I misunderstood your beliefs then I apologize sincerely.
posted by crunchy potato at 11:21 AM on December 11, 2020

Reading your additional comment, I think many people are being mislead by your use of the word "forgiveness". What you want to do is not necessarily forgive the perpetrator, what you need to do is figure out how to release the anger so that it doesn't continue to burn so brightly within you.

A couple of thoughts:
-- I know someone who found comfort in the words from Kesha's song "something only God can forgive" - I'm not sure quite how to put this in your language but if there is an after-life, their actions in this world will determine what happens in the next. This means that there be a more complete and true judgement facing this person that could have happen in this world. If you can trust that justice will be done, for certain, eventually, it may be easier to drop the burden of feeling like you need to make it happen to get what is right.

-- Variations on the fuck it suggestion above. Find a visual that represents utter and complete revenge/annihilation of the other person. When they come to mind, take a minute to imagine that and then let be done with it. Give yourself the pleasure of a an imaginary revenge, as gruesome and satisfying as you like and then, having done that, redirect your thoughts back to living your own best life.

-- Work on forgiving yourself for being so trustworthy that you allowed them to hurt you like that. Extend compassion and grace to your younger self for her mistakes. I can think of a bunch of resources to help - me-mail me if you want ideas

-- Do something to even the score, to shift the balance of the world back towards justice. Maybe find an organization that helps people in similar positions and see what you can do to help make their stories turn out better.
posted by metahawk at 12:08 PM on December 11, 2020

You shouldn't feel that you aren't measuring up to a divine standard because you can't forgive someone perfectly. Perfection is an impossible standard. As humans, we are finite and flawed. The divine, as understood in most traditions, is infinite and unflawed. Human beings can never be perfect in their forgiveness, or in anything else... and the divine wouldn't require or expect that of us. The concept of grace is the idea that the divine will accept us and sustain us in spite of our shortcomings.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:21 PM on December 11, 2020

Hi, I'm a Taurus too. Pretty stubborn tbh. I know what it's like to be angry about things that I couldn't control. Things people did to me. And I think that anger, for me at least, comes from a sense of powerlessness, and from the fear that I might have my control over my life taken away from me again.

A thing that helped me was realizing how much control I do have over my life and my future now. I can't change what happened in the past, but it doesn't define me or my existence. It did give a strong sense of justice, and a desire to do what's right. Or Maybe that's the Taurus in me being stubborn. So I try to help other people. I want them to have better than I did. And I try not to stay stuck in how I think about things, because I got very rigid in how things had to be for me to be ok with them, and that rigidity left me feeling trapped.

So I'd ask, does you forgiving them actually affect them in any real way? Are you keeping them from getting a job or something out of spite? If not, than your not forgiving them doesn't really affect them, only you.

If it only affects you, then that makes it completely separate from them. So maybe instead of seeing it as forgiveness, you see it as letting go of what they did to you, for your own sake. See it as something separate from them, as you separating yourself from them, their betrayal, and the pain they caused. Because it's not just, and it's not right, that after you suffering at their hand, that you continue to suffer emotionally and mentally and spiritually, but that last part, where your thoughts about these things make you suffer, that is an injustice you can change, an inequity you can remedy. You've lived several thousand days in your lifetime I'm sure, why should these seven betrayals get to define you? Changing the way you think, well it takes time and effort. But it does help I think.

I find, (and this is a bit Taurus too fwiw) that thinking about sensations and experiences helps ground me when thoughts of the past intrude. Like perfume, or a beautiful view, or ice cream, or a warm shower. I found meditation helpful as well, to be in the moment, and let go of intrusive thoughts. Prayer can be a form of meditation if it has meaning for you.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:11 PM on December 11, 2020

how to put this in your language but if there is an after-life, their actions in this world will determine what happens in the next. This means that there be a more complete and true judgement facing this person that could have happen in this world. If you can trust that justice will be done, for certain, eventually, it may be easier to drop the burden of feeling like you need to make it happen to get what is right.

THIS. (In this statement is my only fear. The biggest fear of my mental health is that harm he did to me in his soul stays on earth to harm the next soul. I wish I knew how to applaud in html but @erattacorrige:: Thank You. I never put the literal spin on it. I should meditate and find guidance to forward it gone. Give it away.

I did not Express Christianity as my faith. I hope I did not invite or insinuate any bias. I respect any belief or faith that supports freedom of religion.
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 1:33 AM on December 12, 2020

I found the book Radical Forgiveness to be very helpful. He talks to through what in us is drawn toward a behavior - like maybe if I have low self-esteem i'll attract someone whose behavior confirms that for me. That's a bit of a crude explanation. The book explains it much better. If you are willing to do work on each person toward which you feel you need to grant forgiveness, it will reward you. It took a while for the most difficult person so start with the easier people and build the forgiveness muscle this way.
posted by mossy_george at 8:52 PM on December 26, 2020