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As a survivor of child sexual abuse, I’ve never been one to preach forgiveness. I remember running into some of those proverbial “preachers” early on in my recovery who told me “if you want to heal, you have to forgive.” And I remember thinking “who are YOU to tell me what to do?” Or “why SHOULD I forgive my mother and the other people who betrayed me when I was young? They don’t deserve my forgiveness. Besides, some things are unforgiveable.” Or so I thought …

Today, I have an entirely different take on forgiveness. Though I still believe forgiveness, like anything else, is a personal choice, I’m a big believer in the power of forgiveness. Not only does it allow us to release anger and resentment, which is good for our emotional and physical well being, but it also helps set us free, making us less burdened and bound by our past. As a result, we have more energy to use in our lives today.

As for me, I know I’d be a totally different person had I NOT decided to forgive my mom for the emotional, physical and sexual abuse she inflicted upon me.

I know that because I once WAS that other person. Bitter and angry. Always angling for a fight. Constantly on guard against people who might betray me.

The funny thing is that way back I couldn’t see that anger and bitterness in myself. But I COULD spot it in others, especially in some survivor friends I met early on in my healing journey. I remember one conversation vividly. We were sitting around in someone’s living room talking, and when the topic of forgiveness came up, a few of them exploded into fits of hysterical laughter. “Forgiveness? There is no way in hell I’ll ever forgive my father for what he did,” I remember one friend saying. “I hope he rots in hell, if there is such a thing.”

If there were ever a defining moment, that was it. That incident made me realize that something had to change. Because I didn’t want to be sitting around with my friends in my 60s and 70s, shriveled up like a bitter prune, defending my right to stay angry with my mom. Or, worse yet, blaming her for the way my life had turned out.

There was no question my mother had hurt me, and what she’d done was brutal and just plain wrong. But marinating in my anger and bitterness wasn’t hurting her; it was hurting me. I was convinced that if I didn’t do something to let go of this anger (and the sooner the better!) it would eat away at me until I was like an old and holey car held together by rust.

But the problem was that I wasn’t sure how to go about forgiving her. I’d heard about “forgiveness workshops,” where you swung through the doors an angry bitter person and emerged at the end of the day light and free and forgiving. But they always seemed too magical. Too easy. Seemed too much like snake oil to me.

As it turned out, it took me years to forgive my mom. In fact, I can’t exactly tell you when that happy day came. Looking back on the process, I think it happened little by little, over time. It was sort of like sloughing off dead layers of skin that were no longer serving me. Until one day, I no longer felt a sense of anger and bitterness when I thought about my Mother.

Though I don’t pretend to be an expert on forgiveness, having forgiven my mom for all the abuse she inflicted on me, here’s what I know, or perhaps more accurately, this is what worked for me:

Forgiveness is for me, not for “them” – When the topic of forgiveness first came up in the context of being abused as a child, I thought that forgiveness was about letting my mom and the other people who had hurt me off the proverbial “hook.” And there are certainly plenty of religious leaders who will tell you that that is what forgiveness is all about.

But over time, I realized that forgiveness was about me, not about them. I was forgiving the people who had hurt me years ago so that I could let go of the anger and bitterness and feel less constrained in my life. Though I forgave them, I didn’t condone their actions. What they did was wrong and hurt me beyond measure. But staying angry didn’t change what happened. And it didn’t punish them. It punished me.

Forgiveness is a process that requires us to feel our feelings – As I mentioned earlier, forgiveness, in my experience, is a process, not a one-time event that happens at a day-long workshop. While a workshop may help you begin the process, forgiveness takes time and effort. Most importantly, it requires us to feel our feelings in all their colors and permutations. For me, that meant, feeling angry at my mom for what she did and grieving my losses. And feeling sad about having a mom who abused me and betrayed me. The process was painful and prolonged, though it was well worth it.

It may help to imagine what circumstances led to your abuse – I’ll just say from the get-go that this is something I needed to do to forgive my mom, but it may not be something YOU have to do. For me, it was helpful to try and understand why my mom abused me.

For example, I’d heard that her father – my grandfather – whom I’d never met – had abused my mom physically, because my aunt had admitted that much. And I knew that he was an angry, aggressive person. So, was it possible that he had abused my mom in the same way she abused me? I may never know, because my mom died more than a year ago, and when she was still alive, she refused to talk about her relationship with him. But I knew from my aunt that my grandfather was a volatile person. And that he drank alcohol to excess and may have been an alcoholic.

So making the leap to imagine that perhaps he’d abused her like she abused me, wasn’t such a hard leap to make. I can’t say that I ever came up with a definitive answer about why my mom hurt me. But I pieced together a theory that was plausible. Though nothing will ever justify my mother’s actions, doing this “research” and trying to understand my mother helped me come to terms with my abuse and ultimately allowed me to forgive her and have sympathy for her.

Having sympathy for her was never a goal; it was just a natural extension of the forgiveness process, for me. I have some friends who are horrified that I felt sympathy for my mom after what she’d done to me. But as far as I was concerned, being able to experience that sympathy was a blessing that demonstrated my capacity for compassion.

You don’t need to forget to forgive – Though many people insist that we need to forgive AND forget, I, personally don’t agree. In fact, I strongly disagree. It is not that I WON’T forget, but I wonder, what’s the point in doing so? For 35 years or so I forgot that I’d been abused. I repressed the memories, and they went underground, until the memories emerged in my late 30s, but the feelings remained and ran my life … Today it is hard to imagine forgetting what happened. And I wonder why I would even need to do so. If I’ve forgiven my mom and the other people who hurt me, and there is no emotional charge around what happened, what would be the sense in forgetting?

Forgiveness and reconciliation are not synonymous – Even after I forgave my mom, if not to her face then certainly in my own mind, there were people in my life who would say “You STILL don’t talk to your mother, REALLY?” To be fair, many of these people didn’t know the whole story. They didn’t know what my mom had done to me, and that she’d never responded to a letter I’d sent to her, itemizing her betrayals and demanding that she apologize.

So when they put their seemingly innocent question out there, I just let it hang in the breeze. I knew what was best for me. I had no plans to reconcile with my mom. I’d forgiven her, yes. But she was still the same angry, verbally abusive person she’d always been, forever dousing whoever crossed her path with her venomous brew. I was an adult now, not a child. And I had no interest in putting myself in harm’s way again. Ironically, I DID end up reconciling with her at the end of her life and finally forgave her to her face – not because I felt obligated to do so – but because I wanted to – but that’s another post for another time. My point is that it’s possible to forgive someone who’s abused you without reconciling with that person. It’s entirely up to you.

What are your thoughts about forgiving the “unforgiveable?” I’d love to hear what you have to say. Please leave a comment here on ShareWIK.com.

Ellen Brown is a certified professional coach, based in Cleveland, OH, and a regular columnist on ShareWIK.com.  Visit her website at http://ellen-brown.com. 

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