The Long Road to Forgiveness

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I took to asking friends, colleagues, spiritual gurus, clients in my psychotherapy practice, “What's been your experience with forgiveness?” The question induces a certain hesitation.

“It's too much to get into in one afternoon,” a good friend says, noticeably upset. A colleague tells me, “It's humiliating just remembering that someone could hurt me so much that I would need to forgive.” I was plunging into a politics of forgiveness, the complications of a world divided secretly into leavers and leavees, perps and victims, actors and those acted upon.

How do we forgive offenses against the spirit? Does forgiveness come only slowly, with time—say, seven years later, after renewing, as our bodies do, every molecule, cell by cell? People often come into my psychotherapy practice seeking a cherished peace with someone, someone perhaps long gone, who has broken their heart—a mother who killed herself, an incestuous father, a spouse who abandoned a family. People can find themselves with a double burden: there's the original injury—the childhood terror or the tragic, drunken auto accident—and then there's a choking hatred and disillusionment to digest. That's often a meal we are forced to eat by ourselves.

I have come to look at the act of forgiving as a profoundly intrapsychic or spiritual shift in which we do not necessarily depend on the will or skill of the injuring person to ask our forgiveness. Some people ask to be forgiven, and while that presents a richer dilemma, I know that even in those situations, the heart needs its preparations. For the injured person, forgiveness often proceeds along a path from stunned innocence to the tortures of obsession to a surprising expansion of meaning.

Innocence

In early stages of suffering we search for meaning: Why me? Do I deserve such pain? A great injury cracks into our childlike belief that good people thrive and bad people are punished.

But if we believe that we are not so bad that we deserve suffering, then injury shapes a new story—the story of contamination, the world cleaved now into what is pure versus what is tainted and selfish. Without this tale of persecution of the good by the bad, injury disorients us, cracks the frame of our cherished beliefs, reveals our weak and human shame. And we'll do anything to avoid feeling shame.

Dogged fascination with innocence has its costs, though. When I first met with Jack and Ann, they were coming out of years of worry about a runaway son who had finally made it into responsible adulthood. Now facing retirement, they were turning to look at their marriage.

Ann had stored up years of resentment about how she had labored under Jack's temper and how nobody in her family had taken her seriously. “I didn't deserve that!” she said over and over. In our sessions, at least, Jack was earnest and undefensive, but Ann unremittingly kept up an attack on him. It seemed that no amount of understanding—or empathy or apology or remorse—was making it to her heart. Together, we questioned whether Ann's real argument about innocence wasn't so much with Jack as with her overbearing father, a harsh and imperial intellectual. No matter how hard her husband worked to earn her forgiveness, she was not ready to give up the power of a moral position that her judgmental father had never, not once, allowed her. At least with Jack, I said, you speak up, you try to break that spell of injured innocence.

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