Category: Uncategorized

The Ultimate Lesson of ‘The Good Place’: Change Is REALLY Hard

It’s worth looking at

• where the standard originates (is it even ‘your’ standard, or did someone else thrust it upon you)
• reasonability for that standard
• the socio-cultural perspective of that standard
• if and how that standard is being used by someone else to power-over you

It is also possible that we have standards for ourselves, that are organically ‘ours’, which we aren’t living up to.

People commonly feel insecure around

• their bodies
• their career
• income
• partner or lack of partner
• intelligence
• emotional expression

…and whether ‘who they are’ is intrinsically okay.

Self-esteem is actually a barometer of self-efficacy beliefs: the extent or strength of one’s belief in one’s own ability to complete tasks and reach goals.^[1] Basically your beliefs around your capabilities and competence.

Self-esteem is also a result of self-respect:

• Are you in integrity with your own values and standards?
• Do you do what you say you will do?
• Are you effectively setting and maintaining boundaries?

And self-respect is a measure of how you exercise your will and power in the world.

Self-esteem is also related to self-compassion for yourself as a human being. This perspective is rooted in a growth versus static mindset.

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¹ Ormrod, J. E. (2006). Educational psychology: Developing learners (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.

I’ve talked before about my issues with forgiveness-as-enlightenment, and my perspective on the truth about healing and why healing doesn’t require forgiveness

…but both are pieces in a larger paradigm.

I was raised in a neo-enlightenment environment which subscribed to the idea that anger and hate and fear served to disconnect us from others, and that we should only act from love and joy.

Anger itself was considered to be toxic.

Then one day I realized that, in the Bible, even Jesus had occasions of righteous anger. Of moments where he basically said that this shall not stand.

That was my aha! moment.

And I realized that it isn’t an act of love to allow someone to hurt others, it isn’t an act of connection to ignore the pain they cause, that there is no joy in suffering. And that people who’ve been harmed can connect through their anger and fear.

I wasn’t particularly religious – my church was of the bourgeois hippie variety – but I found the Jesus perspective to be authoritative enough to allow me to reject the anger-is-bad message.

They were so self-congratulatory about their perspective on sin, and yet they essentially preached the sin of humanity, that normal human emotions and responses are toxic in and of themselves. That you should accept the ‘negative’ actions of others, and forgive them, regardless of how they have harmed you, but never accept ‘negative’ emotions in yourself.

It is an unwitting cult of self-negation.

You couldn’t even say you were sick or feeling poorly because that would be ‘affirming’ negativity. You couldn’t experience your own suffering because ‘suffering is a choice’.

At least Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity is upfront about viewing people as sinful; but this church, and others like it, praise humanity but denigrate actual humans.

I think that remembering the purpose of anger and hate and fear allows us to engage with those emotions mindfully. Recognizing their place in the pantheon of the human experience can give us perspective, using them as a tool helps protect us, and this coping mechanism moves us forward.

What a gift anger and fear can be.

Love is a result of acceptance.

• “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun… To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is right here and now.” – Fred (Mister) Rogers
• “Love respects and protects. It seeks the highest good not just for oneself, but for the one who is loved.” – u/mementovivere <—– can you respect without accepting?
• “I hope you are able to grow to respect whoever you are inside.” – Fred (Mister) Rogers
• “Respect is when you treat something that matters like it matters, and disrespect is when you treat something that matters like it doesn’t matter.” – u/danokablamo
• “Love is not based on understanding, but acceptance.” – L.E. Modesitt, Jr., “The Death of Chaos”
• “As a father, my love and acceptance of my daughter must always be more important than my expectations of her.” – u/vwboyaf1
• “What does “unconditional” love mean? This is the gift of the parent: the knowledge that who and what you are is enough. Enough to be loved, enough to exist, enough to be entitled to your self. A parent recognizes this very existence, your essential humanity; you are seen, heard, touched, supported and validated.” – u/invah
• Self-Compassion is Key to Self-Acceptance

Love, like happiness, is a byproduct

…in this case of the process of acceptance. The template for unconditional love is parental love: complete acceptance –

Being seen, and having your life witnessed, and your existence acknowledged, and your experiences validated; and of being worth positive regard and attention; being worthy of existing, and as your own person.

The other components of parental love, however, are teaching and support. The parent co-creates the child’s existence and experience, guides and supports them in becoming.

This is, of course, the idea of parent-love, and not all parents are able to build this foundation, either in whole or in part, however, this is what we have in mind when we talk about unconditional love.

The parent doesn’t withhold their love and acceptance until the child is ‘better’, and those who do are not parenting.

This can be translated in context of self-love

…honest self-acceptance is seeing yourself for who you actually are, without warped perception, and acknowledging your existence, validating your experiences, believing you are worth positive regard and attention, knowing that you deserve to exist, and as your own person.

You can accept yourself while knowing that as a human being being human, you are still becoming, you are growing and learning, you are deciding who and how you want to be in the world.

A lot of the things we ‘need’ to change are indicative, interestingly, of our lack of self-acceptance.

It is why people who believe they will be happy and finally feel good about themselves when they lose weight or build muscle or make money or get a girl- or boyfriend often feel empty when they do finally accomplish these things.

Do they honestly believe they deserve to exist in the world, as they are? Do they see themselves as less than or equal to others? Do they have a clear understanding of who they are, an identity independent of everything that time and life can strip away from us? Do they see and acknowledge themselves?

In Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”, she writes about a concept of negating, of Xing, that has stuck with me throughout the years. This negating of another person – and, in the the case of the book, whole planets – is unNaming, of destruction, of annihilating their existence.

I think self-acceptance operates on this fundamental level of existence

…self-acceptance that does not attribute intrinsic “wrongness” or unworthiness to someone who needs to change. This person does not need to change to deserve to exist in the world regardless of whether they actually need to change, and they themselves can decide – without condemnation – who and how they would like to be in the world.

A close cousin to “you’re just doing this for attention”, “don’t hold on to negative experiences” is a subtle type of victim blaming

…one in which a victim is told that they are responsible for their own pain because they ‘refuse to let go’. This perspective contributes a cult of self-negation, one that demands the victim to accept someone else’s perspective on their reality before that someone else is ever required to see or act from the victim’s perspective.

It also completely misunderstands that healing is a process, and these people mistake the effect of the healing process for the cause of the healing process.

In order to accept what happened and let go of your pain, your experience needs to be validated. Anyone who demands you ‘let go’ so you can heal, when what you need is validation of your experience and support for that experience, is invalidating you and harming the healing process.

The healing process moves through several, sometimes simultaneously occurring, stages

• harm ends
• experiences validation
• receives support
• processes experience
• learns about and from experience
• accepts the reality of their experience
• letting go
• forgives (optional as fuck)

I conceptualize it as a spectrum, and a victim organically moves from one end to the other. (Edit: Though, now that I think about it, maybe it’s more like Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs.)

Pushing a victim to ‘complete’ a later stage of the healing process deprives the victim of the foundation of their healing experience, requires their performance of healing for an outside party, and creates a toxic facsimile of the healing process. It also completely misses the fucking point that acceptance, letting go, and forgiveness are results of the healing process, not causes for it.

Victims often experience more harm through their community’s reaction to their trauma than from the actual trauma itself.

In refusing to validate someone’s experience, they effectively gaslight the victim. In withholding their support, they isolate the victim, reject, and push shame onto the victim. Whether the intention is ‘helpful’ for someone’s ‘healing’ is not the point. This response again traumatizes the victim, again strips them of their agency, again puts the reality of their experience in someone else’s hands. It is utterly unacceptable.

We have this dysfunctional approach to processes in where we devalue the process if we believe anyone ‘unworthy’ is benefiting from it or taking advantage of it, and therefore us – e.g. welfare – I suspect that this paranoia is behind some of the actions toward victims.

We see performative emotion in children and believe it isn’t real, that they are acting, and therefore unworthy of our compassion and empathy. We, too, recoil in seeing this behavior in adults, though there are many cultures that experience performative emotion, particularly with respect to grieving. Performing an emotion doesn’t inherently invalidate that emotion.

There are adults who use their negative experiences to relate to the outside world, like children who realize they only time they receive a parent’s positive attention is when they are hurt and injured. There are adults who, in seeking to validate an underlying harm, subconsciously create new harms for validation. These adults are still victims, and no one has to participate in their healing process if they don’t want to; it is, however, unnecessary to invalidate the victim’s experience while setting boundaries with them.

There are adults who calculatingly use negative experiences to manipulate others. These adults are not victims. Rejecting their ‘experience’ makes no intrinsic difference, as they will weave your rejection into their existing narrative, to ‘prove’ their point and further their ends.

Fear of being ‘taken for a ride’ by the second does not justify invalidation of the first.

Subconsciously we know how important validation is because we withhold it from people who we believe are unworthy of it.

A lot of this perspective is a result of less empathy-driven parenting styles, and the adults who are attempting to meet this childhood need are legion; those adults are still victims.

Our brain is literally wired to pay attention to our negative experiences, assisted by salience hormones such as dopamine, so that we can avoid them in the future and protect ourselves. But if people are questioning our reality, and we, therefore, begin to question our reality, how can we avoid those experiences in the future? We are attempting to re-write an experience from a ‘negative experience’ to a ‘positive experience’ or an ‘I’m-the-problem-here experience’.

We learn to question ourselves instead of learning to get the fuck out.

Above all this, there is an underlying entitlement that someone must possess to believe they are in a position to not only judge a victim’s experience, but either proscribe or prescribe a victim’s thoughts and actions.

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I’ll be the captain of my ship
I’ll survey that vast horizon
That ocean of what might be
Don’t have a clue what waits ahead
But I’ll place my trust in me

–Anthony Sullivan

Blame, like forgiveness, is a completely misunderstood part of the healing process.

People are exhorted to stop blaming your parents! Move on! Let go!

‘Each moment you hold onto the resentment, you keep yourself stuck in a prison of victimhood.

You are not responsible for what happened to you as a child.

It happened.

You were young back then.

But now, today, you are responsible for what you choose to do.

It’s this ‘hurry up’ mentality toward healing because you need to be healed, recovered, better – and right now! – or you are unenlightened, deficient, creating your own misery.

Like many cases of abuse, healing is a process that occurs over time. In many cases, victims have had to live a lie for years – the lie that everything is okay, the lie that nothing is happening, the lie that their abuser is the best person in the world – so many lies for so many years. If you tell a lie for long enough, you’ll start to believe it…or, at the very least, identify with it. The lie becomes an inextricable part of your identity.

Blaming helps you claim your history, the truth of what actually happened, and rewrite your identity.

People believe that ‘victim’ is dis-empowering, but what if you have never before been able to tell the truth of your situation? To finally be able to speak the truth is empowering, to acknowledge your experience and, finally, allow yourself to feel what you’ve been suppressing to maintain the lies.

Blame is a tool that helps reinterpret those perceptions that have been skewed through attempts to cope in profoundly dysfunctional situations.

Blame is a function of the need to obtain support and validation from loved ones and the community, the need to reverse what has been pushed onto a victim by an abuser, and the need to reassert the truth.

Will blame always serve in someone’s best interests?

Of course not. But we need to fundamentally re-assess our concept of what healing entails; to expect someone to heal immediately from wounds that were inflicted over years is harmful, short sighted, and selfish.

Blame is warped in abusive relationships.

Abusers often blame the victim, the community often reinforces that blame, and victims blame themselves. The healthy, appropriate re-direction of that blame is healing for earlier stages of recovery.

It isn’t about ‘creating your own misery’, it’s about acknowledging the misery of your experiences.

The more I learn about abuse recovery, the more I think there is a law of conservation of emotions. And research shows that the brain will ‘defer’ dealing with strong emotions until it is safe to do so. You can’t wish away your emotions because healing means you’ve just decided to ‘live in the present’.

And of course, no one ever tells you to ‘get over’ and ‘move on’ from happy emotions.

What these stupid exhortations really mean is that you shouldn’t be angry, fearful, upset, frustrated, or ‘negative’. Because those emotions are ‘bad’ and being happy is ‘good’.

It’s like saying a hammer is ‘bad’.

A hammer is simply a tool.

So often victims have spent decades suppressing their emotions and emotional needs to protect themselves, to protect their connection with their abuser, to allow themselves to function in the world.

Anger allows you to own your experience, provides motivation for stepping back from an abuser, and gives you the opportunity and space to work through your emotions.

Anger can help you recalibrate your understanding of your worth and divest yourself of taking responsibility for the abuser’s actions.

Anger and hate can be important tools for stepping out of sadness, validating that what happened was not okay and that I did not do anything wrong, and helping break emotional ties to an abuser.

Anger and hate can be a catalyst for change, for strength, for standing up, for making a difference. Anger is often a symptom that something is wrong, not a disease that needs to be excised.

Anger is not ‘bad’.

Anger is a natural, NORMAL response to abuse. Anyone who believes that no emotions other than ‘positivity’ should be acknowledged, or who believes that anger and pain demonstrate a defect of character, is not someone who can be supportive of your healing.

Anger is generally a sign that something is wrong; we need to listen to our anger.

(…assuming we are not struggling with certain personality disorders or cognition errors.)

Children are innately in tune with their emotions – with no filter, or judgment, about them – but children of abuse are shown over and over that their emotions don’t matter, that they’re inconvenient, that they cause mommy or daddy to hurt them, that they are bad, wrong, ugly, mean. That child’s sense of themselves is destroyed and is replaced by the parent.

Anger can help a child of abuse find their voice.

Anger can help a child of abuse find their ‘self’. Anger can help a child of abuse realize that they have a right to be safe, to protect themselves. Anger can help a child of abuse know they are more than the use they have to their abuser.

A normal person feels angry when they see a child being abused; and it is normal to feel that anger on our own behalf.

Our culture has a lot of well-meaning, but harmful ideas around forgiveness:

• You can’t heal if you don’t forgive the person who harmed you.
• Forgiveness creates healing, is the cause of healing.
• Forgive even, or especially, if the other person hasn’t asked for it, hasn’t expressed remorse, hasn’t attempted to make amends.
• You are choosing suffering and pain if you don’t forgive.

These ideas are completely antithetical to the healing process.

Underlying the exhortations to forgive is the idea that anger is bad; the oft quoted “holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die” is ridiculously interpreted to mean that no one should be angry, or allow themselves to feel anger, and that being angry ‘makes you responsible’ for your own misery.

It becomes, essentially, thought- and feeling-policing; anger and hate and fear are toxic, we should only act from (and feel!) love and joy; ‘negative’ emotions serve to disconnect us from others, and we choose to suffer. But it isn’t an act of love to allow someone to hurt others, it isn’t an act of connection to ignore the pain they cause, and there is no joy in suffering. And people who’ve been harmed can connect through their anger and fear.

It is an unwitting cult of self-negation that preaches that normal human emotions and responses are toxic in and of themselves. That you should accept the ‘negative’ actions of others, and forgive them, regardless of how they have harmed you, but never accept ‘negative’ emotions in yourself.

It is an ‘enlightened’ iteration of victim-blaming

…one in which a victim is told that they are responsible for their own pain because they ‘refuse to let go’, one that demands the victim to accept someone else’s perspective on their reality before that someone else is ever required to see or act from the victim’s perspective.

Additionally, telling people what they should feel and how they should feel is abusive because it is defining.

“Any statement that tells you what, who, or how you are, or what you think, feel, or want, is defining you and is, therefore, abusive….as if to say, ‘I’ve looked within you and now I’ll tell you what you want, feel.'” – r/VerbalAbuse

Forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause.¹
Forgiveness is not a solution, it’s a process.²

The version of forgiveness being pushed is, in reality, unasked for absolution: intentional emotional amnesia that invalidates a victim’s experience.

Much of this particular paradigm around forgiveness is rooted in religious tradition, both Judeo-Christian and Buddhist. And yet, it wrongly interprets the Biblical model of forgiveness; it wrongly misinterprets the Buddhist concepts of “suffering” and pain.

Yet there is a reason that people subscribe so wholly to this mythology of forgiveness, a reason it is so enduring in spite of its harmful nature.

The reason is that we’ve mistaken forgiveness for compassion.

Compassion asks us to look at others and see, and acknowledge, their essential humanity.
Compassion asks us to look beyond a perpetrator’s actions, to the person.
Compassion asks us to treat them as human, and not an inscrutable monster.

Compassion doesn’t ask us to value someone else’s humanity and experience more than our own.
Compassion doesn’t ask us to justify/excuse/minimize a perpetrator’s actions because they are a human being.
Compassion doesn’t ask us to protect them from the consequences of their actions/choices.
Compassion doesn’t require a relationship with someone who has harmed us.
Compassion doesn’t demand we ignore ourselves, our experience, or the harm.
Compassion doesn’t demand that we ignore the perpetrator as an “unsafe” person.

And compassion doesn’t demand that we forgive

…though it might facilitate forgiveness, as it does accepting/letting go.

Compassion… asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. – Karen Armstrong

The issue with forgiveness comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of forgiveness and the process of healing. Here is how I personally clarify the issue of forgiveness:

• Forgiveness is a possible result of healing, not the result of healing. Basically, you can heal without forgiveness, and people who insist otherwise are mistaking cause-and-effect.
• Forgiveness requires the other party ask for forgiveness. What the forgiveness-pushers are really pushing is un-asked for absolution: “a freeing from blame or guilt; release from consequences, obligations, or penalties”. Additionally, it is impossible to genuinely and sincerely ask for forgiveness without attempting to make amends or restitution for those actions. It’s technically possible to ask for forgiveness without attempting to make amends or restitution, but it is a manipulation tactic without either of those elements.
• Forgiveness-pushers are also mistaking the concepts of “acceptance” and “letting go” for forgiveness. You do not have to forgive someone to accept what happened and let it go. For example, you can accept you were raped and let go of your pain from that rape and still go through with prosecution of the rapist. You do not have to forgive the rapist to accept what happened and move on.
• “Acceptance” and “letting go” are necessary for healing, however, people (1) do not understand that healing is a process and (2) these people mistake the effect of the healing process for the cause of the healing process. In order to accept what happened and let go of your pain, your experience needs to be validated. Anyone who demands you ‘let go’ of what happened so you can heal when what you need is validation of your experience, and support for that experience, is invalidating you and harming the healing process.
• Forgiveness is for the purpose of preserving relationships. If you decide, at a point along the healing process, that you want to maintain a relationship with someone who has harmed you, then forgiveness is necessary to move forward with that person at some future point. If you want a relationship with that person, at some point you have to move past what happened, because otherwise there really is no relationship, just contact that reinforces the harm. (Again, you do not have to have a relationship with an abuser or someone who has harmed you.) And how can you have a worthwhile relationship with someone if they never asked for your forgiveness, or apologized and tried to make it right?

The most important thing to remember about forgiveness and healing and acceptance and letting go is that healing is a process. You can’t insert A and get output B. I think of it like a continuum, and that healing is moving from one part of the continuum to the other. It is perfectly understandable to not be ready for something at one part of the continuum that you will be for at another part. Not being able to accept or let go of what happened now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to later, and you are not deficient for not being ready for that at the beginning.

People who push forgiveness forget the process they went through, and don’t understand the importance of that process, which is one reason why you see them push so hard. And they don’t understand that forgiveness and acceptance/letting go are not the same thing. They are only seeing a distorted part of the picture when trying to paint it for you.

The result of healing is not the cause of healing. And healing cannot begin until the harm has ended. How can you heal while the knife is in you?

Additional resources:

• u/SQLwitch explains true forgiveness and why we get it so wrong
• “I am prepared to forgive my enemies. But only when they cease to be my enemies.” – Primo Levi (regarding Holocaust Deniers)
• The misunderstood role of blame in healing and why you should blame your abuser
• “Forgiveness is giving up hope for a different past.” – Dan Siegel
• u/Polenicus’ gold standard explanation of how forgiveness is a result of healing, not the cause
• How I was able to forgive my father I wrote this before I got clear on the concept of forgiveness, so it really should be titled “How I Was Able To Accept What My Father Did and Let Go”
• An adult survivor’s guide to coping during the holidays, including the comments, is not directly about forgiveness but addresses the most important and unstated component of forgiveness which is to not abandon yourself
• My issues with forgiveness as enlightenment
• Concerning Foregiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth (via u/SQLwitch)
• Forgiveness and Letting Go
• The misunderstood role of blame in healing and why you should blame your abuser