Forgiveness Isn’t Just About Moving On—It’s An Act Of Divine Will
When it comes to abuse and abusers, there is much debate in both the mental health and spiritual community around the concept and experience of forgiveness.
We can often find ourselves on both ends of the spectrum at different points in our healing journeys.
Adamant Non-Forgiveness
One common end I see people gravitate towards and where I myself have been is the end where we are adamant about our right to hold on to our anger and even our resentment. We believe it shouldn’t be our responsibility to forgive. We believe that it is our abusers’ problem and not ours to be roped into.
What is underneath that, though, is still an invisible bonding to the situation and the people involved. We don’t believe it to be our burden to carry, yet we still hold the disdain or the desire to be detached. The disdain or the desire to not be detached only snowballs into a void we inevitably hold around the memory, which is a burden in its own right and is something I noticed kept me from my wholeness.
What I feel when we try and let go of responsibility—which isn’t to say being the one that makes amends for the other person or entire past itself—we are always subtly and subconsciously trying to get the other person to be accountable, and that is a psychic burden that we don’t need. We may feel like we are taking our power back from the situation, but the gap we try and create and maintain is a form of unresolved emotional attachment still.
We will never not be involved anymore as traumatic memories are formative to your sense of self and orientation to the world. It doesn’t mean that it gets to determine the outcome for us though, and that lies in how we deal with our involvement. It is a matter of integrating the spaces we’ve shared and the spaces we’ve then tried to use as brick walls to compartmentalize to come to a more profound experience of healing.
Anger itself, when healthy, is an indicator of pushing back upon what you know is intruding you without your permission. But anger is unconstructive when it bleeds from unresolved wounds, which drives us to turn healthy boundaries into rigid defenses that interrupt our desires to be at ease and at peace.
Idealistic Forgiveness
The other common end of the spectrum is when we are inundated with the message that it is up to us to forgive to have the situation resolved, which is where I have been as well. Whether it is because the people who hurt us deserve forgiveness or whether it is because we ourselves deserve to be free or whether we want to identify with being the better person or the compassionate person, the notion of (superficial) forgiveness seduces us.
What I feel is the common experience is that we are often fed up with carrying pain, with experiencing the tension, and with being emotionally stuck. And so it is natural to want to seek relief and it is natural to want resolution. But what often happens is that we think forgiveness is a one time big act that absolves everything for us and returns us to this fairytale ending of what we want healing to be. What happens is that ‘forgiveness’ can become something like self-punishment for a skill we just haven’t yet mastered.
When we grasp at forgiveness as an act of desperation or as a cerebral act to attain the results we want so that our situation can be ‘over with’, this too creates a gap that only masks desires for detachment, which only points to us skimming over what is still unhealed and attached.
The misunderstandings around this type of forgiveness, which has us believe that forgiveness is an act of our own willpower, is extremely tenuous and can wreak guilt in us if we fall back into patterns of hurt, anger, blame, or confusion. It wreaks the feeling of us maybe being too weak or undisciplined or that we may ‘just not want to heal badly enough.’
The thing is, the linear ideas and the literal associations with moving on and leaving the past behind can actually be a form of dissociation and repression.
Even though our hearts may want that release, that closure, that ‘moving on’ phase, forcing ourselves to forgive because it is ‘morally right’ always backfires. We want that reprieve and that alignment that comes from wellbeing, but if beliefs in forgiveness come from shame, guilt, pressure, or correction, it has the opposite effect of tethering us to only those things.
So where do we go from here?
Being Moved Rather than Moving On
What I’ve found is that forgiveness is often seen as a top-down concept when it actually is a bottom-up experience.
It can’t be enforced, it can only be surrendered to. It is not something you give, it is something that touches you. It does not have to do much with the other person, it has to do with releasing yourself from all the hardened and stuck emotions that have accumulated to do with that other person. It is not an act of our will but the will of a force greater than us, pouring into and working with us.
Both ends of the spectrum mentioned above are fixated on a premeditated emotional state. We either don’t want to feel or we want to feel a specific way. Forgiveness is an energy that vibrates and moves through us that affects us physiologically, and to go through the process of that, we must get our heads out of the way for it to start its journey.
What I didn’t know until recently is that it is not the ‘I’ that moves on from anything, but all of what was and all of what is that moves around inside the ‘I’. When we heal blockages, what was frozen is free to move around. What was frozen transforms into something that is fluid, soft, and subtle.
Moving on, or rather, being moved by your experience, is a natural branch in the thick trunk of learning to come into stillness. When we are too busy trying to overcome, conquer, or bypass our wounds to get to an ideal state, stillness is out of our reach. The Divine’s (or God’s or the Universe’s, whatever you’d like to call it) healing force cannot reach us. Stillness is being able to sit beneath the ripples of the mind that tries to have a hand at which direction is ‘right’ for you.
Forgiveness has to be an act purely motivated by getting into the right relationship again with the Divine or with our innermost selves, which trauma can disconnect us from and in which the attempts to outsmart trauma also further alienates us from. We grow so many defenses and exaggerated subconscious views about the world from trauma and abuse, and that is exactly what the co-creation of forgiveness focuses on healing. It focuses on giving back and releasing what was never yours to be burdened with.
Forgiveness is allowing your innermost self to be touched by the Divine’s grace. It doesn’t begin with what I can extend to others, which is the misaligned definition of forgiveness, but what I can allow to be extended to me and through me. The rest is up in the air.
Experiencing Divine Influence
Through the Divine’s forgiveness around what I’ve held on too long to or was adamant not to hold on to, all the rights and wrongs my mind tried to forcibly lean myself into to feel certain is naturally absolving. My feelings are neutralizing in a way that isn’t numbing but forgiving— forgiving in the sense of softening and not needing to solidify certain opinions to keep justifying or even diminishing what happened to me.
I’m realizing I don’t need to keep the intensity of the stories alive to validate the hurt and the pain I went through. It is all already valid and for me to be in an aligned relationship with myself, both the validity and the non-identification with it have to exist simultaneously.
This living for my inner self and for nobody else is truly what is forgiving. Forgiveness comes from and commences the neutralizing of traumatic bonds that bind you to the other person, in ways that are obvious and ways that are not so obvious. Forgiveness is the unbinding that is given to you so you can come back to your authentic self.
I would say that the heart attempting to heal through the mental concept of both forgiveness or non-forgiveness keeps us at an impasse. I would say to focus on your own healing without the pressure to forgive or the verdict to withhold forgiveness, and that is all anyone can do. The need to be certain is what keeps our unhealed self in a state of limbo. Allowing the Divine’s grace is allowing the frozen parts of us to melt in whatever direction is intuitively calling us. We don’t need to choose. We only need to let be what is for now.