Forgiveness
Why does everyone always talk about forgiveness? You’ll often hear people give the advice to forgive yourself and others, “Forgive and Forget”. But what does that actually mean? When something horrible happens are we really supposed to forgive and forget? If you have ever experienced trauma, you probably know how impossible it feels to “forgive and forget”.
So is there anything to forgiveness? If so, what exactly does that mean? And more importantly, how do you even do that?
First let’s take a dive into the reasoning behind forgiveness. I don’t think the main idea of forgiveness is for the benefit of the person who wronged us and absolve them of any wrong doing. I think the main idea is to stop the suffering of the person who experienced some kind of trauma.
When we experience trauma there can be profound negative effects. We can startle easily and always be on edge that something bad will happen. We can get stuck on what happened, either replaying the incident, or replaying how we wish that we handled the situation differently. We can isolate ourselves from others and experience symptoms of anger, depression, anxiety, and feelings of low self worth.
With all of that in mind, I don’t think forgiveness is where you start. I think the idea meant behind forgiveness is correct. We want to stop the suffering, we want to stop the power that trauma has over us. We don’t do that by making the decision that we are going to forgive. We do that by processing through the traumatic event in order to decrease the emotions, body sensations, and negative self beliefs that traumatic event brings up in us. EMDR is one way to process through past traumas. EMDR is a therapy used to target traumatic events and decrease the power they have over us.
The idea is not to forget what we experienced but instead to regain a sense of control. As far as forgiveness, at some point after the trauma has been processed and we have created meaning and gained a better understanding we may decide to forgive, and we may decide not to. I don’t think forgiveness is necessarily required in order to let go of some of the pain. So instead of forgive and forget, we can process and release. Process through the trauma and release the power it has over us.
