2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Author: Eletskaya Irina
Have you ever heard that the path to healing, to freedom, to love, and in general to all the most beautiful things in life is in forgiveness? I bet you do. If you forgive all the offenders - and you will be happy.
She didn't give a damn for luck. She did this because she hoped to get rid of the pain. And I just wanted to live. And pain with life was not very compatible.
Asya began to forgive her parents almost immediately after she entered therapy. She forgave them for a long time. Deep. Sincerely. Over and over again deeper and more sincere.
She was finally able to see them for real. Not only powerful, suppressive, unattainable in their peremptory righteousness, devaluing and rejecting, as she had known them all her life. But confused, helpless, insecure. Losing this confidence with every new day of their lives, along with diminishing health and physical strength. Along with his inflated false authority in the eyes of his own children. In her eyes.
She was able to imagine what they were like in childhood, with their childhood dreams, aspirations and hopes. I thought about what path they had to go and what to face along the way, what pain to go through (or not to go through) before they became this terrible symbiosis called dad and mom.
And she learned compassion.
… She forgave them completely. Forgave them everything. No residue. Forgiven my loneliness and despair. Its uselessness and abandonment. Your suicidal thoughts and unsuccessful attempts to realize them.
She ceased to extract from her memory everything that could reopen old wounds. And it began to seem to her that they had ceased to be ill even by the weather. There was no longer that obsession with which I wanted to restore justice, returning my pain to the address. To the one who caused it.
It became much easier. Life was filled with new colors, sounds and impressions.
And only the little girl inside her suddenly felt betrayed. As if there was no all this pain and all this horror. As if there was not this black hole inside, which cannot be plugged with anything. As if she had never been lonely and abandoned. As if all this is unimportant and does not matter for a new, happy life.
The girl did not agree. She didn't want to forgive. Her whole being was against it.
And Asya suddenly realized that she did not want this girl to find herself on the edge of despair again, alone with her pain, feeling of abandonment and cruel injustice.
And only when she managed to give herself this inner permission, this right not to forgive, she was able to move very strongly in her separation. I was finally able to separate.
AND…. forgive.
And she knew love.
She no longer expects that someday her parents will realize, understand her childhood pain, take responsibility for her and repent. They will never take responsibility for this, will not repent and will not understand. They just can't. And they never could.
But she can. And he wants to be responsible for his mistakes.
And she repents. That is why she does not ask for forgiveness from her adult son. It would be like a shift in responsibility. As if, having forgiven, he could forgive her her sins.
She only says that she is sorry. She regrets that being with him physically in the same space, she was not always with him when he needed it so much. That she could be selfish, not sensitive enough to his feelings and needs.
That did not give him the experience of intimacy that she herself began to learn many years after his birth in her own psychotherapy. Little by little, little by little, little by little.
She regrets it. About all that it took away from him. Than hurt him. About the pain that she caused to the most dear and beloved creature while she was "a good enough mother" for him.
And today, already on the other side of forgiveness, she says: "You can not forgive your parents." It is no longer so important for her whether her son will forgive her. Forgiveness is a choice. And she can live unforgiven, recognizing this choice for him. And respecting him. And glad that he has this choice. And this is also the path to intimacy. Today he is like that.
Working with the topic of forgiveness, I realized one thing. The path to forgiveness is often the lack of the right not to forgive. No right not to want to forgive. Lack of choice.
No, of course there is a choice. And you can use it. But then you are bad. Then you are ungrateful and cruel. And you are guilty. And you should be ashamed. And no one wants to be friends with you and even say hello. And even more so you, so cruel, no one will love. Never. And you will never see either happiness or salvation. Because you are not worthy of them.
Therefore, forgive all rapists, sadists and murderers. They didn't want to hurt. Didn't mean you any harm. It just happened. They were just deeply and hopelessly unhappy.
It's true - happy people don't hurt other people. Pain is caused by those who are filled with pain themselves. But you may, knowing this and even having compassion for them, not want to forgive them.
You have the right not to want to forgive anyone you don’t want to forgive. And, paradoxically, this is also the path to intimacy and love. It may be like that.
When you allow yourself to be unwilling to forgive, you become more whole. You stop rejecting the part of you that doesn't want to forgive. And you become closer to yourself. So, closer to others. After all, only by accepting ourselves, we become able to truly love someone.
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