Forgiveness. Filled to overflowing with all manner of agenda, this word is one of the most misunderstood in the English language—or any other language for that matter. When we forgive, we think we absolve. We think it makes us good, even noble. We think we are doing the one we forgive a big favor or making things right. We think we are getting closure. Simultaneously, and on another level of consciousness, we may also think that they should earn it, that they don’t deserve it, or that we should not forgive them because that lets them off the hook. Somewhere in the midst of the internal argument we say that we have forgiven—but we have not forgotten.
What Forgiveness Is Not
In order to clear the way for what forgiveness is, we must first figure out what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not absolution. Our offenders are not set free in any kind of universal way because we have forgiven them. We are not doing them a big favor—it’s not even really about them. We are not making things right—there is no right and wrong to forgiveness. People don’t earn forgiveness—it is not something they deserve, nor is it a gift we give them.
Forgiveness is not a one-time thing you do and then it’s over and done. It doesn’t mean that you stop having feelings about what happened. It also doesn’t mean that you are a better person for having extended your forgiveness. In fact, it has nothing to do with your worth as an individual. Forgiveness is not about feeling good about whatever happened. Unfortunately, it doesn’t magically offer the closure so many of us are hoping to receive from it. So if forgiveness isn’t any of these things, what exactly is it?
What Forgiveness Is
Forgiveness is not something that we do. Forgiveness is something that does us. It is much more expansive than any single act of noble goodness could ever attain. Forgiveness is the authentic Self speaking its truth through an internal process of waking up. Forgiveness, like love, is all about truth, because it is a process of grief, which ultimately leads to acceptance of truth. Every bit of that grief process is forgiveness. The denial is forgiveness, the anger is forgiveness, the bargaining with it is forgiveness, the sorrow is forgiveness, and finally the acceptance is forgiveness.
How can denial be forgiveness? Denial wants to believe the offending incident didn’t happen. It wants to believe that she would not really betray, hurt, abandon, or otherwise break our hearts. Denial wants to believe the best so we can stay connected to the people we love. Ultimately, denial means that our love for the person who committed the crime against us is at least as important as the crime committed. The process of denial is part of the forgiveness process in that it tells us the truth of how important our love is for the person involved.
Anger is a step of realization. What is being realized is that the pain I feel is real—that I matter to me, which is why I am angry—and that what you did has had a potentially life-changing impact on me. We need to understand that the pain we feel is real, because when we sit with any feeling, it not only delivers its message but it softens us so that we can begin to see the difference between what is mine and what is not mine—what is me and what is not me.
When I am angry at you for hurting me, I feel my anger as a real assertion of a me. There is a me that has been hurt and must be protected. This is a major first step in realizing wholeness. There must be a me. My anger says I am here, I am real, and I matter. That is its central message, as we shall later see in greater detail. So when I am angry, my authentic Self is coming forward to assert itself. This makes anger a very significant event—it is an assertion of the authentic Self.
Bargaining is a part of the forgiveness process because even though it deals often in magical thinking and fantasy, it intends to carry us to the truth. Bargaining leads to truth because our bargains do not work, so eventually we must face what is real. For example, if Jerry is still angry and drunk every night in spite of the fact that Judy has tried many times to calm him down, hide his alcohol, threaten to leave, lecture, and cajole him, she might finally settle into the truth that she can’t make him stop, thus getting her closer to acceptance.
When we move out of bargaining, we allow ourselves to feel the sorrow that accompanies the offending event; we are softening to life on life’s terms, over which we have little to no control. Here we get into the flow of life, which in turn allows us into the flow of energy that is our essence.
Sorrow is a bit like climbing into a river, slowly allowing the body to adjust to the temperature of the water. As the body adjusts in response to the cold river, we begin to feel as if the river’s temperature has changed, but it is really our body’s temperature that has changed. This is how it is with sorrow. We begin to understand that there are things over which we have no control, and yet, like the body adjusting to the temperature of the river, it isn’t life that changes to meet us, but we who change to meet life on life’s terms. We begin to treasure the small, simple moments of ordinariness that enter our lives daily. Sorrow gives us this gift of reception. Eventually, we will be able receive the flow of life as it carries us to unknown parts.
Acceptance is the last brick to fall out of the wall that is unforgiveness. It finally allows the person to say, “Yes, that hurt like hell. Yes, it was real. Yes, the pain made me more aware of myself as a real person with real needs and desires. Yes, I tried every way I could to work around this, but it just wouldn’t stop being the reality it is. I am changed because of it all.” It is when we have reached acceptance that it finally becomes possible for us to begin the process of taking home the gift that the offender came to give us.
For the Gift
While the offender certainly did not intend to give us a gift, and while we may not even want to consider that there could possibly be a gift for us that comes as a direct result of the process of grief brought on by the offense, it is true. In fact, the Old English word for forgiveness is forgiefan. Broken down, for means “completely”; and giefan means “to give”. Put back together, the word forgiefan means “to give completely.” In the ancient Greek, forgive is aphiemi, and one of the meanings is “to leave so that what is left may remain.” Ultimately then, the word forgive means “for the gift.” Forgiveness gives completely its gift in the leaving behind what is false so that what is true may remain.
It is not uncommon at all for a person who has gone all the way through the forgiveness process to say, “I’ve come to a place where I am actually grateful for what happened to me, because it has made me what I am today.” That is exactly what forgiveness does for us. When we get to the place of genuine gratitude, where we can look back and see with clear vision that we are different and life is more deeply meaningful because of these terribly painful events—we can certainly say that we have forgiven. We have received the gift that forgiveness wants to give us. What has been left behind are the shards of old patterns or relationships we no longer need, and what will now remain is a deeper sense of Self and a more profound respect for life.
At times it can be a great challenge to get to the place of the gift. For example, when one spouse cheats on another, it can seem near impossible to move through the steps of grief to reach the gift each might receive from the experience. The work that is required of both of them at this time, which could facilitate a genuine forgiveness process, is that both do the intimate work that provokes a deeper truth than just what happened and when. This kind of betrayal often requires that both parties get really honest with themselves and each other about what goes on inside each of them and what was going on in the dance of their relationship before any cheating took place.
So if Eric were to be able to tell Nancy specifically about his woundedness, she might really be able to see how her cheating has impacted someone she loves. If Nancy and Eric were to be able to tell each other what was going on in their hearts and minds before her cheating took place, they might begin to understand the dance they were doing that got them both here. In doing so they both increase the level of intimacy between them, drawing them closer and allowing a real forgiveness process to ensue. Even if they eventually break up over this, they will have done it through the forgiveness process.
Forgiveness Is Not an Intellectual Process
We usually try to rationalize our attempts toward forgiveness. We think: I shouldn’t feel this way or for this long, so I’ll just make up my mind to forgive. And I’ll tell myself that I’m not angry or hurt anymore, and we’ll just get back into a relationship and everything will be fine. Down the road, if the offense is repeated, we might say, “I forgave him once, I can forgive him again, and so I should stay.” These are a few of the false intellectualized constructs that we commonly call forgiveness.
But forgiveness is not something done with the mind. It is something done through the power of the authentic Self. As such, it’s not something we can simply tell ourselves to do. There are many books out there that tell us that if we just affirm that we forgive someone, we will change our hearts and the heart will magically begin forgiving. These affirmations are meant to talk us into feelings we perceive to be good and out of feelings we perceive to be bad. Most people find that they have to keep going back to these affirmations again and again, and they often feel that they fail each time they must go back and start the affirmation process over again.
While affirmations can be purposeful in some ways, forgiveness and affirmation are oxymorons. Forgiveness happens at a level of psychic and emotional awareness that affirmations cannot touch. As we have said, forgiveness is not something we do, it is something that does us. You simply cannot talk your way into forgiving someone or something. It only exacerbates the problem, because not only do you now still have the problem of pain, anger, anxiety, and sorrow to deal with; now you also have this compulsive drive to make these feelings “go away” and to replace them with more positive feelings of forgiveness and love. And on top of that you feel like a failure quite often because you can’t make those feelings go away or make the more positive feelings appear.
Forgiveness is allowing oneself to be carried through the grief process, a process that includes very difficult feelings of anger, sorrow, and terrible disappointment. We live in a world of magical thinking where we are extremely impatient with our own emotions. We are supposed to kick them around until they obey us. We are not supposed to feel any so-called “negative” feelings. But as we shall see in later chapters, when we sit with each emotion that arises, and we listen to its message, we learn how much it loves us, and we begin to love ourselves.
Forgiveness, therefore, is a process of self-discovery. Nothing short of that deep self-discovery process can truly be called forgiveness. Many are looking for a “how-to” when it comes to forgiveness: just do these things and you will have forgiven. But the very notion of “how-to” implies intellectualism and contrivance, and forgiveness cannot be contrived. But we can open ourselves to what arises into consciousness. We can sit with and listen to our own emotions until they give us their messages. We can settle into ourselves in such a deep way that life and its suffering hands us back to ourselves.