Q8 Counseling

One of my fellow CPCA members posted an excellent write up about forgiveness on her blog recently (read it here) and that got me to thinking about how I present the concept of forgiveness to my clients.

Almost inevitably, my client believes (consciously or unconsciously) that 'forgive' and 'forget' are synonymous. I have listened to women in great pain wail, "How can I forget what happened?" as if the act of forgiving is somehow supposed to whisk away the memory of the offense or trauma. Or my client believes that forgiving somehow relieves the offender of the guilt which has caused the hurt. "If I forgive her, she just gets off scot free and leaves me with the pain of her affair."

Forgiveness is a tricky thing. If it isn't separated into two parts, healing is likely to be incomplete, and the client may become discouraged at his/her "inability" to forgive and get past a trauma or offense.

Forgive as a verb is defined as "To stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw or mistake." 

Forgiveness is defined as "The action or process of forgiving."

This is an action word - it requires movement of some sort whether physical, emotional, or psychological. There is no way to forgive and remain unchanged. Just as the original offense, flaw, or mistake has changed us in some way, subtle or profound, so the act of forgiveness also changes.

So - two parts. The first, and certainly the most important, is cutting the emotional tie between me and the offender. Any hurt I suffer as a result of the actions of another immediately creates an emotional tie between us that only I can cut. That emotional tie is a natural result of my sense of fairness and of my core beliefs about justice and retribution. Two people may suffer the same offense but experience differing degrees of emotional ties. In essence, my sense of 'rightness' has been damaged, and I want compensation. Therein lies the work of forgiving. To sever that emotional tie, I must give up my wish/demand/drive to be compensated for the hurt or loss I have suffered. 

I hear howls of protest.

Wait.

Note I did not say I needed to give up my right to justice. There is a difference between compensation and justice. This battle is internal and has nothing to do with the offender except as the source of my hurt. If I want to disconnect from my attacker, from my rapist, from my ex-spouse, from an abusive or angry boss I must give up my desire to be 'paid back' for the pain I have suffered as a result of the offense.

Firstly, for almost all offenses, flaws, or mistakes, there is simply no way to compensate appropriately for emotional pain. Flowers? The death penalty? Tit for tat? It simply can't be done. The emotional pain I experience at being wounded by another is mine alone. No one can restore what I've lost and the only way through to healing is acceptance of the pain as a cost of being human.  When I allow the truth of what it costs to be a human being - impacted by life in connection with other human beings - to settle into my consciousness, I have made the cut which will sever my connection with the offender.

Practically speaking, there are different ways of incorporating this conscious sense of acceptance. Many different spiritual disciplines follow tenets which lead adherents to this common point - acceptance of the inevitability of emotional pain as a consequence of being human - and in reaching that point of acceptance, provide steps or a process by which this pain is accepted, borne, and eventually released. Christians are taught that Jesus Christ shares/carries this pain, Muslims learn that Allah is the one who compensates for present suffering with rewards in Paradise, and Hindus espouse the belief that all suffer and therefore compensation is moot. Contemplative disciplines such as Zen Buddhism and Yoga encourage meditation on world grief, the oneness of humanity, and the acceptance of pain as the yin/yang to pleasure.

Does this acceptance lessen the pain of the wounding? No. But it does free me from emotional ties to the offender by placing the wounding in a global context. In accepting this pain as a part of being human, I am prepared then to work through the impact of another's behavior on me, my life, and perspective.

Healing begins.

Stay tuned for Part II - The Offender