How Can I Forgive You? Part 12

You may fall head over heels in love with someone, only to discover months later that you were basking in the glow of romantic love and didn't really know what mature love was. The same may be true of forgiving. You may believe one day that you've forgiven someone, and then, as he generates more goodwill and continues to restore your faith in him, come to forgive him more deeply than you ever thought possible. Conversely, if he injures you again or breaks his promise, you may withdraw your forgiveness and end up back at square one, or worse.

Forgiveness is not a science but a highly subjective process.

Some of you may not care much for verbal apologies-if the offender has said "I'm sorry" once too often, hearing it again may do nothing for you; only concrete acts will convince you of his remorse.

Others may insist on words of contrition-the more, the better.

When the offender gives you some of what you need but not all, your forgiveness is also likely to be partial. That was Peggy's experience. When her husband, Mark, had a s.e.xual rendezvous with an old high school sweetheart, he apologized to her dozens of times.

"He's become accountable to a fault," she told me. "He comes home earlier from the office. When I call him, he seems genuinely happy to hear from me. He makes us breakfast on weekends and arranges for us to play tennis. Our s.e.x life is good, and he leaves loving notes for me in the refrigerator. He hates talking about painful things, but we have a good marriage and I believe his heart is in the right place.

I want to forgive him if I can."

According to Peggy's scorecard, Mark had completed three of the four tasks for earning forgiveness: He had listened openly to her pain, had apologized to her in a meaningful way, and had worked hard to make her feel safe and cherished. What he hadn't done was peer into himself to try to understand and communicate why he had betrayed her. "Whenever I mention the affair," she told me, "he snaps at me, 'Do we have to talk about this again?' I need to know why why it happened. I ask him, 'Did you feel I had no time for you when I was taking my mother for chemotherapy? Why did you start to use v.i.a.g.r.a-were you worried about your s.e.xual performance, 180 it happened. I ask him, 'Did you feel I had no time for you when I was taking my mother for chemotherapy? Why did you start to use v.i.a.g.r.a-were you worried about your s.e.xual performance, 180 your health, getting old?' But he won't talk about it. And frankly, that scares me. If he won't get to the root of the problem, how can I trust that it won't happen again?"

Peggy did her best to focus on all that Mark was doing to repair his damage, but she resented the way he closed up on her. She chose to forgive him, not completely but partially-enough for them to have a fulfilling, authentic, intimate life together.

Mistaken a.s.sumption: When I forgive, I relinquish all negative feelings toward the offender. feelings toward the offender.

It is commonly a.s.sumed that when you forgive, your negative feelings are completely replaced by positive ones. The problem with this expectation is that it's so categorical, that it puts forgiveness out of reach and leaves you with no alternative but to not forgive at all.

When you grant Genuine Forgiveness, you make room for anger and recognize it as normal and adaptive. You don't replace it with compa.s.sion or love and simply wipe the slate clean. This sort of magical reversal is not what happens to real people who have suffered real emotional injuries.

Even years from now, when you think about how you've been hurt or when something calls up the memory of your suffering, your old pain may resurface, grab hold of you, and drag you down. To expect otherwise is to deny the power of the human brain to conjure up traumatic moments and force you to re-experience them with the same clarity of detail, the same visceral intensity, as when they first occurred.

The theologian Lewis Smedes wrote that when you forgive someone you stop hating him, or that you stop hating him but continue to hate the offense.40 I agree with Smedes up to a point, but I would add this: Even if you forgive an offender, even if you're committed to a life of equanimity, there may be times when you experience spasms of hate and cannot separate what he did to you from who he is. You are still human, and to think your response can be divided into neat boxes is unrealistic. Accepting this will broaden your understanding of what it means to forgive and make room for negative spikes in emotion that are bound to arise.

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What happens when you genuinely forgive is not that you necessarily empty yourself of all hostile feelings, but that you allow other emotions to co-exist with them-more tender or positive emotions, such as sadness and grief. Along with your anger comes a richer, more balanced, more complex reaction-encompa.s.sing both what the offender did wrong and what he did right, both the damage he inflicted on you and his efforts to make good.

Be prepared: Forgiving won't wash away the injury; you may be left with a residue of bad feelings and an overwhelming sense of loss. This is what my patient Wendy experienced. Although she forgave her husband, Russell, for his affair, she continued to struggle with bitterness and sorrow. "I know he's trying hard to make me feel valued and safe," she a.s.sured me, "but I've lost the idealized image I had of him-forever. My feelings continue to oscillate between empathy and an unbearable sense of betrayal."

The exact moment when Russell revealed his affair remains indelibly etched in Wendy's mind. As the anniversary of that terrible time approached, she was surprised by the intensity of her grief. "Russell wants us to spend the day together and create new, positive memories,"

she told me. "I'm grateful, but it's all so bittersweet. He's reaching out to me, and that feels great. But it also feels sad, because the more he does, the more I remember how much he hurt me. I keep asking myself, 'Will we ever share moments of pure joy again?'"

Two years after Russell revealed his affair, Wendy sent me this note: "The affair still hurts very much, although the therapy helps.

So does reading and the pa.s.sing of time. We live with it and do the best we can, and we both love each other."

It could be said that Wendy hasn't forgiven Russell yet because her positive feelings toward him are at times tainted with negative ones. It could also be said that she has partially forgiven him and may forgive him more over time. I would argue that the final chapter isn't written yet.

When you forgive, you don't flip a switch. Wendy lost her belief in perfect love, in the specialness of her marriage, and it's natural for her to grieve over these losses and blame Russell for them, no matter 182 how much he does to make amends. But the grief and resentment she feels don't have to cancel out her grat.i.tude to him for his genuine acts of contrition, or pre-empt her feelings of forgiveness.

Mistaken a.s.sumption: When I forgive, I admit that my anger toward the offender was exaggerated or unjustified. toward the offender was exaggerated or unjustified.

People often tell me, "When I think of forgiving, it's as though I'm trivializing the offense. And I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'll do that."

But when you forgive you don't say, "What you did wasn't that bad." You stand by your recognition that the offender crossed the line. And he stands with you, convincing you that he knows what he did was "that bad." Unless he consciously acknowledges his violation, he has no claim to your forgiveness. Unless you you consciously acknowledge it, there's nothing for you to forgive. consciously acknowledge it, there's nothing for you to forgive.

When Dave, a middle-aged accountant, apologized to his thirty-year-old daughter Jenny for his chronic drinking problem, she accepted his apology and agreed to forgive him. Dave's estranged wife, Sandy, was less charitable. "I feel betrayed," she told me. "What right does Jenny have to write off all those years? He's gotten off cheap. He doesn't deserve it."

But Dave offered his daughter more than cheap apologies. He flew halfway across the country to explain in person how ashamed he was of his behavior. "My addiction must have frightened and embarra.s.sed you for years," he told her. He promised to stop drinking, and to give reality to his promise he committed himself to a rehabilitation program. Jenny, in turn, gave up her need to keep her distance-her customary way of punis.h.i.+ng him-and allowed herself to feel compa.s.sion, respect, even love for him. She continued to condemn his former behavior but released him from its effects, so long as he held himself accountable for them.

This interpersonal exchange is at the core of Genuine Forgiveness. Jenny gave up her need to indict her father because he convinced her that he understood how horribly he had wronged her and took valiant steps to change. He became the judge of his own behavior. She could give up the job.

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Mistaken a.s.sumption: When I forgive, I empower the offender and make myself weak and vulnerable. make myself weak and vulnerable.

If you deny your pain in order to make peace, you're likely to share Nietzsche's conviction that forgiving is for weaklings.41 But Genuine Forgiveness takes strength and resolve. Standing up for yourself, you insist that you've been wronged and require an accounting in the "ledger of justice."42 You don't give up your position of power; you give up your preoccupation with power. You don't dismiss your need for rest.i.tution; you let him work with you to achieve rest.i.tution.

Mistaken a.s.sumption: Forgiveness means reconciliation.

If you link forgiveness with reconciliation, you may be reluctant to offer either. But these are separate processes and should be considered separately.

When you choose to forgive but not reconcile, you allow the offender to make amends for past wrongdoing but refuse to give him another chance to hurt you. No matter how guilty he feels, you close the door on all future interaction.

After a significant violation, you may want to end the relations.h.i.+p before you consider any type of reconciliation. If your spouse was unfaithful, for example, you may decide it's best to get divorced and secure a fair settlement and custody arrangement before asking yourself, "What next?" When the dust settles and you're no longer under pressure to show goodwill, you may feel safer spending time together, seeing what he's capable of, and working to reinvent the relations.h.i.+p. Sometimes an old relations.h.i.+p has to die before a new one can be born.

In reality, however, forgiveness and reconciliation often lead to each other, whatever the sequence. If the offender is emotionally and physically available to you-if he listens empathically to your pain and works hard to correct his behavior-you may be more willing to welcome him back into your life.

Of course, there are many degrees of reconciliation, as there are many degrees of separation. Choosing to relate to him doesn't mean 184 that you share a friends.h.i.+p, enjoy a supportive connection, or feel deep love for each other. These warmer feelings may evolve, but only over time as he demonstrates his trustworthiness.

Critical Task #2: Complete all ten steps of acceptance - not alone, but with the offender's help.

Do Genuine Forgiveness and Acceptance call for the same response? To a great extent, they do. With both, you work hard to give up your hatred, your hurt, your obsessive need for revenge.

With both, you try to see the offender and the offense clearly and accept an appropriate share of blame. With both, you define a relations.h.i.+p that protects and promotes your best interests.

Only with Genuine Forgiveness, however, does the offender walk with you and lend a helping hand. His active partic.i.p.ation has profound implications, allowing for a depth of cleansing both inside you and between you that can't be achieved through Acceptance alone.

Let's look at some of the ways in which he can help you feel better about yourself, and him.

Step 1: The offender helps you honor the full sweep of your emotions.

You don't need him to acknowledge your feelings in order to make them legitimate. But when he does acknowledge them, he helps you restore the center of gravity within yourself-a necessary step toward healing.

My patient Vivian experienced the impact of having the offender first dismiss her feelings and then validate them. When she told her mother at age eighteen that her father, a respected physician, had a.n.a.lly raped her throughout her childhood, her mother responded flatly, "Shut up. You're a troublemaker." Vivian felt anni-hilated. "I began to wonder what was real and what was not," she told me.

Five years later, after her father had died and she had given birth to her first child, Vivian received a letter from her mother asking to be part of her life again. In a series of conversations, the mother managed to hear Vivian's story and acknowledge the truth. "When Genuine Forgiveness 185.

you were in elementary school," her mother admitted, "you'd often be sent home suffering from diarrhea. You were chronically anxious and sick. Looking back now, I can see your terror, your numbness, your humiliation. What happened to you was evil."

What you may find, as Vivian did, is that when the offender steps into your world and sits with you in your damaged emotional s.p.a.ce, he helps to provide a stable holding ground-a relatively safe place where even your worst feelings can be voiced and heard. No longer do you scream into a void. When you express pain, he listens and mirrors it. "I hurt," you say. "You hurt," he reflects back. "My feelings matter," you a.s.sert. "Yes, your feelings matter," he replies.

This verbal pas de deux is likely to calm you and help you attend to your muddled emotions. How much harder it would be to identify and sort through them if you proclaimed, "My feelings matter," and he responded, "Like h.e.l.l they do"; or if you said, "I've been wronged," and he retorted, "You're crazy."

The offender can help you wade through the chaos, overcome the sense of powerlessness and meaninglessness created by his violation, and give birth to a new narrative in which you feel more grounded, more in control, more whole. With Genuine Forgiveness, he becomes the reader of your story, immersing himself in your experience, page by page, word by word.

Together, you take a stand "against the erasure of your experience."43 No longer do you need to cut yourself off from your feelings, or be flooded by them. No longer do they represent a destructive force that alienates you from yourself and from him. They become, instead, an invaluable source of enlightenment and reconnection. As he bears witness to your trauma, trying on your suffering as though it were his own, he helps you integrate all that you feel, including, perhaps, some new, warmer feelings toward him.

Step 2: The offender helps you give up your need for revenge, but not your need for a just resolution. your need for a just resolution.

When he listens compa.s.sionately to your distress and takes responsibility for violating you, he helps restore your sense of dignity and justice.

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He may also reduce your need to punish and humiliate him, and make it easier for you to forgive him. In the end, your vindication comes not from inflicting pain on him, but from his efforts to lift the burden of shame from your shoulders and place it where it belongs.44 As Rabbi Harold Kushner points out in Living a Life That Matters, Living a Life That Matters, our "thirst for revenge is really a need to reclaim power, to shed the role of victim and subst.i.tute action for helplessness."45 You may have less need for retribution if the offender steps forward and accounts for his wrong. our "thirst for revenge is really a need to reclaim power, to shed the role of victim and subst.i.tute action for helplessness."45 You may have less need for retribution if the offender steps forward and accounts for his wrong.

Step 3: The offender helps you stop obsessing about the injury and reengage with life. reengage with life.

When he deliberately recalls how he hurt you and atones for it, he allows you to relax, clear your head, and fill your life with more inspiring and stimulating diversions.

A psychologist, Anne, drove this point home for me. During one of my infidelity workshops, she described how she had been scarred by her own therapist. "When I discovered that my husband was cheating on me, we got into counseling to try to find a way back to each other," she volunteered. "I couldn't stop thinking about what he had done to me, and how I had missed the boat in my own house while I was out rescuing other people's lives. He had ended the affair and was ready to move on. So was our therapist. The only one stuck in the past was me. I felt both of them getting increasingly annoyed at me. Believe me, if I could have done better, I would have. It was not fun being inside my head, and I knew I wasn't being constructive. I even took Paxil to try to control my raging thoughts. Feeling their pressure and contempt, I felt worse and worse about myself and the world. Eventually I dropped out of therapy, and my husband filed for divorce. Looking back, I think I was traumatized twice- first by my husband's affair and then by my therapist, who made me feel I was both a bad wife and a bad patient."

I asked Anne whether she had had any further contact with the therapist. She said no. I suggested that she might write her a letter explaining why she had dropped out of therapy. Anne agreed. In a phone consultation several weeks later, we drafted a letter Genuine Forgiveness 187.

together-one that invited the therapist to respond openly and nondefensively.

Anne mailed the letter and to her surprise received a quick response, which she shared with me. "Anne, I feel bad that you dropped out of therapy for something I failed to give you or help you with," the therapist wrote. "I was acutely aware of how much you were suffering, and I did feel terrible that nothing I was doing was making you feel better. I probably took this personally and felt inadequate. Instead of sharing my self-doubts with you, I somehow conveyed to you that you were bad for not recovering sooner. Infidelity is a severe trauma, and the last thing you needed was a therapist who tried to rush you to give up your pain. If you ever want to talk more about this, I'd be happy to meet with you again-at my expense. I wish you the best-Dr. X."

You, like Anne, may find that when the offender reacts to your pain with patience and compa.s.sion, not with judgment or disdain, he helps you feel more normal, less shattered and alone. As he listens empathically, with no personal agenda, and accepts that your recovery won't necessarily follow a straight upward line-that there will be false starts and regressions along the way-he sends a signal that he's not just invested in his own egocentric need to get you off his back but wants to be there for you in your suffering, however long it takes. His willingness to take up your protest may release you from your obsessions and open your mind to forgiveness.

Step 4: The offender helps protect you from further abuse.

Here's how one father created a safe haven for his daughter, giving her the confidence to invite him back into her world.

When Debbie was a child, her father, Dave, drank heavily and s.e.xually molested her. She remembers watching television with him on the living room couch, too afraid to move, while he insinuated his arm around her shoulder and fondled her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

A decade later, when she gave birth to her first child, she began to recall these repressed traumatic memories. She invited her father to join her in therapy, where he neither confirmed nor denied her 188 accusations. "I don't remember what I did," he told her. "I was drinking too heavily at the time."

In the years that followed, Dave made genuine efforts to control his destructive impulses, to honor his daughter's rules for safety, and to prove his trustworthiness and love. He committed himself to an AA program and gave up alcohol. Respecting her need to be in control of her world, he agreed not to intrude on her s.p.a.ce uninvited: He would never call her at home or pick up the phone in his own house when caller ID displayed Debbie's number. He would never touch her in any way, even when they greeted each other in public.

He would never ask to baby-sit for her children or be alone with them. At one family gathering, he acknowledged privately that he must have done something terrible to her. She gradually forgave him, but she maintained her boundaries.

Another ten years pa.s.sed. Although Debbie was now divorced, she felt more self-a.s.sured and anch.o.r.ed, and she began to allow her father into her life. He selflessly offered help. When she moved into a new house, for example, he vacuumed the floors before the movers arrived. Later that year he planted a garden in her yard. When his mother died, Debbie joined him at an out-of-town wake. He continued to keep a respectful distance but was warm and appropriate when she walked by. He never approached her for comfort or consolation, never asked her to take care of him.

It took many years and many corrective interactions, but together Debbie and her father restored her sense of safety. As he continued to prove his dependability, Debbie slowly, painstakingly opened the door to him. His efforts mended the tear inside her and between them. No longer was he merely the source of her trauma; he was part of the cure.

Step 5: The offender helps you frame his behavior in terms of his own personal struggles. own personal struggles.

When someone violates you, you may feel permanently altered, not at all the person you were before. At such times, you feel not poisoned poisoned by the trauma but by the trauma but poisonous poisonous.46 You absorb a sense of inner Genuine Forgiveness 189.

badness and feel flushed with shame. As the offender reverses this process, acknowledging that his behavior is a reflection on him, not you, he helps you drain away the poison and reinhabit your valued self. With his support, you overcome your estrangement from your "good self "-and perhaps from his "good self."

It's important to distinguish between humiliation and shame.

Humiliation is a condition imposed on you by the offender. Shame, in contrast, refers to your inner experience of yourself as unworthy.

When someone injures you, humiliation and shame can become blurred. You confuse his hurtful, demeaning behavior with your private sense of who you are.

With Acceptance, you sort this out alone. With Genuine Forgiveness, the offender a.s.sists you, not by saying "shame on you," but by saying "shame on me"-not "You are dirt" but "I treated you like dirt"; not "You deserved what I did to you" but "My issues got in the way."

Arnold, a forty-six-year-old gay man, arranged to meet someone he had communicated with in an Internet chat room. "I drove ninety minutes to a designated spot-the parking lot of a local CVS," he told me. "The guy-Ted-was twenty minutes late, even though he lived only five minutes away. When he arrived, he just sat in his car.

I got out of mine and walked over to him. He took one look at me and said, 'I pa.s.s.' Then he rolled up his window and drove off."

Tears welled up in Arnold's eyes. "I was devastated," he said.

"Where did this guy get the right to treat another human being so inhumanely?"

Pastoral counselor John Patton writes that an individual who, like Arnold, reacts to violation with shame recognizes the offender not "as a center of independent initiative" who "happens to be at cross-purposes" with you, but as "an offending part of the shamed person's self."47 In other words, Arnold took Ted's behavior on the most personal level, becoming the vile creature Ted rejected, an object of hate and derision.

Eight months later Arnold received an E-mail from Ted, saying, "I want to apologize for how I acted when we met. I'm sure my 190 behavior felt cruel and insensitive. I want you to know that I take complete responsibility for this-there was nothing you did, nothing about you, that made me act the way I did. I had just come out and, frankly, when faced with the reality of actually getting together with someone who was available to me, I freaked. I hope you'll find more stable characters on your future Internet dates. I'm very sorry."

For Arnold, as for you, the offender can help strip away the intensely personal nature of his affront and free you from an obsessive, self-immolating sense of blame and defectiveness. In the process, he may become less hateful and more forgivable.

What happened to Karen and her boyfriend, Forrest, is another case in point. She was ready to leave him after learning of his affair, but she put her decision on hold when he committed himself to a year of therapy to address a deeply entrenched pattern of infidelity.

"If he figures out what's going on inside him, maybe he'll change,"

she told me.

Forrest came into my office confused and distraught. "I don't know what I'm doing," he confessed. "I got divorced five years ago when my wife found out I was cheating on her, and now I'm dating Karen, who I'm crazy about, while seeing someone else who means nothing to me. Why would I deliberately create such a mess for myself? Why can't I learn?"

Forrest's quest for self-awareness led him back to his childhood. As we talked, he revealed a history of abandonment and abuse. "When I was six, a camp counselor used to sit me on his lap and run his hands over me," he said. "I came home that summer and found out my parents had separated-without telling me. A few years later, my older brother did things to me physically that I'm still not ready to talk about."

Forrest began to understand how, for him, relations.h.i.+ps were never protected zones, but minefields, where he felt at constant risk of being abandoned or exploited. He had learned over the years to pre-empt the inevitable by abandoning others first, fleeing from affair to affair. In the chemical throes of romance, he could feel not only loved but powerful and free. Yet his s.e.xual exploits only exacerbated his feelings of loneliness, isolation, and shame.

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Forrest shared his insights with Karen and helped her understand his pattern of betrayal. "I realize he's been running away from relations.h.i.+ps his whole life, and that his behavior is not about me,"

Karen told me. "What I care about-what keeps me in the ring with him and makes me feel there's hope-is that he seems to realize this, too. I don't know if I trust him enough to marry him, but his curios-ity about himself, his willingness to subject himself to painful self-scrutiny, makes it easier for me to forgive him."

When you, like Arnold and Karen, stop seeing the offender solely in terms of your own injury and develop insights into his, you get to the heart of his motivation. When he points the way, you'll find it easier to feel compa.s.sion for him, and for yourself.

Step 6: The offender helps you reconcile with him.

When you genuinely forgive the offender, you let his acts of rest.i.tution strengthen your attachment to him. Mercy and humility may feed your desire to stay connected, but the offender's contrition seals the bond. You don't let him back into your life because such magnanimity makes you feel like a decent person; he earns his way back by proving his decency as a human being.

Reconciliation is not a yes-or-no decision; it offers you a range of options with varying degrees of involvement, intimacy, and trust.

You may, for example, forgive a remorseful partner, divorce him, and continue to interact for the sake of the kids. You may also stay intimately attached to him and work to reintegrate your lives as he proves his trustworthiness.

That's what one patient, Mich.e.l.le, did when she chose to remain with her husband, Henry, and give him a chance to make good, long before she felt any love for him.