TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to express a few thoughts about the subject of forgiveness. It seems to be a word, a subject that I can’t escape in my life. It appears at unexpected moments often. I get comments on my YouTube videos about how I should forgive … or how other people should forgive or how we should all forgive our parents for what they did to us. And that forgiveness is the most noble thing.
Even today, as I was sitting down preparing to make this video, I made myself a cup of tea, and on the cup of tea, on the tea bag was a little sign that said: “Give forgiveness. That is your greatness.” And I thought: Ugh, it really is hard to escape. Well, I’m not into forgiveness. I don’t really like it.
A big part of, I think, why I just feel very: Mmm … disgusted even by forgiveness, is that I spent my childhood forgiving my parents. I survived my childhood because I learned how to forgive them. No matter what they did to me, I could turn the other cheek. I could love them anyway. I could say: “I forgive you. I know you don’t mean what you’re doing. I know you didn’t mean to do that.” And then they would do it again. And then I would forgive them again, and then they would love me.
And I think what I learned earlier than that, is when I didn’t forgive them … when I felt my natural reactions, my natural responses to how they were treating me, which meant: I was angry, I was upset, I was frustrated, I wanted to cry and yell – they didn’t like me! They didn’t love me. They didn’t like my reactions. They didn’t like that I had natural, healthy reactions to how they were treating me. And because they didn’t like it, they rejected me, they abandoned me, they treated me even worse.
So I learned that they would treat me badly, I would have a healthy response to that, and then they would treat me worse because of my healthy response. So I learned at some level that my healthy responses to being traumatized … actually just brought more trauma onto me.
So at some point I figured it out: Oh, I have to bypass my healthy responses of anger, sadness, frustration, disappointment, rage even, crying, … saying stuff, confronting them – I had to bypass all of that and jump right to forgiveness. “I forgive you. It’s okay that you did that. You didn’t mean it. I love you anyways.”
So in a way I became sort of like a little spiritual guru age ten, age twelve, age fourteen for these people who really were not living up to their responsibility for me. And through that I was able to survive in my family. I was able to … live my life; get less abandoned than I otherwise would have. It was a good technique to lower the amount of trauma I suffered.
But what was sacrificed? What was sacrificed for me, was my authenticity … my realness, who I really was, how I really felt, what I was really going through. I dissociated, I split off. That is a reaction to trauma. I wasn’t able to resolve my trauma. I wasn’t able to deal with it, so I split it off. I split off from myself. I became a false me – the me that was saying: “I forgive you” to my parents, the me that loved them anyways. That wasn’t really who I was. That was a false me.
And what’s sad is none of this was even conscious. I didn’t know that I was doing it. But underneath that, unconsciously, the real me was always there. It just wasn’t so obvious. I wasn’t so consciously connected with it. But I was saving myself. I was saving up for the time, emotionally, … that someday I wouldn’t need to forgive them anymore. Someday I wouldn’t need to have to do that behavior and wouldn’t need to be this perfect spiritual person that would love them in spite of their horrible misbehavior.
And once I started becoming independent in my 20s and definitely by my mid-late 20s and definitely by my 30s, I wasn’t playing that game anymore. I was like: I don’t want to forgive them! Why would I dare forgive them? That killed me once, it didn’t save me. And you know what? I don’t need them! I don’t need their love.
And there were a few years, I was angry. I was angry at them. I was feeling a lot of the things that I hadn’t been allowed to feel when I was a kid, and I learned a lot through reconnecting with my anger. I saw how they responded to me, and they were no nicer to me 15 years later than they were when I was a kid. They were nasty and they were mean, and they turned it around on me. And the same people that they were back then, they still were 10-20 years later. Because they hadn’t changed.
They had never acknowledged what they did, and that wasn’t their character makeup. They weren’t living their lives to self-reflect on their behavior and say: “Why do I do those things? Why did I do those things?” They were more of the conventional type of person that doesn’t look at their behavior; just puts it out of their mind, moves on. “Let’s move on. Let’s move forward. Forget about it. Come on, let go.” And they’re the ones who are of a type who preach forgiveness, who say that forgiving people is a good thing.
They forgave their parents. My mom forgave her parents, and her parents were probably much worse than mine. My dad, as far as I know, forgave his. His parents were terrible. And I see that a lot with people who do a lot of forgiveness: they bury a lot of their feelings, they push them down, split them off, and then unconsciously, they end up … repeating their unresolved histories. They end up repeating their biographies. They end up repeating their unhealthy relationships from their childhood with the present people in their life.
And I think it does come down to that very simple statement: “Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it.” I think this happens on a mass level, on a societal level, on an economic level, and also on a personal level.
To me, the people who push forgiveness, who suggest forgiveness – this can be friends, this can be family members, this can be major world spiritual leaders, … this can be therapists; because all these different people can push forgiveness very easily, especially if they have any sort of power in the relationship – what are they really saying? They’re really saying: “Don’t deal with what happened to you. Don’t deal with your real feelings. Don’t deal with your actual history. Just make nice. Let it go. Split off from your feelings, forget what happened to you.”
And I think from what I’ve seen, the people who suggest forgiveness, who even pressure forgiveness or who even guilt trip other people into forgiving … are people who themselves have never dealt with their traumas. They’ve never really looked at what happened to them. They’ve never really worked through the horrible things that they went through. Instead, they have often maintained a fairly close emotional relationship with the people who harmed them the most.
Or maybe if the people who harmed them the most are no longer alive, in their fantasy they still keep a close relationship with those people. They never worked through their traumas. Because someone who really worked through a lot of their traumas … someone who worked through the grieving, worked through the pain, worked through the suffering, worked through the anger, … worked through the feelings of betrayal and abandonment and rejection and unfairness of suffering. Someone who has worked through those feelings, is not going to tell someone else to forgive.
Because why would they suggest to someone to do the exact opposite of what they did? Forgiveness does not further healing from trauma. Dealing with the feelings is what helps people grow.