Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to forgive and forget in order to move on with your life.
Forgiving and forgetting is actually kind of unrealistic. I’m expected to forget every bad thing that anyone has ever done to me? How would I ever learn any lessons on who to trust and what decisions are right and wrong? I wouldn’t. Life is about learning from people and from mistakes, not about forgetting and repeating the same ones constantly.
If I am asked about someone who is no longer in my life because of the bad things they have done to me then I have no problem telling the truth about my feelings- they were toxic, I dislike them and I don’t have a place for people like that in my heart or my life.
Some people may say that seems bitter or that I am still holding onto a grudge. So what if I am? That is my choice.
Holding a dislike for some people also doesn’t mean that I still dwell on what they’ve done to hurt me, it just means that their chances have ran out and I will not lie about my feelings for them. This goes for everyone, if I am asked about someone who I do really like then I will have no problem going on about how wonderful they are. I give my opinions whole heartedly every time, negative or positive. I’ve always been a very honest person, almost to a fault, so I will not sit and say that things are good with someone when they are not, just so it appears I don’t hold grudges. I’m not one for fake conversations or pretending to like someone who has mistreated me just to appear “nice.” Everyone is entitled to their own opinions about everything, including people, and should not be judged for them no matter what they are.
It is not about holding a deep grudge-it is about being authentic and strong enough to stand up for myself against people who don’t have a place in my life anymore.
It gives me more piece of mind knowing that these people will no longer be around me than it would to give them my bullshit forgiveness.
Some of the phrases most likely to make me instantly hulk out are “you need to forgive”, “let it go”, and “move on.” All of those piss me off, but “forgive” is the absolute worst. “Forgiveness” seems like such a nice, happy concept, so you’re probably wondering why I have such a deep and passionate loathing for that stupid fucking word. Let’s start with thedictionary.com definition so we can then throw it out the window:
forgive — vb , -gives , -giving , -gave , -given 1. to cease to blame or hold resentment against (someone or something) 2. to grant pardon for (a mistake, wrongdoing, etc) 3. ( tr ) to free or pardon (someone) from penalty 4. ( tr ) to free from the obligation of (a debt, payment, etc)
Ceasing to blame or hold resentment against someone sure sounds like a nice idea. So does granting a pardon, or forgiving a debt. The problem is that when people say “you need to forgive” they don’t mean “I want you to be happy and being super pissed off about _ is not making you happy.” What they always seem to mean is “I’m uncomfortable with your anger. How about you shove it down until you choke on it?” Shockingly enough, I don’t respond terribly well to being told that I don’t even get to have my own goddamn feelings about all the terrible shit that’s happened to me, or that my completely justified rage is less important than some random fuckface’s comfort.
People also seem to have this idea that once you’ve “forgiven” someone, whatever happened magically becomes okay and everyone acts like it never happened. Fuck that noise. Nothing is ever going to make what happened to me “okay.” No empty fucking platitude is going to give me a happy childhood or a mother who loved me (why yes, there is a post coming about kink and childhood abuse), and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for anyone else’s convenience.
To make things right, much more than one-sided “forgiveness” (read, swallowing my emotions so that no one else has to think about what happened) is necessary. Real forgiveness is earned with honest acknowledgement of wrongdoing and sincere, ongoing, and above all successful efforts to make amends. If you promise something will never happen again and it does, guess what? You don’t fucking deserve to be forgiven. Not that people have to be perfect to make amends, but they have to fucking try. Without any efforts from the people who hurt me to make things right, it is literally impossible for me to “forgive.”
In all the time I’ve spent thinking about forgiveness or letting go or moving on, I’ve read precisely one article that has anything remotely useful to say about forgiveness. To paraphrase fairly heavily, that article says there are three steps to take before you can forgive:
1. Acknowledge the harm done.
2. Feel your feelings about it.
3. Talk about it.
The standard “forgiveness” bullshit allows me to do precisely zero of those things. Instead, it tells me that I should just stop being angry, as if I can flip my emotions on and off like a fucking light switch, that I don’t have the right to feel inconvenient feelings about it, and that I shouldn’t talk about it. Funny how all those things do much more good for my abuser than they do for me.
I’ve tried not acknowledging the harm that’s been done to me, and it’s fucking exhausting to pretend things are okay when they are most certainly not. I’ve tried not feeling my feelings too. Trying to swallow my anger just made it worse, to get anywhere I had to decide I had the right to be angry and that I was damned well going to keep being angry until I was good and done. I still hate talking about it, but keeping it a secret is just one more way to pretend it never happened.
Fuck forgiveness, fuck the idea that I don’t have the right to be angry, and especially fuck the idea that other people’s convenience is more important than my well being.
If you want to actually help someone who had been hurt to move on, strike the word “forgive” from your vocabulary. Instead, say “What happened to you was terrible”, “You have a right to be angry”, “Do you want to talk about it?”, and “Is there anything I can do to help?”
If you can’t manage that, then at the very least be honest about what you really mean if you feel the need to spout some bullshit about how they need to let go. Admit that you don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about their happiness and that all you want is for them to shut up about how they were hurt so you can go back to pretending nothing is wrong. And then admit that you’re a worthless sack of shit.
Below written by SometimesMagical and Diane Roshelle
According to Dictionary.com, forgiveness is:
to grant pardon for or remission of (an offense, debt, etc.); absolve.
to give up all claim on account of; remit (a debt, obligation, etc.).
to grant pardon to (a person).
to cease to feel resentment against: to forgive one’s enemies.
to cancel an indebtedness or liability of: to forgive the interest owed on a loan.
The definition and connotation of forgiveness is all about the other person—the person who wronged you—and setting them free, absolving them, letting them off the hook, ceasing to feel anger (or bitterness or whatever the new demonized emotion is) towards that person.
I’m here to cry bullshit on the whole charade.
Forgiveness isn’t necessary for healing.
Forgiveness is not necessary to “move on.”
It’s not even necessary in order to feel compassion or love for someone.
It’s not necessarily healthy.
In fact, more often than not, in the instances when forgiveness is prescribed (severe betrayal, severe hurt/abuse, severe tragedy, severe trauma), it’s actually harmful to the person needing to heal. There’s a reason why anger is listed as one of the main steps in grief—it’s important! Getting angry, feeling sad, holding someone else accountable, they’re all part of “moving on.”
What does a statement like “you just need to forgive” do? It heaps more guilt on the person who is experiencing those emotions—those necessary emotions—by making them feel like they’re wrong or unhealthy or weak for experiencing them. In other words, it’s blaming the victim, encouraging them to ignore their own needs and cater to another person’s desires.
It denies the mind’s natural way of healing itself.
You don’t get past the anger by suppressing it. You don’t move through grief by denying it. The only way to get through those difficult aspects of healing is by claiming the right to feel them.
And the only reason why forgiveness sounds so “positive” to us is because we have this fucking stigma about the shadow emotions being “negative” (which I discussed briefly here). We as a society don’t know how to handle those intense emotions, so we distance ourselves from them. And when someone else is experiencing them, we prescribe “forgiveness” as the fix-all that allows us to sound helpful without actually doing anything to help. If we move past the idea that shadow emotions are negative, suddenly the need to forgive by letting go of those emotions is non-existent, along with the need to distance ourselves from those emotions.
Does forgiveness ever have a place?
Maybe.
I’m an open-minded person and willing to consider that forgiveness really does have a legitimate purpose somewhere buried underneath all the bullshit–that it can potentially be a healthy byproduct of healing in some circumstances. But I’d be more than willing to bet that, in those instances, the forgiveness happens fairly naturally.
In the instances where the hurt is bigger and the problems larger, i.e. whenever forgiveness takes up focus, it should be up to the individual to decide if that is something they need or even want. It should be up to the individual to decide if the relationship is worth the work of restoration or if it’s safe to continue with that relationship. Moreover, it shouldn’t ever be the goal. Healing should be the goal, whether or not it includes forgiveness.
And without a genuine apology for the pain and damage caused and change to avoid repeating it, I don’t think forgiveness is either possible or healthy. Healing comes in those instances by learning to set boundaries, take a stand for your own needs, and hold the other person culpable for their actions, not by giving a blank check to someone who repeatedly hurts you.
I think it’s high time we forgive ourselves this absurd expectation that we should always forgive. It’s time to allow ourselves to recognize that healing isn’t about forgiving the other person; it’s about listening to ourselves..
I started talking about my childhood sexual abuse when I was in my early twenties. I only told a few people that it was my father who abused me, but there was a common response: “Have you forgiven him?” I was from in a religious environment where forgiveness was mandatory. I was afraid not to forgive.
The abuse kept me living in fear— I was afraid of many, many things, but at the top of the list was the fear of abandonment. If I didn’t forgive, I would be disapproved of and rejected by my Christian friends, and more importantly, by God. Unless I wanted to spend eternity cast from God’s presence, I had to forgive. Unforgiveness was, after all, far worse than anything that was done to me. To refuse to forgive made me worse than my abuser. Or so I was taught.
I also thought forgiveness was synonymous with, “Pretend like it never happened.” In my definition of forgiveness, my dad didn’t have to suffer any consequences, I was supposed to stop talking about the abuse or if I talked about it, I couldn’t mention my dad. That would be “uncovering” him. Forgiveness also meant that I shouldn’t feel any negative emotions toward my dad and that our relationship would carry on as it had.
Even without the religious pressure, I wasn’t interested in breaking off my relationship with my father. I didn’t consider it as a possibility. I was just as afraid of being abandoned by him as I was by everyone else.
Through the guise of forgiveness, I stuffed my feelings and stuck a nice big smile on my face. I was supposed to put the past behind me when I forgave, so I denied my feelings. Forgiveness was supposed to be the path to healing, so I acted healed. I buried my anger somewhere deep, somewhere I hoped I would never find it.
The anger didn’t disappear. It was buried, but it was buried alive. It scratched and clawed and cried out. Its voice demanded attention, so I gave it expression through abusive acts toward myself. I continued my own abuse through all kinds of destructive behavior including dangerous sexual activity, over-working and abusive relationships.
Eventually, I wasn’t only hurting myself, but others. I thought the anger would shield me from the type of things I suffered as a kid. It was the illusion of being in control and more powerful. When I vented my anger, I felt bigger than I was. I secretly smiled inside when I recognized that people were intimidated by me. If I inspired fear, maybe they wouldn’t see how afraid I was. But it didn’t protect me. I kept getting hurt in the same way again and again.
I wasn’t happy. Anger was a mask I wore, but it wasn’t the real me. I wanted to feel real and let myself be the gentle, nurturing person I knew I really was.
To finally get rid of the anger that was pushing me, I had to take it out and deal with it. I had to face its source and look at all the pain associated with it. I had to recognize that the true target of my anger was my parents, not me. By then, I realized I was just as angry with my mother for protecting my dad, maybe even more so.
Also by then, my parents escalated in their abusive treatment. I refused to continue the sick patterns and, after setting boundaries they refused to honor, we parted company.
I had a new definition of forgiveness which didn’t include reconciliation, but in my heart, forgiveness represented a threat. Someone suggested that I forgive my parents and I reacted as though that person was locking me in a cage with a hairy beast with long claws, razor teeth and glowing, yellow eyes. In my mind, forgiveness would disarm me and leave me vulnerable to more abuse. I couldn’t be pressured into forgiveness or anything else related to a type of performance or measuring up. My forgiveness facade was blown and I didn’t care. I had to continue to sort out my feelings instead of covering them up.
I continued to write and talk about my anger, fear and pain. One day, after months and months of processing, I woke up and actually wanted to forgive my mom and dad. I was shocked. The day before, I hadn’t felt anywhere near being able to forgive. Suddenly, I was prepared to drop of the baggage of offense. I no longer wanted the responsibility of trying to control what they deserved.
Once I made that decision, I felt lighter, freer. I wouldn’t have believed how much of a difference it made.
Forgiveness didn’t mean the end of my pain. Actually, once I forgave them, I felt the most intense pain of my journey so far. Forgiveness opened my heart to remembering the good things about them and viewing them in a more balanced way. In my anger and hatred, I only saw them as evil people without any redeeming qualities. Since nobody is all good or all bad, that was one of the lies I used to try to protect myself. Once I admitted to myself that my parents actually do have good qualities, I started missing them and the pain of abandonment and rejection engulfed me. This is a journey of finding the truth, so even though the truth brought pain, I welcomed it since it also brings healing.
I’ve worked through that pain now. I don’t feel tied to the abuse like I used to. I always had the knowledge that I was stronger than the abuse, but the forgiveness process left me actually feeling stronger than it.
I still don’t have a relationship with my parents and I don’t ever intend to. Even over the relational and physical distance, they continue their abuse. Occasionally, more things from the past come to light and I’m challenged to sort out my feelings in that regard. My forgiveness has been a layered process. I don’t consider my parents much at all anymore, either with pain or longing. In many ways, they are a distant memory and are becoming more so over time as I continue to face my past. I’ll never forget what they did or failed to do, but there isn’t pain attached to the memories that I’ve worked through.
I don’t have gushy feelings toward them, but I also don’t have the desire for revenge. I divorced myself from the need to control their fate or determine what they deserve. That’s what I think forgiveness really is.
I don’t think those people who tried to sell me forgiveness were trying to hurt me. I’m sure they were only trying to help and were speaking from their own fears. They may not have intended harm, but it was harmful. Forgiveness is a personal issue and one of the most sensitive in dealing with abuse. Forgiving my parents was one product of my healing, not the means to it.
by Christina Enevoldsen
Less than 24 hours after reading the stories promoting incest that my father Hank had spent the last three years writing and posting to the internet, I got stuck on the rock of forgiveness.
I’d swallowed the pop culture definition, in which my future happiness and security depended upon extending forgiveness to the man who’d molested me as a kid. Hank the Blank, the same man who then, thirty years later, attracted thousands of fans with stories in which young boys were always eager participants in acts that made my skin crawl to read.
If I wanted to be a wise, sober, evolved person, I must forgive. If I wanted liberation from suffering. If I wanted to be a good man.
I went there immediately. I went there first. And it felt fucking horrible.
Then I read Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and I came to this passage:
Some survivors attempt to bypass their outrage altogether through a fantasy of forgiveness. This fantasy, like its polar opposite (revenge), is an attempt at empowerment. The survivor imagines that she can transcend her rage and erase the impact of the trauma through a willed, defiant act of love. But it is not possible to exorcise the trauma, through either hatred or love. Like revenge, the fantasy of forgiveness often becomes a cruel torture, because it remains out of reach for most ordinary human beings. True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.
It was only when I read that passage that I felt something like liberation. That I got unstuck. For 31 years I’d tried to be a good boy. I’d crammed 98 percent of my feelings into the farthest darkest corners of myself.
I honestly couldn’t answer Ground Control when he’d ask me what I felt about something. Here I was, the “sensitive” kid, the “sweet” man, and I had no fucking clue what I felt.
“I know depressed,” I told him.
“That’s not a feeling,” he said.
Shit, I thought. I had 31 years of feelings to vent. 31 fucking years. I better start now.
I once remarked to the Manly Fireplug that I had a lifelong attraction to bad boys. Friends or lovers, it didn’t matter. I liked the boys who could tell the world to fuck off.
“That’s cause you’re a bad boy,” he said. It was one of those ah-ha moments. But that was a few years ago, and I stayed stuck on the rock.
After I found Hank’s stories and lost my mind, after I bought a knife for self-protection and positioned myself so that nobody, nowhere, was behind me, so that I could watch everyone and suss out their motives, after I tore Hank the Blank a new one over the phone, after I came home from work every night drenched in my own sweat, after all of that, I gave myself permission to be angry, petty, sullen, and stubborn. I dropped reasonable, diplomatic, and forgiving. I wouldn’t torture myself in the pursuit of “fairness.”
I told myself that if I fucking wanted to say fuck on Dogpoet, I’d fucking do it.
Sometimes a well-meaning person tells me I need to forgive. That it’s the key to my happiness. And sometimes it feels like a cobweb on my face that I just brush off. And sometimes it feels like control, like Hank the Blank himself is imposing his will, trying to bend me to his own fucked-up purpose, and I can’t get away from that person fast enough.
Look, I get it. We don’t want to see people we like suffering. We want to imagine that there could be a tidy resolution to pain, and we gently push our loved ones in that direction.
But there’s nothing tidy about child abuse. There will never be a day in my life that I won’t be affected by it. It’s fucking family. It’s primal. It’s everything. It cuts deeper than anything else, working its way into our marrow. We don’t “walk away” from it. We can’t.
I tried the tidy resolutions and the peremptory forgiveness. I tried whiskey, and meth, and Manhunt, and Playstation, and shoes, and gardening. I got snatches of songs stuck in my head every waking moment for over a year because I couldn’t handle hearing my own thoughts. That way doesn’t work. That way ends with the razor and the gun and the rope.
Look, Hank the Blank isn’t contrite. He doesn’t get it. “It was only an hour of your life,” he told me. Four months ago he made me a promise that he’d seek therapy. I knew it was empty, and I was proven right. Hank the Blank doesn’t deserve forgiveness.
That doesn’t mean that I’ll lug his crap around forever. Four months later I feel less burdened, not more so, because I cut ties with him and decided not to forgive. I’ll feel what I need to feel, once I figure out what a feeling is. I’ll save my love for the people who deserve it.
