Forgiving and Healing

On another website, I posted an article about a  spiritual journaling workshop that I conducted last night. Our topic was forgiveness. (Click here to read that article.)

An excerpt from the forgiveness section of my book, WellWriting® for Health After Trauma and Abuse, follows:

Forgive those who have hurt you

This is a tough one. Remember that forgiveness for others as well as for yourself promotes well being, peace of mind, and your health. Not forgiving results in grudge-holding that builds up anger, depression, and anxiety...

...Dr. Fred Luskin, who heads the Stanford Project, recommends four steps for you to acquire forgiveness. These four steps, paraphrased, are summarized here:

•    Experience the anger and then realize you have a choice how to respond to the situation.
•    Realize the anger you have does not feel good and is hurting your health.
•    Release the anger as quickly as you can.
•    Vow to proactively forgive in the future.

Any thoughts and comments on forgiveness would be most welcome...

Comments

[Steve Thomas]

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