Better than Forgiveness

“You only get to live free when you make the choices that scare you the most.”  Dr. Rosenna Bakari

I used to believe in forgiveness. Actually, I still do. I just don’t believe in it the way many people do. I don’t believe forgiving people makes us our best selves. Sometimes, it makes us miserable or disempowered. 

I am a well-adjusted human being with steady success in my life. I have forgiven many people in my life. Some of them disappointed me by not living up to my expectations; others willingly hurt me. Female friends abandoned our relationships to pursue male companionship. My husband once told me we should never have married. My son went absent from my life for two years. My mother definitely had some unsavory parenting practices. Love is bigger than disappointment. Forgiveness arose effortlessly. 

I believe that forgiveness arises in hurt people when circumstances are met. No one can predict the circumstances of forgiveness for another person. People who pursue forgiveness, like love, will often be disappointed by the lack of long-term fulfillment. Like love, desperate people pay too high a price for forgiveness. They sacrifice themselves and live in the space of emotional or psychological smallness. 

For 40 years, I lived in a space of smallness to remain part of a loving family. When I disclosed my childhood sexual abuse decades ago, I learned that forgiveness was synonymous with silence. My family never even asked me to forgive. They only asked me for my silence. I offered my forgiveness because I didn’t know any other way to remain silent. I couldn’t show up for holiday dinners and family reunions and greet my violators without a heavy dose of forgiveness to underwrite my silence.

Although the people I told believed me, they believed in family pride more. The violators were never asked to acknowledge their wrong or make amends. They continued as pillars of the family. Meanwhile, I lived with wishes to die and perfectionism as peace. Healing was about how good I looked, not how good I felt.

At age 44, the back-to-back loss of several close family members forced me to look at my word differently. In an effort to restore family balance, the surviving family members attempted to pull closer together. That effort resulted in my sister inviting her husband, my violator, into my home for a week-long visit. There was a reason I lived a thousand miles away, and this breach of the boundary was too much for me to bear. Keeping her secret for her was no longer enough of forgiveness.  

The unaddressed pain of childhood sexual abuse exacerbated my grief. I knew I had to heal, and forgiveness was not the path of healing I needed to take. I needed self-care, an unadulterated focus on decisions that served me best. Over the last decade, I have come to understand these five practices to be much more beneficial to my personal growth and well-being than any focus on forgiveness. 

Living Openly

I realized that the pain was in the silence. As long as I was keeping secrets for others, I was unable to even request help. Even when I did disclose to people close to me, I requested that they keep the secret too. Nearly a dozen adults participated in a terrible game of “keep shame alive.” I lived in silence, not because I never spoke, but because no one listened. I lived in silence, not because I hid my scars, but because no one ever noticed them. Silence did not serve me well.

I grew into living openly as I dropped the secret. I began disclosing to friends so that I could process how I felt about my family’s response. I needed people to help me make sense of why people who loved me would choose a violator over supporting me. I didn’t tell everyone I knew, but I also no longer cared who knew. I didn’t ask anyone to keep the secret for me. Instead, I asked them to help me break my silence.

Reconciliation with the inner child 

I learned that my inner child needed some love from my adult self. As an adult, I need to rescue my inner child and manifest love where there was judgment, inconvenience, and fear. Developing an internal emotional relationship with the child-self was critical to remove the judgment I had placed on myself. The measures I had taken to survive during my age of innocence seemed stupid, immoral, or weak to the adult who chose perfection as a defense. 

So much pain had been denied. Only a nontraditional therapist could help me suspend my current reality to look at the vulnerability and innocence of my 7, 14, and 18-year-old selves with love. I was fearful of acknowledging the pain of my innocent child at an emotional level. So, the silence seemed reasonable. However, the pain we experience today may only be quelled by allowing ourselves to go deeper into the pain we felt (or denied ourselves) as children. 

Letting Go of Toxic People 

My beautiful family was toxic, and I had to distance myself. In disclosing my abuse to a friend, I explained that my sister was my best friend and letting her go hurt deeply. My friend asked me, “what kind of friend asks you to keep a secret that she is married to someone who violated you?” I cried because I didn’t have a response. I never evaluated my family. I just loved them. I missed the daily phone calls, annual visits, free advice, and having someone around who had known me all of my life. 

The more I broke my silence and processed with people, the more I realize the harm that had been done by people who requested or validated my silence. I knew toxic referred to people who were overtly demanding and insensitive to the needs of others. I never thought of the request for silence and requiring me to share space with my violators as toxic. Instead, I saw my distress as a weakness. That was my mistake.

Understanding the Context of Cause 

I was fortunate to have friends who were in the helping profession and teaching psychologist colleagues. They asked me tough questions when I disclosed to them. They wanted me to tell them about the environment that enabled the abuse to occur and family dynamics that made silence the rule. They empowered me to consider the context. I spent a decade unraveling the context. 

Part of that context included forgiveness as a manifestation of denial of harm. My father had harmed my mother many times over. My sister had forgiven her husband and lied to their son. I couldn’t recall problems being addressed in my house in a healthy way. My family held a lot of secrets, and men had a lot of power.  

I had so much to figure out once I allowed myself to be angry and unforgiving. Trying to understand all of the contexts felt like someone had placed a thousand-piece puzzle before me to solve without a single clue about the picture. Maybe friends could help me turn over some pieces, and the therapist could help me put together the corners. But solving the puzzle was my task, and it became my “living-openly,” healing journey.

I evolved from being a character stuck in a story of forgiveness to be the narrator. I stopped acting out a script. I now use my own voice to tell how my story began and how it ends. My story does not begin with forgiveness. I began with self-care.

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