[I found this on my hard drive. Apparently back in June, I was thinking about forgiveness.]

[carose59]

No One Has The Right To Remove Another's Validity As A Joke; It's Too Dangerous For Both Of Them.*

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The only sense I can make of forgiveness is that it's linked to the person you're forgiving. For instance, I forgive my mother the things she does that drive me crazy by telling myself she's more important to me than any of the things she does; I let go of the things and hold onto her. I do the same with my friends, up to a point. The point comes when those things are actually hurting me and overwhelm the good stuff.

I "forgive" (and I use the quotes because I don't know if this is really forgiveness) people who have done (and would do again) awful things to me. I do this by trying to let go of both the thing and the person. Like confession, there's no point forgiving if you have no intention of changing your behavior, and not putting myself in harm's way again (and ending up with more pain and things I'd need to let go of).

It doesn't feel like forgiveness to me, not the way we're taught to think of it, a soft, giving thing, a blessing. It doesn't feel like I'm soothing my soul. It feels like apathy. But being apathetic toward people you can't have in your life seems healthier than hating them, and certainly healthier than loving them, so I don't know what the answer is.

And I don't forget. Forgetting leads to letting it happen again.


*East Village Other

Comments

[gattagrigia]

Thank you for this. I have never understood forgiveness, either the 'forgive and forget' or 'forgive but never forget'. I believe that forgiveness, whatever that is, is for yourself, not for the perpetrator of the pain, but how can you forget? The memory of the pain will always be there. And I can't 'give' forgiveness, it's not a gift, the perpetrator still caused the pain and it's their problem to deal with that. I can't do it for them, no matter what they expect or want.

If you've been damaged, you've been damaged. Forgiveness won't change that. Then again, I've never understood 'let it go'. Does that mean don't obsess about the event? I can choose to do that, but the damage is still there. I can learn to deal with it, use it, ignore it, but it will never go away. Emotional scars can form, just like physical scars, but whatever damages you physically stays with you; ie, a broken bone might lead to arthritis, a bad cough can lead to scarring on the lungs. Cancer can't be 'cured', even if it's cut out, that damage is there, and the chemical and radiation treatments damage the body even more. You can deal with damage in many ways, but it is there, it doesn't go away. Maybe I'm spiritually blind, but I just don't see it.

Sorry, I'm being especially negative today, I guess. I took one of those silly internet tests, What is your Tarot card? and I got as The Sun. A more opposite result is hard to imagine.

[carose59]

I'm sorry for not responding sooner; I don't think I saw this, which is my own fault for not checking email more often. Will you forgive me? *g*

I had a weird thing happen at work, where one of my co-workers suddenly started treating me like shit. No explanation, just suddenly I was a horrible person in her eyes.

Early this year, she told me she didn't like the way she wsa behaving, and so she was letting go of whatever it was she felt I had done, and she hoped I'd forgive her. I told her I would, because I'd already just written her off and I didn't care one way or the other anymore. (I didn't tell her that second part.) She wouldn't tell me what I'd done--she didn't want to rake it up, she said. But she wouldn't let the conversation go, either. I think I was supposed to ask forgiveness too, but you know what? I can't do that. Maybe whatever it was was something I meant to do, something I stand behind. So the conversation petered out.

Since then we're pleasant to each other. But I don't trust her any more than I did before her apology. Maybe I should see what therapist says. *g*