The Long Road to Forgiveness

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Phyllis finally spoke. “No, I can't. I can't really imagine any of that. It doesn't move me.” Her voice grew firmer. “That's not what I want.” But she had clearly made a shift out of her ruthless desire to persecute. We sat together in wonder, watching her hatred in its dying fall.

Other injured people are caught in repetitive, fantasized scenes, not of retaliatory harm, but of rescue and reparation. It's another way of not letting go, of trying to master what is otherwise unthinkable. Fantasies of either revenge or repair temporarily help us manage the humiliations of injury and loss.

I called my ex-husband one day to tell him that I had forgiven him. On one level, my motivation was simple: I felt less angry and thought I needed to admit that shift. On the other hand, I could have merely behaved with more warmth, and he would no doubt have gotten the message, so there was something else in my longing to speak.

I said that I was at last able to feel that I was doing well, and that I forgave him. But my voice felt flat, and his response was thin: “Well, ah, thanks,” he said, and dropped the unwelcome gift. Hearing this story, a friend accused me of asserting moral superiority, but superiority was not what I felt. The wave of emotion that almost swamped me was humiliation.

We sometimes rush too quickly to forgive someone in an attempt to avoid humiliation. “Oh, no problem,” a friend says when I call to apologize for not calling her sooner after her father died. Still, her tone makes me wonder whether my neglect made her feel she doesn't count very much with me. So I try to apologize again, but that just makes her withdraw more. She wants to keep the small dignity of acting as if she's OK.

Even in that limp moment of speaking to my ex-husband, I understood that this small, awkward display of forgiveness marked an increasing independence in my own spirit, a shift—surviving humiliation—that was internal, not interpersonal.

Transcendence

As injured people give up obsessively replaying scenes with the person who injured them, they begin to deal with a hole they find in themselves. If they can tolerate the emptiness, they have a chance to look inward, toward a self they might now experience as both spare and surprisingly spacious. Giving up the effort to be whole, unsullied, I was astounded at how I was both cracked and liberated by the loss of my marriage. Everything was up for grabs. What, really, did I want to eat for dinner? Did I want to visit a friend in Chicago? And what about my work—did I really want to sit, hour after hour, listening to more tales of cruelty and suffering? I had to admit it was interesting, not knowing what was ahead. I moved through the days with a mysteriously sweet and painful awareness of what a prize, really, life is, and how little we realize that.

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