TRANSCRIPT
FORGIVENESS AND BLAME
There is an idea in our society, and certainly throughout the psychology field in general, that it’s vitally important to forgive. A lot of spiritual leaders and whole spiritualities are based around the concept of forgiveness, and certainly a lot of therapy is about learning how to forgive—and forgive the people who have wronged you, forgive our parents particularly. My attitude is that forgiveness is not really part of the process of healing. It’s a consequence of the process of healing. That’s an important distinction that I make. I never ask people to practice forgiveness, nor do I ask myself to practice forgiveness. And the reason for that is that I don’t see forgiveness as an action. I see forgiveness as a consequence of other actions and actually a consequence of the healing process.
WHAT IS FORGIVENESS?
To forgive someone is to no longer hold anger at them for what they did, for their flaws, for their woundings, for their traumas, for their abuses that they’ve caused you. So to forgive them means that I am no longer angry; I am no longer resentful at you. And there’s an idea that that makes a person much healthier—when they can forgive. And it’s also considered a sign of their maturity, of their adulthood, that they’ve learned to let go. And there’s always a grain of truth in that, which is why people always respond when they say: “Oh, I learned how to forgive.” And people say: “Oh, you are so mature.” The thing for me personally is that all throughout my teen years, I was considered so mature and healthy because I forgave. I forgave my parents primarily, and I forgave my other traumatizers. I was considered very humble and mature because I didn’t really have anger at them. I wasn’t resentful. People could do awful things to me, my parents in particular, and I could say very quickly: “You know, I’ve learned to let go and I forgive them”—and people really had a lot of respect for me. And the interesting thing was that it was just a very, very shallow forgiveness, and that’s why I’ve come to recognize that when most people say they forgive, it’s actually very much like what I went through as a teenager.
PREMATURE FORGIVENESS
Instead of having really worked through their anger, really working through the rage that they have against the people that did wrong to them, they just split it off. They dissociate from it. So I consider it premature forgiveness or false forgiveness. It is the forgiveness based on dissociation rather than a forgiveness on really working through the process. Now, of course, a lot of people who practice what I consider to be very false forgiveness or premature forgiveness say, “Oh no, I actually have worked through all of my anger and rage and resentment. I really have learned to let it go. I’m not resentful anymore. I’m not enraged with the people who did wrong to me once upon a time. I’ve moved on. I’ve let it go.” But my experience is that they really haven’t; they just split it off, and they’re actually very enraged people just below the surface. But they’re really out of touch with it and have no idea.
WORKING THROUGH ANGER
So how does one work through it? How does one work through all the rage and anger—and that’s the whole point of self-therapy as far as I see. And that it’s a huge process, and it can come and go in waves. But it’s not a bad thing to be resentful. It’s not a bad thing to be angry at the people who wronged us. What is very dangerous is when people act out their anger and resentment in inappropriate ways, especially on people who are completely innocent. A lot of people do that. They take out their rage and resentment from twenty or thirty years ago, or forty or fifty years ago in their past; they take it out on people who maybe weren’t even alive when those original traumas happened. They take it out on their children and on other people who are dependent on them—people who can’t really properly defend themselves. But interestingly, people can even take out their rage and resentment on the people who actually traumatized them, but it still can be very inappropriate. It still to be acting out. Because they’re taking it out on people who wounded them, but it’s too late. They’re not actually working through the rage and resentment. They are just spewing it out. They are vomiting it everywhere in ways that actually don’t resolve it, and that’s why some people—their whole personality—becomes centered around their anger and their resentment, and they’re actually not on a process. They’re just tapping into the anger and resentment and vomiting it out in a way that just keeps repeating the cycle over and over again, and doesn’t help them move forward, doesn’t help them actually resolve it, grow out of it, and process it, because they never actually grieve it, because they just live in it constantly.
HEALTHY, APPROPRIATE BLAME
I think the point is to dramatically know exactly what one’s traumas were, who one’s traumatizers are, and—totally blame them for what happened. But those people don’t even have to know that you’re blaming them—you just blame them in your own head. You can blame them perhaps in a private place. A lot of crying and screaming sometimes can be part of that process. But the key is—if you can’t really blame the people who did you wrong, how can you grow from it? Blame is a dirty word. People hate the idea of blaming very often—especially, from what I’ve seen, parents. You know, blaming parents—it is some sort of a crime. “Oh, you can’t blame parents. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were just acting out their unconscious stuff. They tried the best they could…” But what really is blame?
BLAME IS PLACING RESPONSIBILITY
Blame, to me, is holding somebody responsible for what they did, and blame is a totally appropriate response to being traumatized. The first thing is blaming the right people. Not letting some people off the hook and over-blaming other people, but really finding the correct assessment of blame. Finding the correct assessment of responsibility on the person who did the traumatizing, or on the people who did the traumatizing. And it’s actually a lot of work to correctly assign appropriate responsibility. And it’s also very painful. Because if you really know who’s responsible, it’s very hard to idealize them, and most people want to idealize their parents. Or they want to over-blame one parent and over-idealize the other, or just idealize the other one a little bit even.
BUT AFTER PLACING APPROPRIATE BLAME?
Then it’s my job to take responsibility for my healing, to really begin to work it out. Because then there are the two options: to work it out or to act it out. And if I blame them and just continue to blame them, I could stay stuck in blame forever and never go anywhere. So my job is to take my own adult responsibility for healing myself, for working through my process. That might mean getting far, far away from the people who I’m blaming sometimes. Sometimes it might mean confronting them. Of course, as I’ve talked about, it’s very dangerous to confront the people who traumatized us. But sometimes it’s very important.
BLAME: A DIRTY WORD IN PSYCHOLOGY
I think the reason that blame has become such a dirty word is because most of the psychology field really doesn’t work through much of a process. Their goal is not to help people process their feelings, to really understand who their traumatizers are, and to really grow from that, grow out of it. All the psychology field knows how to do is to help people dissociate from it. So they don’t even wanna look at holding people responsible. And when you consider that really for most people the people they need to blame most of all are their parents—when you look at the fact that most of the people in the psychology field are parents also, and there’s a fraternity of parents, because most people in the psychology field who are parents have actually done a lot of very wounding things to their children—the exact thing that their patients are coming in and trying to blame their own parents for—a lot of therapists can’t handle that. They can’t handle sitting with their patients who are blaming parents for the very crimes that the therapist themselves have done. So an easy way around it is to not really look at what your parents did that much. But let’s move past that; let’s find quick and easy ways to seem like you’ve moved past that. Let’s work through.
Some other feelings and then call done and put it somewhere else, but blame – “No, no, we’re not here to blame at all.” And even though they say, “Yes, we’re here to find your traumatizers responsible” — they might say that – they’re really not. Because there’s really no reason to avoid blame otherwise. There’s nothing to be afraid with blame if you’re really working through a process.
END OF PART ONE