I forgive you
Hey, Will? I don’t know a lot. But you see this? All this shit. It’s not your fault.
Yeah, I know that.
Look at me, son. It’s not your fault.
I know.
It’s not your fault.
I know.
No, no, you don’t. It’s not your fault
I know.
It’s not your fault.
All right.
It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault
Don’t fuck with me.
It’s not your fault.
Don’t fuck with me all right? Don’t fuck with me, Sean, not you.
It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault …
Oh God….Oh God, I’m so sorry (through heavy sobbing)
Fuck them, okay?
Two of my favorite movies of all time both star the late Robin Williams. Both include heavy themes of trauma, loss and the journey that those who survive must still go through. The first is What Dreams May Come where Williams goes into the afterlife to try and save his wife who took her own life, only to have to let her go. The other is Good Will Hunting, where Williams plays a therapist named Sean and Matt Damon the title character, Will.
Will is a savant mathematician who always finds himself in trouble, underachieving and alone. Abused as a child, he’s never dealt with any of his past. Court-ordered therapy lands him in Sean’s office where the powerful scene above plays out.
Entering into Sean’s office for what he thinks is his last required session, Will finds Sean browsing his file, considering the report he needs to file with the court. Will tries to guess what his therapist will say. He accurately names his own abandonment issues and even asks, somewhat rhetorically, if that’s why he recently broke up with his girlfriend, who he loves and who loves him.
While the movie doesn’t go into detail about a named diagnosis, Will is a classic narcissistic avoidant. He doesn’t need anyone to feel complete. He’s fine on his own. The arena of love is a terrifying place for him to be because those he relied on as a child were not only unloving, they were physically abusive. Locked away in his subconscious are the very tangible memories of his most trusted caregivers. But unlike those who grew up in safe, nurturing homes, where they were provided with love, protection, emotional sustenance and guidance, Will’s association was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Love equals pain. Those closest to him are dangerous. Those he counted on most left physical and mental scars that became engrained, buried and suppressed out of his own body and mind’s ability to protect itself.
Along the way, Will would self sabotage, lash out, act out (at times violently which landed him in jail), push away those who actually cared about him and convince himself logically that he would be fine on his own. In his psyche, he’s survived worse already. Allowing others to get close would challenge his deep seated notions that love wasn’t safe; that people who showed affection would one day turn around the next and beat him with a belt.
Perhaps the worst thing about Will’s situation is that also embedded in his mind and heart is a feeling of unworthiness, despite the outward expression of confidence and independence. When you experience trauma, especially at a young age, you can too easily believe to your core that somehow you deserved the treatment you received or the life experience in general, whether that’s abuse, the death of a loved one, etc. You do everything you can to soothe the adults, to please them, to make their pain go away because even at a young age, you can feel their hurt. You just don’t know how to deal with your own so you try everything you can to ensure you don’t cause any more, often at the detriment of yourself and your own needs. And despite all your best efforts, end up hurting others anyway.
In a scene that creates a lump in my throat every time, Sean looks at his file and reassures Will, and more specifically Will’s inner child, that everything that happened to him, his resulting behaviors and his life experiences that have landed him in a court-ordered therapist’s office was not his fault.
With a look of genuine fatherly love, Sean says over and over to Will, “It’s not your fault.” Will, never having addressed any of his past trauma, knowing anything about how it’s affecting him nor having had the opportunity of any type of release is reluctant. Sean has struck a nerve and Will’s MO throughout his life has been to move away from the pain, push it further and further down from the present. Make it go away at all costs. But Sean continues until finally, Will breaks. His release comes in the form of never-before-cried sobs. The two men embrace. His guarded walls finally tumble, at least for a fleeting moment.
: :
I am not that different from Will Hunting. I’ve made far more progress than he depicted in the film, but the sources of my pain are from both decades-ago trauma combined with a slew of lived experiences that have resulted in internal conditioning that needs continued work to address. Only in the last few years have I become aware of my detrimental patterns including how and where they play out in my life. The worst of which has been giving far too much credence and airtime to my inner critic, which is a manifestation of my inner wounded child.
In losing my mom to a brain tumor when I was two, I had my rock ripped away from me. Add to that a father who became so devastated (and who didn’t have a good model on how to parent by his alcoholic father and aloof mother) that he could only do the best he could, but would often fall short when it came to helping me become emotionally stable in light of our loss. Two more deaths of my foremost mother figures at 15 and 17 combined with my dad’s remarriage to a heinous bitch for five years between the ages of 8 and 13 and to say that I didn’t have a good model for love would be an understatement.
I found all sorts of ways to cope but none of them included diving into my feelings and reconciling with the trauma and the pain. At least not until I finally sought therapy at 30 years old. We didn’t do feelings in my house. When my brother was 4 having just lost our mom, he found my dad crying on the bed. He asked what my dad was doing.
“Well Timo, I miss your mom and I’m really sad,” he said through tears.
My brother’s response: “Well stop it.”
Though I have no idea how my dad reacted, my guess is that he didn’t let Tim know that it’s OK to be sad and to miss someone and to grieve and be angry and all of the things. But knowing my dad, he probably did his best to protect us — through logic, distraction and an “It’ll be OK.”
Throughout our childhood, he didn’t talk much about our mom. He thought it’d bring up too much pain for us. In reality, it would bring up too much pain for him.
When highly emotional topics were raised, they were talked through as quickly as possible.
When my Aunt Pat died when I was 15, I don’t remember a long talk about miss and grief and sadness, though we did share many tears together. Instead, he said that I could skip school if I wanted to. Logic and reason over feelings.
After about a year of dating my high school girlfriend, my dad decided to have a sex talk on a drive to a hockey game. Once again the exact details are probably a bit off, but it wasn’t about love or caring about each other or advice for how to be a good partner. Instead, it was a memorable one-liner led again with logic and reason: “There are condoms in the top drawer of my dresser. Don’t need them.”
Flash forward and with many unfilled details in between, I’ve learned that my experiences growing up have resulted in my primary attachment being insecure, specifically being a fearful avoidant. Love scares the shit out of me at a subconscious level because it conjures up the association of my more cherished and needed caregivers abandoning me or not being there when I needed them most. It’s not their fault they died or that they were doing the best they could given their own circumstances but it’s the way it went. That got baked into my nervous system. Instead of learning to feel things in my body and react to them appropriately, I learned to distract, disassociate, deflect, delay and a lot more detrimental detracting dogshit strategies for being the man I actually wanted to be.
This is not a piece about blame or pity or whining, however. On the contrary, this is a piece about radical responsibility. It’s about surrender. It’s about trusting others. It’s about loving myself completely, scars and imperfections and missteps and all. It’s about accepting the love and affection and adoration from others. It’s about setting boundaries, high standards and expectations for myself and holding to them. It’s about wrestling with the past to make my future better; to make the futures of my partners, my friends, my family, my colleagues and those I haven’t met yet better.
And this starts with forgiveness.
Real or imagined your brain can’t tell the difference between a lived experience or a half-baked, reactionary thought. Your endorphins pump all the same. Your muscles tense. Your body goes into fight, flight, freeze or fawn. And you could just be sitting there by yourself in a quiet, empty room.
When that wounded inner child (also known as your ego) is screaming at you that you suck at life, that you messed everything up, that nobody likes you, that you’ll probably die cold and alone because that’s how he’s interpreted and internalized everything (to protect you mind you), what he’s trying to do is to get you to believe that you deserved everything that happened to you. If you move toward feeling routinely happy or secure or confident, if gone unhealed, he’ll try his best to knock you down to his level because he has an unhealthy comfort with the pain. He scurries back to the darkness because that’s all he knows. And for years, any time you allow the wounded little child within to throw tantrums and carry on, you create limiting beliefs that become your reality. It becomes the lens through which you see the world. You could be 20, 30, 40, 70 years old, but you’re living life through the purview of a child. Mine are about 8 and 16 years old, respectively. Lucky me. I have a couple of them.
Of course the majority of what they carry on about is true. No child deserves trauma, being ignored, having feelings or needs neglected. But your inner child can’t forgive himself. They think in hyperbole and will do anything they can to keep your attention. Like a parent who says no, “It’s for your own good,” they’ll try to convince you. To ignore, redirect, soothe and reassure the inner child that you will indeed be OK, that’s the job of your adult functional self.
So as you, my reader, my witness:
I forgive you buddy.
It’s not your fault.
All you’ve done is try to keep us safe, protected and happy. You’re doing the best you can with the information you have. Much of that information was useful at some point. But you’ve done your job. It’s my turn to take care of you. It’s time for you to live! It’s time for you to relax. From here on out, I may not listen to you as much. You might not like it, but I promise to heed your advice when it’s sound. But if it isn’t, trust me that we’re moving in the right direction. You’ll still get scared and worried and let me know with all your might, but I may need to ignore you. I’ll try to do so in a kind, compassionate way to help calm you down and convince you that it’s OK. I love you and I forgive you! I ask that you trust me more. I ask that you try your best not to get so riled up for so long that it takes us out of the present moment and away from those who are just trying to include us, celebrate us and love us.
Dad, I forgive you too. It’s not your fault. You had a shitty model in your drunken father and mother who wasn’t strong enough to leave, taking all of you kids with her to a safer, more stable environment. It’s not your fault that the love of your life died. I cannot imagine the pain that still remains with the hole in your heart that will never be fully repaired. I forgive you for not giving Tim and I what we truly needed to learn our emotional needs and capabilities. While I understand where much of my pain and suffering comes from, I understand that the more I am willing to poke around and take responsibility for myself as a healthy, secure man, I likely will continue finding new bits of trauma here and there. I do not blame you. It’s on me now to heal regardless of where that pain came from. I’m now quite a bit older than you were when mom died. You’ve moved on as best you can. I will do the same in my own way. I love you and I forgive you!
Bro, I forgive you. Perhaps even more than me, mom’s death was devastating, whether you’ve been willing to think and feel about it or not. At times throughout my life, you’ve been downright mean and nasty. When I needed an older brother, you were an enemy. I didn’t feel safe or cared for by you. Even as an adult, I feel like I’m a burden, that I’m inconveniencing you. And while that hurts, I forgive you. I know the pain that I’ve felt, conscious or more deeply seated, over the loss we’ve experienced. I hope someday we can talk about these things. To make peace with them, together. I hope that I can be a part of your daughters’ lives and be the uncle that they deserve. I hope someday I can be the brother to you that I needed back then. I hope that through my healing I can bring you some of your own, in your own way, in your own time. I love you and I forgive you!
Mom, I forgive you. I’ve often wondered what life would have been like if you didn’t die. If I had you to talk to about growing up, women, relationships, music, movies, life. I may forever grieve your loss. I may never fully grasp what it means to be a partner because of the massive trauma that your death caused me as a two year old. I know there was nothing more that you would have wanted than to see us grow up. To be a part of our childhoods. To be a part of our lives. There is nothing I want more to this day. I want to call you right now because I need a hug — from you. I want you to help me through opening my heart because it’s still so broken from you dying … even after all these years, these decades. But I also realize that my heart is huge, as was yours. Whatever piece is broken pales in comparison to what’s left of it to give and to receive. I love you and I forgive you!
And to myself, I forgive you. You’re a good man who will always be imperfect, so stop feeling the need to try. You have a light that others can see and feel, but you too often choose to let it burn out or cover it up. People love you for you, so stop trying to please everyone and bring your authentic self because that’s what people actually want to see and experience. Continue to be willing to do the work, but let go of the guilt and shame that constantly surrounds you. The past is in the past and it’s passed. And the future will always be there and it’s shaped by what you do right here in the present. You are capable of so much. Trust yourself! Take that huge heart and share it with others. Let others in to share it with them. There’s healing in allowing your truest self to be seen. There’s room for everyone without pushing yourself out. Generosity and gratitude in all forms will help you feel better when you’re down. Exercise those powerful tools often. Own your wants and needs and learn how to articulate them with those who’ve earned that right, those who’ve shown you that they care about you. You’ve survived so much more than you’re scared of. Don’t be afraid to jump in the deep end once in a while without knowing how it’ll go. Force and flow! Know when to fight and when to surrender. Like a hot hand touching a stove, when you hit that water, you’ll begin to swim. Fighting it will only make it harder. Turn over and start swimming — or when the situation dictates, simply allow the current to float you on down the river with ease! Hell, even enjoy the adventure and craziest of it all. It’s OK to be happy, joyful, gleeful and downright silly despite all your mistakes, missteps, past and present. Live buddy. It’s OK to live. I love you and I forgive you!
Originally written 4.21.21
