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Belongs to: Shane Told from Silverstein talks on forgiveness
Yeahhhh. There’s no forgiving the priest who molested me when I was 8 and ruined my life. There’s no forgiving that. Period.
Damn. So hard to be able to trace so much of the pain and darkness and difficulty or your life back to this one event, this one man. To wonder - what would my life have been life if he hadn’t just fucked it all up? When you know the source of your pain, but you can’t change it, heal it, fix it, it just brews bitterness. The injustice, the perversion, the cruelty…you were EIGHT. You wish you could scream at the top of your lungs and reverse all of the pain back on him. To protect the boy you were, to win him back. Maybe at one point you felt angry at yourself that you couldn’t. But there’s also the sheer tragedy of it - mourning the loss of your innocence, mourning the confusion and the pain and the betrayal. Part of you died that day. It feels like there should have been a funeral, but you carry that grief with you every day instead. And somehow you still had to continue to put one foot in front of the other. Carry it all inside, alone, silent, decaying, but forced to move forward. It opened a chasm in you so wide it feels it could never be repaired. A permanent hole that reminds you of the hatred you have for the man who caused it. Naturally, forgiveness would feel like a dishonor to your story, your pain, and an undeserved grace to the evil man who did it. You wish you could bury him under all of the pain he caused you, instead of giving him a key out of the prison of hatred you want him to stay locked in forever. Makes total sense.
Pretty much spot on.=====
And that is completely understandable as well as to be respected. What you’ve been through is something that was traumatic and the weight of your words here conveys how deep the impact it had on you. I’ve been myself victim of sexual abuse at different instances of my life and fully resonate with what you’ve said here. I never felt like forgiving others would need to be part of my healing, because I don’t owe anything to people who’d hurt me.
However, I believe forgiveness is often wrongly depicted. It is too often described as this act of excusing someone, which would give them permission to free themselves from potential guilt or shame (although many people just don’t feel that way or even see the wrong in what they did). In that sense, as long as you don’t forgive, you get at least some sense of justice and control in face of someone who tried to take that control away from you. It feels satisfying. It channels the anger into someting that makes sense and is just powerful, even healing at times. After recognizing that we were victim of someone’s awful behavior and decisions, it serves a purpose to be freaking angry and acknowledge the hurt that’s been done over and over. Through one own’s healing journey, there are many different seasons, and all are valid, no matter how long we stay in it or if we even want to make it a destination.
For the most part, I’ve personally started to come to terms with seeing forgiveness as a daily gesture turned towards me rather than towards the people who have hurt me. I don’t care about them. I don’t want to consider them nor how they feel. But I do care about whether I would live the rest of my life filled with anger, a deep sense of injustice that needs to be felt, but also eats me alive at times. Forgiveness is one thing, but actively not forgiving is also whole another emotional state to be in. It is possible to re-learn to embrace life in between, without it being either a gift or a curse to the abuser.
Maybe, just maybe, forgiveness is about reaching a point of feeling at peace within. Without it ever be in reaction to what someone did to us. Could it be fear, shame, guilt, anger, sadness, despair – all the emotions that a person caused us to live and maybe sometimes feel stuck with. These are things that were never asked for in the first place.
Anger and restoration are essential to reclaim your right to be. And your own existence, who you are, goes beyond what they subjected you to. In the end, this is about your heart, your well-being, your life. You truly deserve the best. I’m rooting for you.
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@heartsupportwall Thank you for that perspective. 