On Forgiveness

Forgiveness is one of those ideas that is capable of making any traumatized individual squirm. It’s confusing and feels icky and unfair and sort of exhausting. Practitioners in the therapeutic space are quick to say “forgiveness is not the same as condoning the behavior” but actually, at least according to Merriam-Webster, it kind of is. The synonyms for the verb to forgive are: excuse, condone, or pardon. 

So… yeah. 

There’s a reason why trauma survivors (hello, pretty much everyone) have a hard time with forgiveness. It makes us feel like we have to do the heavy lifting while the perpetrator of egregious crimes of neglect, harm, and abuse against us get to get off scott free. It makes us feel empty, unseen, invalidated, dismissed… the list is endless. It makes us feel like sainthood is required for a full recovery, which is just exhausting. 

Recently, I realized that forgiveness is the wrong word to use for this necessary step in recovery. Words like letting go, detaching, and forgiveness were incomprehensible to me for a long time and terribly invalidating. Doesn’t everyone realize that trauma survivors would be the first to let go, detach, or forgive if they had that option? 

As I have created safety and healing through faith, I have also come to the conclusion that letting go, detachment, and forgiveness are all different ways of saying we need to give up on the history that is weighing us down. What our spiritual path is really asking of us is to choose freedom. Faith, in my experience, lifts the spirit. The baggage of the past weighs it down. We can’t bring our trauma sources with us on our journey to a better life. In order to fly free, that weight has to stay behind. And I don’t think I could’ve arrived at this awareness without faith.