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