Do Not Tell Me to Forgive
I am sometimes told that if I would learn to “forgive” certain people in my life (my father, my ex, even other family members) then I would find life easier and maybe be less angry and depressed. I used to believe that I was bad at forgiveness, that I needed to work hard at being better at it, and that this was my greatest character flaw. But I don’t believe that anymore.
I don’t believe I was ever someone who was unforgiving. In fact, when I look back at the past fifty years of my life, mostly what I see is someone who was eager to give other people the benefit of the doubt and eager to tell herself that everything was her fault. I see someone who spent decades of her life killing herself to help institutions of power, her ex, her children, her parents and other families members. She worked herself to suicidal depression and then got told that the depression was her own fault for not being willing to keep working herself to death, or for not being kind or generous or hopeful or faithful (or insert word to describe femininity) enough.
There is a part of my brain screaming at me that I’m being prideful and selfish for saying that I don’t think I was ever at fault when people told me I wasn’t forgiving enough. I don’t think it is any of those things. I think that there are tools used against women and other marginalized groups demanding change and equity and those tools are often labeled “forgiveness.” Some other names for them include “letting go” and “moving on” and “the past is in the past.” Actually, no, the past is not in the past when the problems continue into the present.
At this point, I’ve come to see that people pressuring me to forgive are often people who are in power above me and want me to stop talking about problems I see (often with them personally). Forgiveness has been used too often as a tool to shut people up, to silence activists, to tell women that they should keep giving and giving and giving until they die (literally) of exhaustion, and to uphold power structures that desperately need to be changed.
I will admit that there might be a kind of forgiveness that isn’t about power, but that’s not what it feels like when people tell me to forgive. There is a usefulness in not caring about my ex’s opinion anymore, or the judgment of people who remain in the Mormon church. I find it freeing to sometimes tweak those people and that old view of womanhood that I worked so hard for so long to be approved of in myself. Fuck all of them.
If that’s what you mean by forgiveness, well, then, we are in agreement. That is very useful, after all.
The one book on forgiveness that resonated with me after divorce was Forgive for Good, by Fred Luskin. He took a totally selfish view of forgiveness. His view of forgiveness is not letting the offender off the hook -- but it is letting you off the hook. Why should they be able to keep on hurting you? Why should they be afforded so much space in your mind? And he has ways to help you get there, not treating it as an instantaneous decision, either. That was the only approach that worked for me -- but it did, in fact, help me tremendously to heal and stop obsessing about my ex. https://www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/forgive_for_good.html
I don't see any need to forgive. In my experience offering forgiveness gave my abuser 3 decades to continue to harm children. He specifically used apologizing & soliciting "help" from other family members to keep him "in line". Family jumped on the opportunity to "help" him and shunned me - partly bc they saw my anger as a personal flaw. Ultimately I forgave him but it was the family that I didn't forgive. Now I wish I hadn't forgiven him either since it was clearly his MO after finding numerous other victims stemming throughout his lifetime, right up to his death. If forgiveness helps anyone, more power to them. But the pressure to forgive is part of the problem. Forgiveness with no accountability only serves to allow the same thing to repeat over and over. No one should discuss forgiveness until substantial work is done to show that they are forgivable.