When Forgiveness is Bullshit

You’ve all heard it. Whether it’s from a friend or family or popular magazine article, “You Have to Forgive to Move On”. How untrue that actually is. Forgiveness has been touted as a miracle cure…that if you want to heal your trauma, addiction, abuse, you have to forgive. If you don’t, your pain is your fault.

UUUGHHH.

Let me just get this out of the way first: Forgiveness is not a requirement to healing.

The dictionary says that the word “forgive” means to “stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake”. Well, to stop feeling angry or resentful towards someone means that you need to have those feelings first. You can’t stop feeling hungry until you’ve eaten; You can’t stop feeling angry until you feel it.

For many trauma and abuse survivors, stopping their angry feelings is counterintuitive to healing. Anger is a necessary and vital emotion that indicates a major injustice or boundary violation has occurred. Trauma is exactly that.

In my work with adult children of narcissists (ACON), the narcissist in their life (and sometimes even the family members that collude with the narcissist) uses the “you need to forgive” tactic as yet another way to control or manipulate the person out of their feelings. Whether you’re an ACON or not, this statement can be deeply invalidating and confusing.

Many individuals who aren’t ready to forgive often get confronted with mounds of guilt, shame, or doubt, wondering if their lack of forgiveness makes them bad or unbending. The reality is that usually the person asking for forgiveness is doing so because they’re uncomfortable by your feelings, individuation, or boundaries. Especially if you were the scapegoat of the family or the pleaser, this can disrupt years of family dynamics that kept toxic relationships in play.

Forgiveness is a highly personal act that DOES NOT have to happen in order to heal, but certainly CAN happen if the person wishes for it.

Let’s get something straight: It is okay to want to forgive. It’s okay TO forgive. It’s just as okay not to. When we force something before it’s ready, we usually end up with an incomplete experience. Consider eating half frozen peas before they’ve thawed. You won’t taste much, it’ll give you brain freeze, and you’ll likely still be just as hungry as you were before.

The same is true with forgiveness. If you’ve still got a lot of anger, sadness, and grief to process, slapping on forgiveness is going to give you the same result. You might feel a sense of “I did it” at first, but then within hours, all of those unfelt, unprocessed feelings will pop up like goffers from the ground.

What happens when we don’t forgive?

You may be thinking that if you don’t forgive, then that means you’re just going to remain an angry and grumpy person who no one wants to be around. You may think you’ll be someone who just stews and dwells in drudging up the past as a way of punishing those who will listen.

In my experience, individuals who accept that they may not be ready to forgive feel the opposite: Liberation.

It’s especially helpful to work with a therapist who does not try to push that shit on you. When you step into the reality that you’re not ready to forgive and that its OKAY, a tremendous weight can lift. When that weight is gone, it can actually help you explore your real feelings, feel them, and have a new kind of relationship with them. In a paradoxical way, this process can sometimes make forgiveness more likely in the end because it will be genuine.

However, let me make one very important distinction: I do not believe in forgiving an abuser.

I will never ever condone that or encourage anyone to take that on. In my opinion, forgiveness is best suited for nonviolent (physically and emotionally) and non-abusive acts that were the result of ignorance or something close to that.

If you’ve experienced physical and/or emotional violence or neglect, torture, war-trauma, childhood abuse, childhood neglect, continued gas lighting from abusers, or anything within this realm, forgiveness is not for you.

Again, this is a personal decision.

If you and your trauma-informed therapist determine that forgiveness is something YOU want because YOU want it, not because someone else says so, then you can map that course out together. If someone has told you to forgive an abusive person(s) or you’ve read it somewhere, approach it with extreme caution and skepticism.

Let’s also circle back to the dictionary definition of forgive. It uses the words “offense, flaw, or mistake”. Nowhere does it say “abuse, trauma, or act of violence”. Sure, forgiving the bus driver for being late is one thing (again, after you’ve let yourself feel whatever comes up), but forgiving an abusive parent for continued harm is another thing.

I am not here to be the arbiter of what you should or shouldn’t do. In some rare cases, it may be possible for an individual to truly come to terms with their trauma and forgive their abusers. Much in the same way it’s possible for someone to run a 4-minute mile, certainly not everyone can do it. Even if you want to run that quickly, you may not have the physicality to even come close to that number. With forgiveness, you may hear of that one story where someone forgave and was truly released from their pain, but know that is likely a one in a million kind of situation.

For now, let this be your mantra: I don’t have to forgive to be okay.