The Long Road to Forgiveness

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For a good half year, my thinking flowed in two layers, a double dialogue. On one layer, I thought about my mother, my children, my clients, my friends. I talked to the car repairman, I bought movie tickets, I drove to Connecticut. But the other layer flowed along, too, a dark and grumbling creek, ice-rimmed. I drove muttering to Connecticut, wondering the whole way: Had he meant this when he had said that? Should I have spoken up here, kept quiet there? I began to appreciate my obsession's grinding mission: the effort to hold an absent and often unrepentant person accountable.

Similarly, my client Susan racked herself to understand her husband Ed's abandonment after 22 years of marriage. “Why?” she plaintively asked him. “Well,” he said, “I know this sounds stupid, but remember when I asked you to wear those earrings? And you wouldn't!” Susan's mouth dropped open. Ed went on, “Then something just shut down in me.” That's all he could say.

Susan was left to imagine what it was that had truly gone wrong. In the absence of the perpetrator's accountability, injured people work with the only material they've got: their minds. Indeed, it is the essence of obsession to try to handle something in your mind when you believe it cannot be resolved in the outer world.

Susan was determined to learn how to accept her loss and move forward. But if she were suddenly to find herself lightened of rage, if her suffering ended, what would such lightness of spirit say about her husband's abandoning her?

Paradoxically and inevitably, Susan's thriving would be living proof that it was not such a big deal. “I start to imagine letting go of all this bitterness, and then such sadness comes up! He gets off scot-free, saying, 'See, it wasn't such a terrible thing.' But I know one thing: This is a truly crazy idea—that my suffering will make him pay!”

My client Phyllis spared no energy in concocting daily malicious retaliations during her divorce from a bully of a husband, delighting in leaving him waiting for poky children, enforcing restrictions on his calls to them, refusing to bend rules. I was unable to help her set limits on her sadism, despite endless appeals to the well-being of her children. I finally asked what would be a proper punishment. “Oh, I wish every day that he would die. I really do,” she said.

“Would you like to kill him yourself?” I asked.

She didn't blink an eye. “I would if I could get away with it.”

I pushed further. “Maybe we should take some time to imagine you causing great pain to your husband. A sort of guided fantasy.” Clearly stunned, she looked at me with glazed eyes. “Like, you could hit him with a baseball bat.” Her mouth was open. “A gun?”

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