What If Forgiveness Isn't Something You Can Force?
From all my experience of finding forgiveness in me for others and mysef, I don't think forgiveness is something we can simply decide to do.
We hear things like just forgive them. Let it go. Take the high road.
But saying “I forgive you” doesn't necessarily mean forgiveness has happened inside the body.
Sometimes underneath those words there is still hurt.
Rage. Bitterness. Disbelief.
A nervous system saying: That hurt me. I need to remember that so it doesn't happen again.
That response makes sense to me.
Withholding forgiveness can be protective. If something hurt us, of course some part of us wants to keep track of it. Of course some part of us doesn't want to release the grudge if the grudge feels like the thing standing between us and being hurt again.
Which is why I don't think the path to forgiveness begins with making that part shut up.
I think it begins with letting it speak.
Forgiveness and the parts we don't want to be
The first episode, Freedom Through Flowing with Forgiveness, explores an idea that still challenges me:
Forgiveness always comes back to: what am I allowing myself to be? Who am I allowing myself to accept inside of my own self?
What if forgiveness isn't primarily about granting something to the person who hurt us?
What if it is also about our own capacity for wholeness?
Because when I encounter something in another human being that horrifies me, there is a very tempting way to create safety:
I am nothing like that.
That exists over there.
In those people.
Not me.
Shadow work asks me to consider something much more uncomfortable.
What if all of these patterns of consciousness are part of the human whole?
What if being human means carrying capacities I hope never to enact?
What if I am not above humanity's darkness simply because I consciously reject it?
That doesn't make harm okay.
It doesn't erase responsibility.
It doesn't require me to reconcile with someone who hurt me, trust them again, invite them back into my life, or pretend something wasn't wrong.
For me, it opens what I called in that first episode “a crack in the door.”
A crack through which understanding becomes possible.
Not approval.
Understanding.
There is a part of me that is capable of horrors.
Even writing that sentence can feel frightening.
But strangely, recognizing it doesn't make me feel more monstrous.
It makes me feel more human.
Because if darkness belongs exclusively to monsters, then our only relationship with it is rejection.
If darkness belongs to humanity, then perhaps we can become curious about how it happens.
How does pain become cruelty?
How does fear become control?
How does shame become attack?
How does a person become capable of doing something that another person cannot imagine doing?
Understanding doesn't absolve us of responsibility.
It gives us somewhere to begin transforming.
The only way to transform horrific energy is through understanding and connection. The only way to transform any energy is through connection and empathy.
And eventually I realized that the person I had the most difficulty offering that kind of humanity to was myself.
I could often look at another person and think:
I can see how that happened.
But could I look at myself that way?
Could I zoom out far enough to see myself as another complicated human being and say:
Oh. Yeah. I can see how that happened.
Not to absolve myself.
To understand myself.
But what if I can't forgive?
That's where the second episode begins.
Because none of this means you can—or should—command yourself into forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not something that we just choose to do.
If I'm still furious, I'm furious.
If I feel betrayed, I feel betrayed.
If something seems deeply unfair, forcing myself to become spiritually gracious about it doesn't necessarily transform the feeling.
It may only teach another part of me that its experience isn't welcome.
So instead of demanding forgiveness, what happens if we create enough safety to feel what actually exists?
The hurt.
The anger.
The disbelief.
The juicy hatred.
The rage.
The bitterness.
The unfairness of it.
Let it have its turn.
One practice I share in the episode is something I call Pillow Talk.
I sit on one pillow with another pillow across from me and speak to the person, system, entity—or sometimes the part of myself—I'm angry with.
And I let myself say it.
Then I switch places.
I physically move to the other pillow.
And from there, I experiment with occupying the other perspective.
Not because I have decided what that person really thinks or feels.
Not because their perspective suddenly makes mine irrelevant.
I'm allowing my own psyche to explore what exists when I stop inhabiting only one position.
Then I switch back.
Sometimes something shifts.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes there may be remorse waiting for me there.
Sometimes justification.
Sometimes another layer of anger.
The goal isn't to tie the whole experience into what I called “this beautiful little package that ends with a bow of forgiveness.”
The goal is to make enough room for the truth of the experience that something can move.
Forgiveness as something that arises
These two episodes ultimately arrive at the same place from opposite directions.
Forgiveness, to me, is less interesting as a moral command than as an emergent experience.
Something that may arise when enough of us has been allowed into the room.
The angry part.
The grieving part.
The frightened part.
The grudge-holding part.
The part capable of empathy.
The part that can recognize another person's humanity.
The part that can recognize our own.
Maybe forgiveness isn't something we have to force ourselves to give.
Maybe it is something we create the inner conditions to receive.
And maybe the freedom isn't even in reaching some perfect final state called forgiven.
Maybe the freedom is in becoming expansive enough to hold more and more of what is true at the same time:
The hurt and the pain existing alongside of the part of me that chooses to let go.
Not because the hurt didn't matter.
Because it did.
And not because everything humans do should be accepted.
But because I don't want to have to exile pieces of humanity—or pieces of myself—in order to know who I am.
Each time we can gently work through another layer, something loosens.
And, as I said at the end of the second episode:
It just frees us more and more.
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