A Thoughtful Response Regarding Forgiveness
Earlier this month, I noticed much activity on another website I maintain--all clustered around the topic of forgiveness. So on the 11th of January, I wrote a post on Forgiving and Healing. As part of the post, I included an excerpt from my book, WellWriting® for Health After Trauma and Abuse. Yesterday I received a thoughtful comment from Steve T.
I have decided to publish Steve's comments for two reasons:
- Comments are often overlooked by blog readers as they tend not to stand out unless the word "comment" is selected at the end of an article.
- The comment here pinpoints a major challenge in the area of forgiveness: forgiving following abuse from another.
Most of us think that forgiveness brings value to our lives because it helps us to heal. True enough but when the insult bestowed on any person looms large, the healing often has to happen before the forgiving can even begin. Author Nancy Richards in her book, Heal & Forgive, does an excellent job in illustrating this basic truth as did Steve T in his comment which follows:
"Hi Dr. T,
Forgiveness is a 'quality' that has been urged and often commanded by spiritual leaders for eons, commonly with the same admonitions you employ above. It's probably impossible to have lived on this planet very long without having heard those warnings many times, the bottom line of course is that forgiveness must be employed for the abused's "own good". Oddly, at least in cases where genuine remorse is immediately expressed by the offender (as in cases of unintentional injury), forgiveness seems to be an entirely natural and inherent part of human nature--no such authoritarian commandment is necessary to evoke it. In cases where remorse is NOT evident (or is pretended), "forgiveness"--especially the artificial, "spiritually" sanctioned, guilt-induced variety--translates in the mind of the abuser to "You have permission to continue treating me like something people scrape off the bottom of their shoes." The evil inherent here I hope is obvious.
You and Dr. Luskin are flat-out wrong. To use a position of authority, especially, to tell an abused person that he or she must "forgive your abuser lest ye be eaten alive by your own poison" is to have fallen into an ageless, destructive trap.
"Forgiveness" as you 'encourage' it is not part of the solution, it is an especially large part of the problem.
Please make the effort to realize that if not for the conditioning that took place during your, Dr. Luskin's and no doubt the Stanford Project itself's upbringing and 'education', you would realize that you are NOT helping abused persons by perpetuating this sort of advice, you are instead advocating for everything that is wrong, upside down and backwards, and therefore being actively hurtful by siding with the abusers.
Please reexamine the 'wisdom' of your 'remedy' for trauma victims. Yes, it's nearly universal and has been around for a very long time. So have abused, mistreated children (and women, and 'mentally ill' people, crime, war, and on and on and on)--and despite age-old advice identical to yours, all of this just keeps coming.
One plus one equals two. I'd think that Stanford people would be able to see that.
For the sake of anyone who comes to this page I hope you one day soon see it yourself.
thank you,
Steve T., ACE score: 4"
Thank you, Steve, for taking the time to add your comments to this website and blog.
All comments on this topic are more than welcome. Please take a few minutes to add your comments to this post.
--Dr.T