Revisiting Forgiveness

A look back on how and when I forgive. And who needs the forgiving.

I am working on a new collaboration book with an amazing group of women. We are exploring the mother-daughter wound and the healing that must occur, I think, for humanity to evolve.

As I began to explore my own ancestral DNA handed down by the women in my lineage, I had to revisit the chapter I had written in Tipping Sacred Cows about 12 years ago, when there were fresh wounds to heal and older ones re-opened and bleeding out.

I share a story in this chapter of a canon event in my life, a moment when timelines shifted, which I’m sure brought me to this exact moment.

Things did not end well with my Mother. For me, anyway, it all began with this one event and how my Mother chose to deal or not deal with what happened to me. I’m not sure yet where I go from here with my chapter in the new book. This is me opening up the small box I keep hidden under my bed, with the key held in my heart, ready to see and feel it again, hopefully from a wiser perspective…

**This is an excerpt of the chapter

Should we ask anyone to forgive the person who molested or raped them? Who beat or abused them? There is an aspect of forgiveness that requires acceptance, and some things are just not acceptable.

There is a statistic that is frightening: one in four women has been the victim of rape or molestation in her life. I’ll say that again. One out of every four women on this planet has been raped or molested. I am that one in four.

In the moment when it first occurred, every ounce of trust and faith I had in men evaporated instantly. Clearly, this is where the root of my feelings of unworthiness, my never feeling safe, and my need to be protected came from. It was a kick, a punch, a brutal assault on my childhood self. The cracks from this blow spidered out and touched everything and made me vulnerable to criticisms about my body, my intelligence, and my perceived value to myself. Sometimes, the cracks filled my beliefs, making them fragile, and sometimes, my beliefs filled the cracks, solidifying them. Much of my quest, my search to find all types of meaning to and in life, stems from this place, this red shirt of my past. Pain is often the impetus for spiritual questing, and I would be remiss to not speak to this early pain, this root of so many other hurts that have dominated the different stages of my life.

I share this piece of my reality rarely, and when I do, I am often asked if I forgive the man who did this to me. What I say in response is, Forgive? No. Accept? Yes. Because the truth is, and this is the hardest for many to understand, that I am who I am because of all of the moments of my life. They are my paintings, flawed and ugly, beautiful and grand.

Each moment of my life is inextricably my life. Accepted yes, forgiven sometimes, but angry still. How is that possible?

Because my anger isn’t at him anymore. It was once, but now it’s at us, me, you, the world. This is why I am writing this book. Because I’m angry that somehow humanity forgot the basics. Somehow, we have lost our ability to love each other and respect each other, and our hurt manifests in how we hurt each other, and then we become desperate for forgiveness because we feel shame. There is a part of me that would undo those moments of confusion and terror at the hands of a man trusted by me and my family, but the truth is I can’t, and if I did, I wouldn’t be me. But what I can do is try to help people understand how we work and how to find the true self that would never think of harming another. Because the way I see it, we must all work together. This is my way, although there are other ways as well. Maybe I’m naïve in that I believe that somehow love and understanding will help heal the world and somehow stop the cycle of abuse.

But this isn’t just forgiveness. This is life. And though I may naïvely hope that somehow love and understanding will fix the world, I am still realistic. I fully believe that there are things in this world that are wrong, done by people who are just plain bad. People who are wrong on the DNA level. What do we do with that? How do we forgive something and someone who is just plain not right, who is wrong in all directions? Sometimes, there are just bad people, and nothing will fix them.

One in four—that is the statistic. So I am not the only one I know who has been molested. I have a friend who also experienced this in her childhood. We do not agree on some points of how to deal with forgiveness and acceptance in the scope of our pain caused by the betrayal and injustice of being abused. I am adding her story here because I think it is important to say that forgiveness or nonforgiveness is a choice, personal and professional, and as different as a thumbprint for each person.

My friend was molested as a young child, starting from the age of five and lasting until the age of nine. The abuse was severe—that is the only way I have ever heard her describe it. I know that she suffers from post-traumatic stress and that she still wakes up crying and covered in a cold sweat. My friend is complex, as people are, and she can be a shit. She is also hilarious and punny in the cheesiest of ways. Her trust is a distant thing, which is not surprising, so when she gives it, you know she has given you a true gift of herself. But as distant as her trust is, her empathy overflows. She is incredibly brave and amazingly kind. I love her profoundly.

We lost touch for a while and then reconnected in that way that can happen, and over a bottle of wine (or three) we caught up on each other’s lives. She told me about something she had come to realize. She realized that she was angry over what had happened to her. She said it like it was a revelation. I think it was because of that whole “anger is bad” concept, and that she had not allowed herself to really go there, ever, about what had happened to her.

“I’m so incredibly angry, but not in a bad way,” she said. “It’s totally maintainable. It feels good and right.” Which stuck with me. I got it, this idea of being angry but not thinking of being angry as something that needed to be fixed or stopped. She is a happy person, living a happy life. Like me, she doesn’t carry her abuse around with her. She doesn’t even let her PTSD impact her life wholesale. She treats it like a chronic illness, something

to be managed. She has compared it to a brain imbalance—she was injured in such a way that it messed with her chemical responses and the building of her neural pathways. Profound trauma can do that to you.

I recently called her and asked her about that anger, and she said, “It’s like my anger is screaming in a language that understands injustice.” That was the best way she could describe it, she said, and she apologized for not being able to really encompass it for me and for making it sound cheesy. I told her what she had said was just fine.

She spoke about it in a very calm and accepting way—not of being molested, but of being angry. She went on to say that she felt okay with her anger and comfortable because she felt it was a good and right anger. It didn’t consume her; she knew it was something that a person should feel angry about in the same way we feel angry when someone is killed in a senseless shooting. That the act, the thing that was done to her was in every way wrong and bad and against everything we would consider to be right or good. Then she said, “Bad does not require my forgiveness, and I refuse to be passive in the face of it. I refuse to be anything but angry that such a thing happened to a child. I was that child. A horrible wrong was done to me. And I do not forgive the person who did that wrong to me. Because he is a bad man. Seriously, just plain bad. Why should society forgive that? Why should society ‘let the anger go’? Why should I? It is part of who I am.”

I have to say, I get this line of thought. Think about it. As a subject matter, molestation is pretty enraging—this violation happens to children; grown people do this to babies. Let’s all be

outraged here and not move on when the subject comes up. This is not something that deserves forgiveness, and we may be right to delay it or withhold it. We should remember it so that we are angry enough the next time it happens to do something serious about it. To point and say, “Stop that bad man—he’s doing a great wrong.” Maybe, if we weren’t so quick to forgive, to forget, to jail, or to execute, we would make more progress in stopping the things that hurt people.

“Sometimes,” my friend said, “forgiveness seems to anesthetize us to the point that we are unresponsive to what we should be absolutely in an uproar about.” This is one of the side effects of the forgiveness pill when taken enmasse by society. We really don’t forgive child molesters. But we are “bad” if we judge and say we don’t forgive, so we do on a deeply personal level when it happens to us.

It is weird that the general thought is that, somehow, our refusal to forgive and forget means we have not moved on. My anger and I’ll bet my friends, keeps me diligent and more aware, not in a crazy kind of way but in a way that says, “Hey, pay attention here—something is not right.” It is a way that takes action to correct a wrong, whereas if we were drugged with forgiveness, we might fall asleep at the wheel.

And that’s just another bit of complexity to grapple with. Really, the complexity is endless. I mean, shit, I can even feel empathy for the sex offender who gets harassed when his neighbors discover he’s on the sex offenders registry. How weird and crazy is that bit of our human being-ness in action?

So there you have it: two different people, each with her own complex inner world of forgiveness and nonforgiveness. We are fully capable of understanding the other’s choices and just as capable of not forcing our own decisions on the other. When and if she chooses to forgive is something she gets to decide. Ditto for myself.

Great wrongs do not require my forgiveness, nor do those who have done those wrongs. They simply require my understanding, if I am able, my acceptance of them and my willingness to not let them define me.

Like a bad habit we should kick, we should really reconsider the knee-jerk impulse to take the forgiveness pill. Just like any drug, it’s not right for everyone in every situation. So I say, let’s give complexity a chance, and wisdom, and our ability to manage both in a way that answers our needs—in a way that makes us say, Yes, this is good for”

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Want to be part of the book? I have 3 spots open for women who want to share their path to healing their Mother/Daughter wound. DM me for details.