Yes, Jesus Christ, the Head of Conscious Humanity, does tell us we absolutely must forgive others who have wronged us. Doing good to our enemies is what C. S. Lewis calls one of the "house rules" common to all denominations. And it's also mandated by the Work, because holding on to resentment is a negative emotion, and one that will hold us back from making any spiritual progress.
AA too tells us to watch out for resentment, because it can precipitate a relapse.
So we've looked in the previous post at the need to forgive, and although it's very, very difficult in many cases, we've managed to release our old angers and resentments, and let go of the whole bundle. (Hint: if we can't quite get there, we need to ask our Higher Power to give us the willingness to forgive).
But paradoxically, forgiving too easily or too quickly constitutes what a counsellor friend calls a "spiritual bypass".
He means that we leap over the anger or the resentment without processing it, and although we may say - and mean it - that we've forgiven the person concerned, we haven't really done that at all. We've just stuffed the anger deeper into our unconscious, where it festers, sometimes for years. And we do this because acknowledging the reality of how we've been treated and how we've allowed ourselves to be abused is too painful to contemplate. Often, it takes professional help to see this and to accompany us through the difficult journey to understanding and eventual forgiveness.
Let me give you an example of a client who did just that, performed a "spiritual bypass", and the problems it caused her. She was typical of so many women who've been raised to be submissive and always "nice", especially to men, so that she didn't feel she had the right to be treated respectfully. Additionally, her mother, a Christian who hadn't fully understood the Gospel about forgiveness, had drilled into her daughter the need to be a doormat for others - this, the mother insisted, was what Jesus had told us to do.
Of course, He said nothing of the kind!
He tells us, as does the entire Jewish tradition, to "love our neighbour as our self".
That presupposes that we have the right, and actually do, love ourselves - that we have, as the modern buzzword puts it, compassion for ourselves. We really do need to love ourselves, and it's the prerequisite for any real forgiveness to take place.
If we don't love ourselves, we can't love others. All we can do is become codependent, putting up with abuse of all kinds because we don't believe we are valuable people. And that is what had happened to my client, whom I'll call Carol (not her real name, of course).
Carol had been raised to regard all women as inferior to men. That no matter what she did, however high her college marks were, or her achievements at work, this was all secondary to her real role in life, which was to look after her husband.
Yes, taking care of our family is very important indeed. But again, we must have a healthy level of self-esteem before we can do this. In Carol's case, because she despised her own sex, she tolerated a level of emotional abuse from her husband that other people would have found intolerable.
She had to rush home from work to cook a meal every night, even when she worked longer hours than he did. He never once offered to cook for them both, or to wash up, or to carry out any household chores at all; that was "women's work", and beneath his dignity as a man. Because she always had to be available as an unpaid servant, she was never allowed to take a day out with her friends, or a short break to stay with her sister.
Her husband treated their daughter as abusively as he did her mother, because she too was an inferior being, a female, and had no rights compared to those of her brother, who was excused all household chores "because he's a boy".
He constantly insulted his wife and daughter, finding fault with their cooking, their cleaning, their appearance and their attitude. Not once was any praise given, or affection shown.
The daughter voted with her feet as soon as she was old enough to leave, and took a lowly paid job in order to be able to afford her own bedsit.
Carol, however, could not leave, neither could she complain - that would have been "unChristian".
When Carol reached her fifties, careworn and with her self-esteem through the floor, she contracted cancer. It used to be thought that there was a "cancer personality", and although that theory has been much debated, there's no doubt that Carol's own lack of self-esteem exacerbated her illness. She simply fell into a state of denial about it. The strange pains and weaknesses couldn't be important, she told herself, and in any case, she didn't have time to be ill; she had her demanding job, her even more demanding husband and son to take care of, and no time at all to take care of herself.
By the time she was in so much pain that even her husband noticed, and insisted she see a doctor (because any serious illness must be nipped in the bud, in case it got in the way of her housekeeping), it was too late. The cancer was inoperable.
Carol finally came to see me when she had been given only months to live, and then only because her friends and her doctor insisted on it.
She still felt she had no right to be ill, and that her cancer was somehow a punishment for having been a poor wife and mother.
Eventually, we reached some understanding of her situation. She spent the last few weeks of her life partly at home, cared for by nurses and by her own sister, and partly in a very good hospice.
During her remaining time, Carol came to see how she had constantly "forgiven" her abusive husband for insults and demands that he had no right to make. And she had not really forgiven him at all. She had thought so little of herself that she had repressed any anger or resentment, and buried her negative emotions too deep to access - except when it was almost too late.
Her "forgiveness" was not true forgiveness, it was a spiritual bypass.
With the help of sessions with me and jointly with the hospital chaplain, Carol reached a level of understanding that allowed her to released the buried feelings, and to really forgive. She came to see that she had been treated very unfairly, and that her husband had made unreasonable demands throughout the marriage because he knew no better. They were both victims of a cruel, patriarchal upbringing that had served them ill.
I have seen this scenario played out many times in different forms. Sometimes, perhaps most often, it happens with abused women and their abusive husbands. Sometimes the persecutor is an adult child, often an alcoholic or addict whom the mother is continually rescuing from his spectacular messes, to the detriment of both.
The mother and the abused wife say that they forgive their abusers, but they cannot really do so, because to be able to forgive means that you understand that someone has behaved wrongly towards you. Carol, raised to be a "doormat" (in her own words) could not believe that other people did not have the right to walk all over her. Only when she began to build some self-esteem, and to see herself as a valuable person, loved by God, did she come to see that she had allowed herself to be abused.
If you or someone you know should be in this situation, then before rushing to forgiveness, it's important to realize what has happened, what offences have been committed against you. Once you know, then - and only then - can you for.give
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