Chapter 7: The Freedom of Forgiveness

“Forgiveness does not change the past,

but it does enlarge the future.” —Paul Boese

I sat down with a small child once who said to me “I am going to forgive my dad”. I was new to counselling at the time and fairly unforgiving in my own process. Having known about her dad and the sadness he had caused this young girl and her family, I found her statement quite shocking and if I'm honest, very naive.

In my response, I was quite dismissive of her willingness to forgive and remained resolute in trying to discover her deeper feelings of anger, sadness and loss. I never asked what her reasons were to forgive him or indeed what it took in her to get to that resolve. The very thing I didn’t do was support her in her willingness to forgive.

Over the years forgiveness has been mentioned to me in many different ways. Often it is the phrase, “I can’t forgive.” or “I’ll forgive but I will never forget!”. I hear in both of these phrases the feelings held onto. The use of the term ‘never forget’ reflects holding onto the experience if the instance or act has passed. Then I think of the stuck feelings that remain after a traumatic event and all the feelings that can exist in our bodies through remembering.

Last month, a friend sat with me and talked about forgiveness. We talked about the impact a forgiveness workshop delivered to children had on them. She told me of the stories shared about forgiveness and what it meant to children to engage in the act of forgiveness. She shared with me the value to both children and adults from harnessing a willingness to forgive. It reminded me of the young girl and left me wondering - where does forgiveness exist in childhood trauma?

I have heard unforgivable stories of loss, violence, abuse, regret and suffering from others. I look on as the anger, sadness and fear in their pain consume them. The notion to forgive or indeed acknowledge forgiveness feels incomprehensible. The only resolution available feels stuck in revenge, lament or sacrifice. But with each of these, the pain does not go away. It is held onto. It sits in bodily pain, in digestion, in stress, in heartache, in tension and in our mental well-being. Sometimes the effect is such that there is a desire to remain connected to it.

I’ve also heard of things going another way. In many instances of abuse, the victim has been ready and willing to forgive another but the perpetrator on the receiving end neither accepts forgiveness, isn’t available to take any responsibility for it or is unable to change their behaviour to justify that forgiveness. This then leaves the victim unable to receive the “sorry” they were looking for. This can also mean that forgiveness is stuck.

The word sorry varies in the relief it offers a victim. In varying scales for the individual, genuineness, delivery of, and the subsequent actions following the word “sorry” all determine how much acceptance is then given to it.

In childhood trauma, forgiveness exists in the healing, and compassion exists in the forgiveness. Healing involves the engagement of two stages of forgiveness - the forgiveness of another and the grieving within the self.

Engaging in the process of forgiving another person, act or system requires at least one of the following:

• Accepting who or what they are.

• Accepting that the perpetrator in your life was capable of committing such pain either intentionally or accidentally.

• Accepting that their actions towards you (in a single or continuous event) were the outcome of the things that took place in their lives.

• Understanding in wholeness the role (if any) you played in their lives.

We have to come to a place of accepting and understanding the perpetrator for who they are. This is a difficult concept because often in trauma, survival is often based on focusing on the perpetrator. So to say that healing involves focusing on them too can feel very contradicting.

It is important to understand that in trauma we focus on them to keep ourselves safe from them. In forgiveness we are focusing on them to separate ourselves from the role they have over us.

When the young girl told me “I am going to forgive my dad”, I now believe she was ready to accept her dad for who he was and accept that she was not the cause of his actions. She was ready to separate herself from him and ready to focus on herself.

When we humanise the perpetrator and their actions towards us, we also humanise ourselves. Our lives are claimed back from the perpetrator who took them.

The second stage of healing and forgiveness is self-grief. Self-grief involves engaging with the reality of your current state rather than the memory of what life could have been or was. It is mourning the life you wanted or needed before arriving at accepting the life you have. It is engaging with the emotions that exist within you following trauma and experiencing them in its entirety. Even the ones that don’t make sense or don’t fit with society's expectations.

A lack of grief in childhood trauma can show up in many different ways including:

• Siding with the perpetrator - this can exist as negative self-talk or acting as the perpetrator did

• Holding onto painful feelings and memories - keeping hold of the feelings to internalise or project onto others.

Grieving involves connecting to the feelings we hold within ourselves from trauma and to humanise our experience. Compassion walks alongside our grief right through until we reach acceptance. Grieving challenges the concept of “I’ll forgive but never forget” as it proposes letting go of the residual feelings.

Self-acceptance is the outcome which we want but grief is the process to get us there. Acceptance cannot come without engaging in grief.

I had an argument once with someone who shared their story of abuse and called themselves a victim. I replied that I did not like that word and they should call themselves a survivor. As I reflect on that argument today, I can sit here and say I was wrong to have suggested that.

They called themselves a victim because they had grieved through their experience and understood they were a victim to another. Their self-compassion was such that they could own their experience and all that happened to them. They were communicating that it is OK to be a victim. I held a lack of compassion for the word victim and I was communicating that it was not.

I am not suggesting we label ourselves as anything. I am suggesting that we own the forgiveness we give to others and grieve through our experience to hold self-acceptance of exactly who we are.

With that young girl in mind and many others like her, she understood that forgiving her father would set her free and enable her to focus on the life that she saw value in, her own.

I wish you well in yours.

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