“[S]eeing an abusive parent as someone who had a traumatic past of his or her own can make what happened with you more understandable. Not okay. Not ever okay” (McCoy).

Forgiveness

Perhaps I must first decide if anything is unforgivable. Is it my father’s abusive behavior? It arose from a different place than my mother’s, and it came more from what he did than what he didn’t do.

Both parents’ actions are part of my loss.

 

What Might Forgiveness Require?

Does it depend on getting a sincere apology and a promise to never do it again? Must that promise be fulfilled over and over until the hurt retreats?

Because the pain never goes away.

Shall the offenses be examined slowly, in manageable pieces, or all at once? What follows this scrutiny may be memories of experiences that once only injured but now surprisingly also strengthen.

Accountability helps whether initiated by those who wronged you or conferred on them by yourself.

And yet. And yet, the sorrow remains. Present events evoke previous traumas. Anger, helplessness and incredible sadness flood in.

Might understanding, not forgiveness, keep them at bay?

 

Understanding, Not Forgiveness

Over the years, life lessons have come to accompany a haircut. My stylist and I skip trite conversations for philosophical discussions.

“I have replaced forgiveness with understanding,” he said after I told him that I struggle with what it means to forgive. “People often do the same thing again and again. I find peace when I can understand the why behind their actions.”

Understanding evokes what Jewish scholar David R. Blumenthal calls the “second kind of forgiveness (selichah) . . . an act of the heart . . . an empathy for the troubledness of the other.” He emphasizes that selichah “is not a reconciliation or an embracing of the offender; it is simply reaching the conclusion that the offender, too, is human, frail, and deserving of sympathy.”

I know my parents suffered, but childhood traumas like mine are too embedded to excise easily.

Selicah does not demand such an excision.

 

Truth, Not Understanding or Forgiveness

I have struggled with discarding forgiveness since many experts think it necessary. “The key to recovery . . . is letting go of anger and resentment,” Dr. Kathy McCoy writes in Psychology Today. “It means making peace with past hurt and pain. It means choosing to move on.”

Others, like psychologist Alice Miller, reject such coping mechanisms.

“[F]orgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but can cover them up in a very dangerous way.”

Either way, facing reality is imperative.

“Why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood?” Miller asks. These approaches might obstruct “emotional access to the truth. . . , the indispensable precondition of healing” (“Concerning Forgiveness”).

If we rush to forgive, we do not allow ourselves to recount past trauma let alone acknowledge the complex emotions surrounding such a retelling.

Perhaps forgiveness is not a simple one-step process, nor an obvious destination.

 

Honor Your Parents? 

My former rabbi said abusive parents break the contract between themselves and their children. The Ten Commandments require us to honor our mother and our father. Honor, not love.

Rabbi Dov Linder rejects this admonition. “Asking someone to honor his parents knowing it will cause the child emotional or psychological harm is asking that person to violate his obligations to himself and his own well-being. It is forbidden to honor one’s parents in such a situation.”

But Linder adds a caveat: “The Torah also puts great weight on telling someone how they have pained you, and on being open to the other’s remorse and repentance, so as to leave the door open to reconciliation when possible.”

My parents ignored my pain. They never apologized. They never expressed remorse or promised to change.

They never stopped tearing at the contract.

No Accountability, No Forgiveness

Forgive, understand, condemn. None lead to resolution.

I need not forgive. Feeling the obligation to forgive without remorse or repentance from the transgressor seems senseless. Understanding by itself erases culpability.

In most religious systems, even divine forgiveness is not unconditional. “True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution” (Herman 190).

But unrelenting condemnation nourishes a connection I wish to break.

“Ruminating about all the horrible people who have hurt . . . you is like locking yourself in a cell with those very people, except that you’re the only one who suffers” (Martha Beck, O Magazine, February 2012, p. 37).

Yet cruelty must be confronted.

“It was . . . precisely the opposite of forgiveness – namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents’ misleading opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs – that ultimately freed me from the past” (Miller, “Concerning Forgiveness).

Holding abusers accountable even if they never apologize confers responsibility and allows one to let go and go on..

 

Healing

The kind of forgiveness that leads to healing says, “I see the truth of what you did, it was horrible and unacceptable . . . but I am moving on with my life and letting you go” (Amy qtd. in Streep 230). 

 

Stepping Away

Forgiveness, my therapist explained, implies a finality, like healing from a wound.

But forgiveness is not as simple as that, she explained. It isn’t physically safe to forgive someone who is dangerous, nor is it emotionally healthy to forgive someone who is mentally abusive.

There is a different kind of forgiveness that leads to a shift, not a forgetting, but an emotional processing that leaves one carrying less weight, feeling less vulnerable, and having the strength to step away.

To me, this kind of forgiveness is less a choice than a byproduct of a courageous confrontation with past wounds.

Forgiveness isn’t about forgetting. Forgiveness isn’t even about forgiving.

Forgiveness is faith that the future can repurpose the past.

Barbara has published in newspapers and magazines as a journalist. She authored several academic articles as a UT Arlington graduate student and English professor, and recently her work has been published in Huston-Tillotson University’s literary journal, 900 Chicon, The University of Texas at Arlington’s Stimulus: A Medical Humanities Journal, The Galitzianer: The Journal of Gesher Galicia, The Manifest Station, Toasted Cheese and Literary Yard.