When forgiveness is a hot potato
As children growing up in our households, many of us were faced with an awful choice of what to do when we were hurt, abused or ignored by our primary care givers. Behind door number 1 was to hold fast to ourselves, honour our hurt feelings and maybe refuse to just “forgive and forget” the parental ill treatment until our heart felt truly ready to forgive on our own terms. For many people though, this was a luxury they couldn’t afford. See, for those of us who grew up with fragile, abusive or unpredictable parents, this was not a good idea if we were to stay attached to them and survive. After all, crumbs of attachment were better than no attachment at all!
So, most of us instead chose door number 2 which was to “forgive and forget” the transgression, mainly by blaming ourselves for being too sensitive or gaslighting ourselves into believing that nothing bad happened at all and we must have imagined it. This worked fine and we could let our parents off the hook, forget the anger and go back to a safe pseudo attachment; a game where we all acted safely attached to one another. Just play the game and nobody gets hurt right? Wrong.
Because as adults, we forget to stop doing this and reclaim our truths, feelings, needs and self respect when we get into romantic relationships. We reactively become people pleasers and lose our self respect and the ability to be truly known by our partner. We act the same way toward our partner as we did with our fragile parent, scared to lose the attachment and therefore powerless to choose.
The business of forgiveness in adulthood can become quite loaded when we get in touch with our past anger and resentment about a debt that was owed to us from the past but never repaid in full. It may become difficult to forgive our current partner in healthy ways because we were never free to make that choice of our own will in childhood. Forgiveness of the abuser was imposed on us as a “have to” to survive. To regain that lost sense of control in adulthood, we can become quite triggered when hurt and refuse to give in. The idea of forgiveness may stir up big old feelings in us which can create a lot of anxiety. So, we dig our heels in now because we weren’t allowed to then. We make up for powerlessness then by being overly powerful now. This is not the way to heal however- trying to make our current partner pay for our parent’s abusive actions or trying to reclaim our power now by being too heavy handed. We are still being ruled by the past if we decide to go this way.
To truly be able to decide whether to forgive or not, we must get in touch with the rage we feel towards our parents and decide if we want to keep projecting that rage onto our partner, or if we want to face the pain of the past and heal it cleanly, so that we can set ourselves free by forgiving our current partner for any unintentional hurt they may cause us. This is a necessary act for any two imperfect people if a relationship is to survive.
