How Can I Forgive You? Part 5

In his provocative book Man's Search for Meaning, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl suggests an existential response to the world's injustices. A Holocaust survivor, he argues that we cannot dictate how people treat us, but we can control how we choose to react to their treatment of us. Viktor Frankl suggests an existential response to the world's injustices. A Holocaust survivor, he argues that we cannot dictate how people treat us, but we can control how we choose to react to their treatment of us.

This may be our only freedom, but it's a profoundly important one, for it helps us to maintain a sense of mastery in a chaotic world.

The point to remember is that your pain or sorrow may come Acceptance 83.not from someone else's behavior but from your own att.i.tudes and beliefs. Would you get less hurt, then, if you expected less? That's obvious. When you insist that someone be just so and don't allow for a range of human responses, you're more likely to experience him as inadequate, even despicable, and feel cheated. If you can convert a demand into a wish and learn to distinguish what you think you need from what you merely hope for, you may end up feeling less rattled by others when they fall short.

Correcting Your Cognitive Errors To cut through your cognitive errors, it helps to speak to the offender and consider what he has to say. You don't need his input to accept him, but if he's willing to talk, and not abusive or blindly self-righteous, why not hear him out? You may find that your pain is grounded in a misunderstanding, and that there's nothing to repair and nothing to accept or forgive.

In "A Boy Named Sue," a song with lyrics by Shel Silverstein, Johnny Cash tells the story of a boy who spent his life nursing a false a.s.sumption: that his father named him Sue to make his life miserable. Vowing revenge, the boy hunts down his vagrant father and knocks him to the ground.

The father explains himself, saying that he called the boy Sue not for any malicious reason, but to make him tough so he could survive in a mean world. The truth is an awakening for the son and drains away his years of bitterness. He throws down his gun and embraces his father, but not before swearing that if he ever has a son, he'll name him Bill or George-anything but Sue.

The lyrics of this song are sheer fun, but they teach a profound lesson about human interactions-that we get hurt at times because our a.s.sumptions about others are dead wrong. Confronting his father with his pain, Sue stumbled on the man's true intentions and got to see him as a real person, not as the "dirty, mangy dog" he thought him to be.

Like Sue, we often lock our interpersonal injuries away in deep storage for years, only to find out they were based on misunder-84 standings that could have been straightened out in a heartbeat. Too bad Sue didn't talk to his father sooner.

An Exercise to Correct Your Negative Thoughts To check out whether your ideas are valid and useful, write out your "automatic thoughts"22 about what happened. Let yourself get into your anger or hurt. Don't try to think rationally or calmly. Don't edit. Then, taking each idea separately, ask yourself: 1. Is this idea true? What cognitive error might I be making?

2. Is this idea useful? What feelings and behaviors does it generate in me?

3. Is this idea typical of the way I think? What's my pattern?

4. Do I need more information about what happened? Where can I get it?

Here's how a patient named Sandy challenged her unproductive thoughts.

One day when she returned home from work, she was furious to find an unsightly pile of used pipes on her immaculate lawn. The man who had replaced the underground drains had finished his job and failed to take them away. Steaming, Sandy called and left a message for him to remove them immediately. A day pa.s.sed. Then another. Sandy called twice more, to no avail. To gain control of her response, she tried the following exercise. First she wrote down her automatic thoughts: "What a sleaze ball. I can't believe he'd try to get away with this. It was so stupid of me, paying him before I checked out his work. You can't trust anyone today."

She then talked back to these ideas: 1. My cognitive errors are dichotomous thinking, jumping to conclusions, and overgeneralization. "Maybe something happened that I don't understand. I've hired this man before, and he's always been reliable and decent."

2. My ideas aren't useful. They make me feel taken advantage of, Acceptance 85.vindictive, betrayed, stupid. They solve nothing. They make me want to strike back.

3. My ideas are typical of me. I distrust people and a.s.sume the worst about them. This is an attribute I probably picked up from my mother, who always thought people were ripping her off.

4. I can call him one more time and appeal to his decency.

Sandy took her own advice and left a strong but conciliatory message. "I don't understand what happened," she said. "You've always done such good work and been true to your word. Please call and explain why you're not returning my calls."

The next day she heard from him. "I'm sorry," he explained. "I was out of town and didn't check my messages. I left the pipes because I thought you'd want to show them to the person who installed your sprinkler system. He ruined them. Of course I'll come and pick them up."

Sandy hung up, having been reminded of something all of us should keep in mind-the value of checking out our a.s.sumptions so that we don't unnecessarily injure ourselves and others.

Step # 8: You look at the offender apart from his offense, weighing the good against the bad. weighing the good against the bad.

When somebody hurts you, it's normal to have negative feelings about him. With Acceptance, you honor these feelings, but you also try to separate the offender from the offense and view his behavior in the context of your relations.h.i.+p. You don't just look at the moment when you were mistreated; you look at all the moments you've shared, weighing the good against the bad. The process demands that you be true to your memories, not letting one obliterate the rest. Of course, this is possible only when the two of you have a shared history. Without one, you have nothing to respond to but the injury.

When he has been good to you in the past, and you have experienced his kindness first-hand, you're likely to feel less critical and condemning. But if he has been good to others but not to you, why 86 should you care? If your mother is mean to you, will it matter that she's sweet to your brother? The offender may have likable attributes, but if you've never enjoyed or profited from them, they're unlikely to soften your response to him. In fact, knowing he has a benevolent side reserved for others may only fuel your anger and heighten your sense of injustice.

Acceptance doesn't require you to feel any particular way toward the offender. It asks only that you try to see him objectively. It also asks you to be on guard against the propensity to think in absolutes-to see only the negative in him if he has been good to you, or to shut out everything but the good if he has harmed you. As the Austrian-British a.n.a.lyst Melanie Klein points out, it's natural for us to want to split the world into opposing camps-good and evil, right and wrong. Unable to hold an "ambivalent view," 23 we demonize or deify people. Choosing sides feeds the illusion that we see things more clearly, but the opposite may be true.

For most of his adult life, John resented his mother for being cold and unnurturing. "I don't remember her ever hugging me, even when I was a kid," he told me. "When my best friend died, you'd think she would have comforted me, but she kept her distance."

John went on feeling deprived and resentful long after his mother's death, not realizing that his memory of her captured only part of the story. I encouraged him to make one list of the qualities in her he disliked, and another of those he liked. One list reinforced his image of her as tough and unfeeling. The other showed that she had loved him unconditionally, had supported him in his search for himself, had challenged him intellectually, and had been there for him in times of sickness and celebration.

Weighing the lists against each other, John was able to see his mother in a more complex, multi-dimensional light. Freed from his fixation on her shortcomings, he could process all that she had meant to him. "She was never very good in the physical affection department," he told me wistfully. "But I believe she still loved me in her own way."

Listing someone's positive and negative qualities can be a Acceptance 87.relations.h.i.+p-enhancing exercise for you, as it was for John. It could also draw you further apart. Wherever the process leads is fine. The purpose is not necessarily to undo the damage but to respond to it in a controlled and thoughtful way, without minimizing or exaggerating its seriousness.

It may be informative to interview others who know, or knew, the offender in a different light and can offer evidence that challenges the way you view him. You may ask yourself, "Why bother?

He hurt me and isn't worth another second of my time." But if you want to fight your obsessions and continue the relations.h.i.+p-if you want a reality check and are curious to know more-why wouldn't you consult others for their insights?

This is what Mike did. He had always viewed his mother in negative terms-"She dressed in high heels and a girdle," he told me dismissively. "She hated gra.s.s and rain. When the 'girls' came over for canasta, she brought me out and showed me off to her friends like I was some sort of diamond brooch, or a new dress from Saks."

Mike was in his second marriage and on the far edge of middle age when he met his aunt-his mother's sister-at a family wedding and asked her to share her memories of his mother, who had died many years before. What began as table talk with a relative turned into a corrective experience that led to Acceptance.

"Yes, she showed you off to her friends," his aunt recalled, "but you did did excel, and she was very proud of you. She wasn't big on the outdoors, like you-she wouldn't have been caught dead in sneakers and probably never even heard of L. L. Bean. But she wasn't afraid of life either. She went to college before most women considered applying, and she graduated in three years. She traveled to Europe with your father and loved seeing new sights. She headed charitable organizations, ran her own business, and had many loyal friends. excel, and she was very proud of you. She wasn't big on the outdoors, like you-she wouldn't have been caught dead in sneakers and probably never even heard of L. L. Bean. But she wasn't afraid of life either. She went to college before most women considered applying, and she graduated in three years. She traveled to Europe with your father and loved seeing new sights. She headed charitable organizations, ran her own business, and had many loyal friends.

She took delight in you and your accomplishments, and encouraged you to find yourself. True?"

Mike nodded yes. Like many of us, he had been committed to a biased version of the truth, playing up what he disliked in his mother and dismissing what he liked. He now began to question 88 why he had viewed her so narrowly. It wasn't that his portrait of her was wrong, he realized, but that it was selective and biased, and cut out so much of what was wonderful in her-not just in his aunt's eyes, but in his own.

Continue to Weigh the Good and the Bad.

Acceptance is an ongoing process. Over time, a crisis or a change in circ.u.mstances may bring out qualities in the offender that were masked or undeveloped, and make you see him in a different light. You, too, may change and grow. This was what happened with me. The corrective experience was death-the death of my mother.

Throughout my life, she was critical and difficult to please.

When I told her about a vacation I was planning, she responded, "It's ridiculous, how you spend money." When I told her about the Ph.D. programs I was planning to apply to, her only comment was, "I don't know why you work so hard."

At the end of her life, however, as she lay in the hospital dying of lung cancer, she changed. Frail and dependent, she stopped compet-ing with me. And I suppose that I, too, laid down my arms. She let me be there for her, feeding her and wiping her on the toilet. She clung to me when she tried to stand. She thanked me. I felt appreciated. The nature of our relations.h.i.+p changed. I became the good daughter I had always wanted to be. Perhaps she became the loving, supportive mother she had always wanted to be.

Shortly after her death, I began questioning my aunts about her, and I realized that emotional support was a luxury she had never experienced as a child-her parents had been too busy struggling to make ends meet. Her father was up at three each morning and on his way to lower Manhattan to buy produce for their grocery store.

Her mother, who spoke Yiddish at home, worked a sixteen-hour day, running the store and feeding a family of five. Conversations were brief and to the point. Loving had to do with providing, feeding, clothing. Emotional support? I don't believe my mother understood what this meant. When she talked, she spoke without filters or censors. She wasn't exactly delicate in her choice of words or sen-89.sitive to their impact. She was blunt and lacked interpersonal skills-what we call emotional intelligence today.

Over time I've come to understand my mother's toughness in the context of her life experience and to accept that she was unable to expose her softer side-until the end. I appreciate now that she tried her best, working hard to send me to the best camps, the best schools, while running the family business, a fabric store. In some important ways she wasn't there for me. She couldn't comfort me or encourage me. She seldom made me feel that she took delight in me. But she wasn't nasty or mean-spirited either, and her heart was often in the right place. When I think of her, I like to remember those occasions when she greeted me warmly. Because she never apologized for being so hard on me and never seemed to understand or care how insufficient she made me feel, I cannot honestly say, "I forgive you." But I can accept her, and love her, and embrace her in my memory and in my heart.

When You Refuse to Forgive When you say no to forgiving, you define the offender in terms of the harm he caused you and exorcise all other information about him that might rehabilitate him in your eyes. You invest in hating him, and frame him in ways that support your hatred. The idea of questioning whether you're seeing him fairly strikes you as a form of surrender, an intrusion on your time. Any effort to appreciate the multiple roles he has played in your life-those that harmed you, those that enhanced you-leaves you feeling confused and vulnerable. How much simpler, it seems, to view him through the cold clarity of your anger.

There are many reasons why you may refuse to see him in a more objective and benevolent light, but here's one that may be relevant to you: You need to see him not as he is but as you need him to be You need to see him not as he is but as you need him to be.

You define him by distinguis.h.i.+ng him from you: I am what you are I am what you are not not. You highlight the wrong in him as a foil to your own rightness.

Painting him as evil lets you see your own goodness in relief; if you had to see him more clearly, you would be forced to see yourself 90 more clearly and to acknowledge your own deficiencies, even your own complicity.

The Offering of Collateral Gifts In sizing up the offender-weighing his good qualities against his bad-it helps to consider what I call the offering of collateral gifts the offering of collateral gifts.

These are the caring, seemingly gratuitous gestures he may make at any time after the injury, with no apparent reference to it.

Wordsworth called them "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love," and they need to be acknowledged if your evaluation of this person is going to be fair and comprehensive.

Should you see them as peace offerings? Is the offender trying to say in his own oblique way, "I'm sorry; I did wrong; I'd like to make up for it"? Or is there no connection between these gifts and the pain he caused you? You may never know, because he may never discuss the injury, never adequately acknowledge the harm he did. Yet these benevolent acts can have a powerful, positive effect on you and on your relations.h.i.+p.

Lisa received such a gift from her former husband, Ben, after years of estrangement. Their divorce had dragged on for years, with an ugly custody battle over their daughter. "He never showed a drop of remorse for breaking up our family and decimating my life," Lisa told me. "I was so depressed, so lost, I couldn't function. I even questioned whether the kids were better off without me."

The court finally awarded Lisa and Ben joint custody, and both remarried. Years later, while Lisa was in therapy with me, her sister lost her job, and her mother secretly went to Ben and asked for help.

Ben came through, finding the sister a position in a friend's company. He never mentioned the divorce or the years of rancor. "Has he suddenly become a good guy?" Lisa asked me. "Or is this his narcissism at work again-his need to experience himself as powerful and universally loved?"

"Does it matter?" I asked.

Lisa thought it over. "I suppose not," she said, "perhaps because I love my sister more than I hate Ben. But whatever his motives, what Acceptance 91.he did for her makes me feel warmer toward him and offsets some of the damage he caused."

Ben found other ways to be generous. He paid for their daughter's housing until she could support herself. And when Lisa's frail father needed to get into a rehab facility, Ben pulled strings to get him in.

"Ben scarred me for life," Lisa told me. "But in all fairness, he also lent me a hand. At the time of our divorce, I saw him as a monster.

Today I accept him as a flawedcomplex man who cut me more deeply than anyone I've ever known but who also came through for me.

Maybe the qualities I hate and love in him go hand in hand. The same insatiable need for love and approval that made him cheat on me may have motivated him to take care of my family when they needed him."

Ben has still never directly acknowledged his destructive behavior. Until he does, Lisa will never know whether he's aware of, or cares, how profoundly he made her suffer. She stops short of forgiving him because he has never directly addressed the injury. But his offer of collateral gifts continues to resonate with her and has gone a long way toward helping her accept him.

The Flip-Flop Factor Using the Flip-Flop Factor to attach to someone As Lisa discovered, the qualities you hate and love in someone may not only co-exist, they may be two sides of the same basic personality, seen from different angles. I call this phenomenon-that the qualities that attract and repel us are incontrovertibly linked and presuppose each other-the As Lisa discovered, the qualities you hate and love in someone may not only co-exist, they may be two sides of the same basic personality, seen from different angles. I call this phenomenon-that the qualities that attract and repel us are incontrovertibly linked and presuppose each other-the Flip-Flop Factor. Flip-Flop Factor. 24 It's a concept you can put to good use when you're trying to come to terms with an injury and sort out your feelings toward the person who hurt you. 24 It's a concept you can put to good use when you're trying to come to terms with an injury and sort out your feelings toward the person who hurt you.

Let's say you love your husband for his playfulness and creativity, but hate the way he ducks responsibility and throws himself into the joy of the moment whenever there's work to be done. What the Flip-Flop Factor teaches you is that the same attribute that makes him so spontaneous and so much fun may also make him irresponsi-92 ble, and that if you're going embrace one side of him, you need to tolerate the other.

A patient named Jane resented her husband Marc for his in-the-face opinions and his intrusive advice about everything she did. She put beef in the stew-he told her lamb would be better. She sliced the carrots-he insisted she use the food processor. To accept him, and to cus.h.i.+on her annoyance, she learned to ask herself, "What is it about this obnoxious trait of his that works for me? What about it do I find attractive?" What she saw was that she loved the way he doted on her and enjoyed doing everything together. Her parents had never been around to give her guidance or direction. What drew her to him from Day One was the way he lavished attention on her, making her feel noticed and cared for in a way her parents never had. Seeing his negative behavior in this positive light made her feel less personally wounded and helped her accept what she considered his shortcomings.

Using the Flip-Flop Factor to detach from someone The Flip-Flop Factor can also help you detach from someone who injured you when all you see is his positive (flip) side. The Flip-Flop Factor can also help you detach from someone who injured you when all you see is his positive (flip) side.

This is how a patient named Harriet used the concept. For most of her life she idealized her father because the truth about him was too hard to bear. He had left the family for another woman when she was ten, and he was never heard from again. Forgiving him was her way of escaping the pain of his abandonment. The man she had known was a heavy drinker and a gambler, a profligate who never paid his bills, including child support. Yet her memory of him remained unsullied.

By identifying her father's positive attributes ("He loved life and good times") and matching them against his negative attributes ("He lived off the flattery of women and s.h.i.+rked responsibilities"), Harriet began an inward journey that put her in touch with her real feelings and helped her formulate a more balanced, authentic response to him. "I'm trying to see him as the person he is, not the person I want him to be," she told me.

You, like Harriet, do yourself a disservice when you overlook how someone failed you, forgive him too easily, and a.s.sign him Acceptance 93.qualities he never had. The Flip-Flop Factor may help not by fuel-ing your desire for reattachment, reattachment, but by supporting your quest for but by supporting your quest for detachment detachment -helping you see how the qualities you love may be intimately tied to those that destroy you. -helping you see how the qualities you love may be intimately tied to those that destroy you.

What you hate in someone, you may also envy The Flip-Flop Factor also teaches that what distresses you about an offender may reveal as much about your own unresolved inner conflicts as it does about him. It shows you that you may hate him for what you can't admit you hate in yourself, and that you may envy him for what you lack in yourself. These realizations won't come easily, but they'll help you see how your personal issues color your response to him. The Flip-Flop Factor also teaches that what distresses you about an offender may reveal as much about your own unresolved inner conflicts as it does about him. It shows you that you may hate him for what you can't admit you hate in yourself, and that you may envy him for what you lack in yourself. These realizations won't come easily, but they'll help you see how your personal issues color your response to him.

Maggie Scarf, author of Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage, Marriage, writing about "the unacknowledged, repudiated, and thoroughly unintegrated aspects of one's own personality," explains the a.n.a.lytic concept of projection. "What was once unacceptable within the self is now what is so intolerable and unacceptable in the partner. The war within each member of the couple has been transformed into a war between them. And each believes that peace and harmony could be achieved if only the other would change."25 writing about "the unacknowledged, repudiated, and thoroughly unintegrated aspects of one's own personality," explains the a.n.a.lytic concept of projection. "What was once unacceptable within the self is now what is so intolerable and unacceptable in the partner. The war within each member of the couple has been transformed into a war between them. And each believes that peace and harmony could be achieved if only the other would change."25 Scarf could have had a patient named Abbey and her husband, Bruce, in mind. Abbey chronically complained about him. "He lacks pa.s.sion, fire, enthusiasm," she told me. "I want someone who smiles at me, who's warm and expressive and excited about life." She couldn't see that the qualities she criticized him for were related to those she envied him for, and lacked in herself.

To understand why Abbey was drawn to Bruce, we need to know that she grew up with a father who was emotionally constricted and a mother who was verbally and physically abusive. Abbey's first marriage was to a man who was, in her own words, "exceedingly handsome, das.h.i.+ng-a bonfire." The marriage blazed out after a year, the time it took for her to discover his infidelities. She was just as miserable with Bruce, but though a part of her hated him, another part knew exactly why she had sought him out, and understands why she 94 stays with him today. "I deliberately chose him because I believed I'd be safe with him, and I knew he'd be a responsible, calm force in my life," she told me. "He's boring, but he's stable. When my life is steady, I have trouble remembering how important that stability is to me, but I know I can't live without it. Bruce doesn't sweep me off my feet, but he doesn't throw me to the curb either."

Abbey saw that the qualities she found insufferable in Bruce were intricately bound to the qualities she needed in him. But on a deeper level, she couldn't bear to face the fact that the qualities that drew her to him-his even temper, his basic contentment-were qualities she herself was missing. Unlike Bruce, she felt constantly distraught, empty, cheated. Making him the object of her rage, hating him for being flat and dull, protected her from facing what she lacked-the ability ever to feel content with anyone, including herself.

The Flip-Flop Factor may help you, as it helped Abbey, to think differently about your dissatisfaction. As I said in After the Affair, After the Affair, it it "challenges you to view your differences in a new way, one in which you reconcile, tolerate, and perhaps, at times, embrace the bright and dark sides of your partner's personality, and your own."26 You can apply the Flip-Flop Factor to any relations.h.i.+p. Alison saw the principle at work first-hand when she and an old college friend, Susan, agreed to spend a day together in Manhattan.

Their plan was to leave in the late morning, poke around the Metropolitan Museum, have a spa lunch, and then devote an hour to Bloomingdale's. The night before, Alison's son called to say he was going to be in town the next day. Alison would have loved to see him, but she had committed herself to spending the day with Susan and said nothing. A few hours later, Susan called to say that her own son had arrived unexpectedly from college, and, since she wouldn't dream of leaving him alone at home, she had invited him to join them. Alison was fuming but said nothing. For weeks she had been looking forward to an intimate, relaxing afternoon with an old friend-having either son along would change the dynamic altogether. Trying to make the best of the situation, she called her son to Acceptance 95.see if he could join them, but it was too late. He had other plans.

The three went to the museum but never made it to Bloomingdale's. "We spent most of the day in an NBA store, looking for equipment for her son," Alison told me. "Susan wasn't a bit apologetic. It never occurred to her that she had done anything she needed to apologize for. Our relations.h.i.+p will never be the same."

What initially drew Alison to Susan was her friend's directness, her self-confidence, her ability to say and do what she wanted-in short, her flip side. Their disastrous day in New York showed Alison the flop side of these same attributes. She now saw her friend as self-centered and insensitive.

Alison eventually acknowledged three truths. The first was that attractive and unattractive qualities go hand in hand. The second was that the qualities she criticized in her friend were related to qualities she envied and lacked in herself. Susan was direct and a.s.sertive and made decisions unenc.u.mbered by the needs of others.

Alison, in contrast, was trapped in her own head, hostage to the needs of others. Her father had died young, and she had grown up learning not to ask for much and not to trouble her overburdened mother. Silencing her voice and putting her own agenda aside were patterns that continued in her adult relations.h.i.+ps and compromised her ability to enjoy people and negotiate conflict.

The third truth Alison faced was that people are rarely all virtuous or all evil. When she allowed herself to look at Susan more objectively, she admitted, "She isn't always selfish. She can be a very thoughtful and caring friend. She has sent me gifts on my birthday and brought me meals when I've been sick. She takes charge- sometimes for herself, sometimes for me. If she weren't in my life, my life would be the poorer. On balance, her faults mean less to me than our friends.h.i.+p."

Must there always be a flip side?

Here's an important caveat for those of you who have been seriously violated in a relations.h.i.+p: sometimes the flip (positive) side is 96 irrelevant. It's not that there is no flip side; it's that you've never seen it, or that it has never enhanced you in any way. If your father s.e.xually molested you, you don't have to think well of him because he's capable of tenderness or good at getting his way. Seeing his positive attributes does not have to soften your negative feelings toward him.

You can accept him without liking him or seeing him in a glowing light.

Step #9: You carefully decide what kind of relations.h.i.+p you want with the offender. want with the offender.

If the offender is unwilling or unable to make amends, what kind of relations.h.i.+p makes sense for you? Is reconciliation in your interest. If you do reconcile, how do you honor the devastation and anger you feel inside? Can you remain authentic to yourself and still interact with him in a civil, constructive, conciliatory way? Can you forgive someone who is dead or otherwise inaccessible?

Acceptance, as we know, does not require reconciliation. You can accept someone and reconcile, or you can accept him and not reconcile. Whichever path you choose, Acceptance asks only that you start out from that place inside you where you are most secure, most centered, most self-affirming. Cut yourself off from him to take revenge (Not Forgiving), or quickly reattach to him to smooth things over (Cheap Forgiveness), and you're likely to sabotage your future.

Here are three healthy options for you, when the offender can't, or won't, apologize.

1. Acceptance Without Reconciliation When the Offender Is Inaccessible If the offender has died or is out of reach and you literally can't communicate with him, reconciliation is obviously not an option.

But you can still accept him and the pain he caused you. He may be gone from your life, but his memory will continue to chafe, and you need to deal with this discomfort in a way that doesn't disfigure you or ruin your life. You owe this not to him but to yourself.

97.This work of making peace with an absent offender is the work of Acceptance. It doesn't require his partic.i.p.ation (as Genuine Forgiveness does). It doesn't demand an ongoing relations.h.i.+p. What it does ask is that you: * try to see what happened clearly, without blinders; * recognize your contribution (if any) to the injury; * understand his intentions, to the extent that this is possible; * recognize both the good and bad he has brought to your life; * forgive yourself for allowing him to hurt you; * work to remember him without hating him or hurting inside so terribly that you bury yourself in pain.

Reaching out to him after his death, in letters perhaps, or in words spoken silently at his grave, may provide some consolation. It doesn't matter that he can't hear your grief and is no more available to you today than he was before. You don't expect him to change or make up for what he did. But you may achieve a certain peace if you declare the truth to him as you see it, in the clarity, wisdom, and dignity of your own voice. It may also help to imagine his response. Hearing the words you want so badly to hear-the words you know he could never say- can give a language to your pain, and help you heal.

This approach comforted a fifty-year-old psychologist, Kim, who found herself struggling to accept her mother's coldness two years after the mother's death. At a professional training conference I gave on forgiveness, Kim shared her story: "My mother loved my children from my first marriage but refused to have a relations.h.i.+p with my stepchildren when I remarried," she said. "I'm still trying to overcome my resentment."

I asked Kim what she does to get over her pain.

"Occasionally, I go to my mother's grave and speak to her directly," she confessed to the group, laughing through her tears.

"Our relations.h.i.+p is improving because today my mother listens and doesn't talk back. I can say things to her that I couldn't say when she was alive."

98."Like what?"

"'Mom, it hurt me that you never recognized my step-kids.

John'-my second husband-'has been so good to me, rescuing me from a very unhappy first marriage. Your behavior made me feel you didn't care about my happiness, or me-that you thought I deserved to suffer or be miserable or alone. I feel you blamed me for the problems in my marriage and never forgave me for getting divorced.'"

I asked Kim what she wished her mother could have said to her.

Kim replied, "I would have liked her to say, 'Kim, I don't know why I was so nasty to your step-kids. They're really good kids. And I see how good John is to you. I see you're happier. You deserve this.