The False Narrative: The Need for Forgiveness in Order to Heal

The False Narrative: The Need for Forgiveness in Order to Heal

The path to healing from trauma and grief is deeply personal and can be fraught with contradictions and confusion.

I have carried a great deal of anger surrounding the circumstances of my youngest daughter’s life challenges and death. Her mental illnesses and addiction issues took her into terrible circumstances and into contact with some horrible people. Over the years she shared details of some soul shattering experiences with me, and after she died I received confirmation about the worst betrayal of them all.

It has been my experience that many people do not have any idea how truly bad life can be right here in America. I don’t want to share those horrible stories here or anywhere else, but I will say that the cringe-worthy, frightening, nauseating kind of things you see in movies or read in novels or social media posts really do happen to people you know and to people who live in your community. Making that statement isn’t a quest for drama, nor is it an exaggeration. There are monsters in this world, and most of them are human.

There are many victims of those events and those monsters; the individuals who experience them, their families and friends, the communities that absorb the impact, the EMTs, the police officers, the social workers, the emergency room personnel, the detectives who work countless hours to build a case. The list goes on and on, moving out in endless ripples that create small waves for some and tsunamis for others.

In the midst of all that overwhelming motion, victims are often told that they should forgive the person who caused the harm. They are told that forgiveness is the only path to peace, that in order to heal, to move on, to become whole, they must forgive the offender. And if the offender has found religion, found Jesus or Odin or the Divine in any form, the victim especially must forgive them and welcome their presence in community.

I had been hearing that call for forgiveness for 50 years, and after Beth’s death I wanted to believe it because I wanted to finally move away from the pain her years of suffering had caused. I was willing to grab hold of whatever seemed like a viable means to do that. Three years after her death, three years of feeling and processing and thinking, I have come to a point where I call bullshit on the topic of forgiveness as a means to healing.

There are times when forgiving someone may be a healthy thing to do, as when persons in a healthy, balanced relationship have a serious conflict or disagreement and then come to a resolution of the matter. There are times when an individual’s faith allows forgiveness to bring peace. But there are times when forgiveness is a toxic tool, the use of which is driven by misperception, laziness, selfishness, and power imbalances present in outdated patriarchal religious, legal, and community systems.

Who benefits from forgiveness, overall? What falsehoods are behind that mask? Sometimes victims are urged to forgive an offender because it makes it easier for everyone else to move on with their lives, and because the existence of their pain and trauma is an inconvenience to others. Harm caused creates an imbalance that is felt as an energetic negative. Individuals and communities, consciously or subconsciously, perceive that imbalance as a debt that must be paid to restore wholeness to the individual and to the collective. The presence of that debt is, consciously or subconsciously, discomforting and disturbing, and so the whole presses for balance to be restored to itself above the needs of the individual victim. Salving the conscience of the people who cause harm or those who are made uncomfortable by anger and grief should never be made the burden of the person who has been wronged or injured.

The act of forgiveness implies that a debt has been settled or released, and the suggestion that the victim must release the offender from that debt creates an unnecessary burden on the one who has been wronged. It creates a false narrative that forces the victim to give yet another thing to someone who has already stolen things of immeasurable value, and creates a disturbing cosmic sense of the balance of debts owed and paid. Furthermore, there are circumstances in which any debt owed by an offender is owed at a level beyond human constructs; when the injury caused is so grievous a matter that the debt created is held by the Divine, and so the matter of forgiveness becomes a matter between the offender and their own Divine.

Contained within the grief of losing someone are multiple boxes. One box holds anger and all the other negative feelings directed towards the external factors that influenced a loved one’s death. Another box holds all the questions that can never be answered, all the regrets and unspoken or unaccepted apologies, and all the misunderstandings and miscommunications that were never quite sorted out. But there is also a box that holds the love, the happy memories, and the hopeful dream of one more sunset, one more conversation, one more smile somewhere on the other side.

Comes a time, and it is different for each person, when one realizes that the weight of what is held within that negative box is overwhelming, that its presence causes weariness, that one cannot rise against its pull. With that realization comes the choice to be made: which box makes life better? Which one is worth carrying? Which one is it time to put down?

It is possible to experience compassion without forgiveness. It is possible to have an understanding of circumstances without forgiveness. It is possible and healthy to focus on healing one’s self without carrying the responsibility of healing others, and forgiveness is not a necessary step on that path.