2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The article is inspired by several cases of clients who are neurotic because they cannot forgive their parents.
I can understand those of my clients who are not ready to forgive insults, humiliation, physical abuse, psychological bullying, sexual exploitation and other horrors that they had to go through in their childhood. Often, just because the one who caused the pain, caused the injury, does not repent in the least, they do not want to relieve him of their accusations. They defend themselves against admitting, for example, the difficult childhood of a person who crippled them by justifying and absolving them from responsibility.
Forgiveness does not lead past anger, but rather through it. When a person is able to rebel against the injustice that happened to him, he can recognize the trauma as such, he can hate his tormentor, and then, perhaps, the path to forgiveness will open.
After anger and mourning for his past, a person opens the way to the fact that he, as an adult, is able to see the life of his parents and the limitations that were in it, therefore, will become capable of genuine sympathy and understanding.
This process depends on a conscious decision to leave the past to the past, to distance oneself from it. Victims of parental abuse can no longer make the decision not to let the pain of childhood rule their lives when they feel strong enough to influence their lives, when the main place in their life is not the parent (s), but themselves.
This becomes possible when people have reached such a level of their inner development, when they have a fundamental opportunity to choose. When a person decides whether he will remain in despair, sadness and self-destructive anger for the rest of his life, or take responsibility for his life, then there is an opportunity to "let go."
In my practice, forgiveness to clients came when they abandoned all their expectations in relation to the parent, abandoned their illusory hopes that one day he would come, repent, finally be fair, ask for reconciliation. As long as clients insist that the parent (or another relative) owes them something, they are still associated with him. There is no way out of these oppressive states.
Some of my clients, who had the courage to cut off all claims from themselves, after some time became free and prosperous people. Some who did not have the courage to part with illusions or benefits (for example, an apartment, a job) went, unfortunately, along the "crooked" road of this life.
I have always believed that it is important to convey to clients that this is their personal decision, how and when they want to "reconcile" and "forgive". I do not think it is correct to view "forgiveness" as a therapeutic goal.
People who fail to take this step will feel guilty and bad because they experience their inability to forgive as a failure.
Therapeutic tasks that forcefully force “forgive” reinforce in clients the feeling that they owe and owe something that they are not internally ready for.
The state that allows "forgiveness" cannot be imposed from the outside, just like faith, hope and love.
The issue of age is also important. Of course, everything is individual, but the “demands” of young people to forgive their tormentors look like soulless bullying. Forgiveness is an existential concept inherent in adulthood. Everything has its time.
I once read a surprisingly beautiful article by a colleague that suggested an exercise in forgiving loved ones by making paper boats and letting them go on the water. Beautiful, touching, but paper boats are not enough to forgive. Such a beautiful exercise can be performed when the grievances have already "floated away", as a ritual of farewell to the past, in which there has not yet been forgiveness.
Forgiveness may not be the goal of therapy, but quite one of its results. Forgiveness is evidence of strength, adulthood, the quality of a person who legislates to himself.
The result of forgiveness is liberation from negativity, clearing a place for both positive emotions and feelings, and for joyful events in life.
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