The Gift of Forgiveness

By David W. McMillan, Ph.D.

Most forgiveness advocates ascribe the purpose of forgiveness as part of a path toward reconciliation with a person or persons. Seen in this light, forgiveness is something the aggrieved party grants to the offending party. In this spirit the beneficiary of forgiveness is the offender. It may appear as a necessary step for peace and reunification between the two parties.

            This is definitely not the primary way I think about forgiveness. I see forgiveness of an offender as a gift the aggrieved gives themselves. I don’t even consider forgiveness to necessarily have anything to do with any rejoining in a real relationship. In fact, I would often not recommend reconnection or verbal or emotional exchanges happen between two parties in some relationships.  For example, I would not recommend or expect that a rape victim reconcile with their perpetrator as a potential friend.

            Yet, I would recommend that the rape victim should forgive their abuser, not for the abuser’s sake but for the victim’s sake. The kind of forgiveness I’m writing about is spiritual forgiveness, not behavioral forgiveness and reconciliation. The benefit of this forgiveness comes to the forgiver, more than it does the forgiven. It is the forgiver, who, I believe, benefits the most.

            Consider the rape victim. Let’s assume it is a freshman college coed. She arrived on campus and met a college junior male basketball player. His picture was on billboards advertising tickets to the game on campus. He was smart and charming. His friends admired and looked up to him.

            She became infatuated. He courted her for a month. Then, he seemed to tire of her. She was confused. She texted him and asked him why he was avoiding her. He gave her lame excuses. Her friends told her they saw him with another girl. She went with her friends to a party and found him there. He yelled at her and told her to leave the party and that she was not to see other men.

            Later, he called her late at night and demanded that she come to his room. Still in his spell, she went, knocked on his dorm room door and opened it when she heard him say, “Get in here, now.”

            When she opened the door, she saw him standing by his bed in his underwear. He grabbed her arm. She said, “No, stop,” and you can imagine the rest.

            She left his room in shock, numb. She went about her daily class routine as if nothing had happened. Then, she began crying in public for what appeared to be no reason. She hid in her room when she didn’t go to class, afraid that she might see him. She rarely ate, but when she did it was food from her dorm vending machines. She lost weight. She sought therapy from the college counseling center. She stumbled through the year. She had a full scholarship to t his college, so she felt she had to return the next year.

            When she returned, she found out that her counselor had filed a Title IX charge against him. She was not prepared for this. When the investigators came to interview her, she denied it. Later, she contacted the Title IX investigative team and confirmed with them that she had been raped.

            Her phobia of being on campus continued. Her eating disordered progressed to bulimia. She was prescribed meds for anxiety. The Title IX investigators completed their report. A trial was scheduled. She didn’t want to attend or be a witness, but the school implied she might lose her scholarship if she didn’t testify. So, she did. The trial appeared to be an attempt to protect the star basketball player. The hearing office found his denials to be credible and that she was not believable.

            This experience left her frightened and enraged. She felt that she had no voice, no power, that his male entitlement and his misogyny had been affirmed by the system. She felt betrayed by her therapist, and by the Title IX investigators. Her fear paralyzed her. Her anger poured out of her in enraged tears. “How could he get away with what he did?” she shouted, alone in her room.

            People in her apartment building heard her shouts. Someone called the police. The police came, took her to the hospital E.R. and eventually she came to see me.

            We worked together for several weeks, making little progress. One day, I stumbled onto the idea that sadness can undo fear and rage. So, I asked her to remember a time when she was significantly sad, when she recognized that she could not get what she wanted; that something had died; that she had to let go.

            She remembered a time when she did not get a part in the high school play. She was devastated. She began to cry. Prior to this she had cried, but her tears were filled with rage and her desire for revenge.  But these were tears of grief, of facing a reality that she couldn’t control and letting go of wanting; seeing the futility of her desire.

            She cried for five minutes. It was like her sadness squeezed out her fear and anger. Those angry fearful feelings smothered her with tension and filled her with energy, which had no place to go.

            Now she sat in front of me on my couch, sad and limp.

            I asked her if she was afraid.

            “No,” she said.

            “Are you angry?” I asked.

            “No, I’m sad,” she said. “I will never be vindicated, will I.”
            “I don’t think so,” I agreed.

            “There is peace in this sadness,” she said. “In the moment, I’m not banging my head against the wall. What happened isn’t okay, but it happened. I can’t change it. That’s sad, isn’t it?”

            “Yes, it is,” I agreed again.

            “He will never know what he did was wrong, will he?”

            “I expect not.”

            “Why have I been fighting so hard? I think I know,” she said. “I’ve been fighting for him, for his character, for the daughter he may have some day, for his wife. It’s too much. I can’t spend the rest of my life fighting for him. I won’t let him steal my sexual future. I won’t let him make me frigid. I want to have a husband someday. I want children. I can’t stay in this frightened angry place. I’ve got to get out of here. Please, Dr. McMillan, help me.”

            “I’ll try,” I said. “What I’m about to say may sound strange to you. But bear with me. I want to suggest that you forgive him and put him in the past and stop allowing him to live in your head. He takes up too much space there.”

            “That will be hard,” she said.

            “Yes, I expect it will, but you’re half way there. You have discussed that life is not a happy-ever-after story. We all die. Life’s a tragedy. When we’re honest with ourselves that’s what we see. And you just discovered that. What happened in your relationship with him was a tragedy for you both.”

            “Yes, it was,” she said.

            “Love is filled with loss,” I said. “All love stories end in tragedy, even the best. We all begin relationships with hopes and expectations and every day, we learn more about our partner. We learn that they are not who we thought they were. They disappoint us in one way or the other. Eventually, we either lose some capacity or they do. They don’t help us as we had hoped or we don’t help them as they expected. Disappointment washes over us in waves. We have to let go of our dream of who we thought they were and see who they are. Love hurts.”

            “My rape was a big dose of hurt,” she said.

            “It was, but do you want to stop taking the risk of loving? Yes, love disappoints and love hurts, but love excites, teaches, enriches and expands our hearts. Love transforms us and helps us discover our best selves.”

            “No, you’re right. I won’t let this take away my courage. It will take courage, but I want to promise myself, I will risk loving again.”

            “Wow! That’s courage,” I said.

            “So why do I want to forgive him and even if I did, how can I?”

            “So, you’ve already begun the spiritual forgiveness process. The end of this process is -  now, we aren’t there yet, - but the end of the process is to wish him well and to give him to God and let God teach him what he needs to learn in this life. You don’t need that burden. Let God bless him.”

            “Oh, I’m getting a glimpse of what you’re saying,” she said. “How do I get there?”

            “Like I said, you’re already on the road. You have filled your brain, heart and soul with sadness. You have discovered that life, - mine, yours, his - is a tragedy we all share. You have seen that you were both hurt in this period of your coming together.

            “You were both possessed by the mating forces of nature. These forces make us crazy. You can see this in the explosion of spring. It is especially obvious in the mating of cicadas every thirteen years. The power of the species mating demands possesses all humans fiercely in their young adulthood. And some of us are injured in this explosion. This time you and he were injured, both of you in very different ways.”

            “Yes, we were,” she said, “The worst of his character was enabled.”

            “Yes,” I said, “he will go unchallenged into an entitled narcissistic isolation where he may be powerful, he may get things he wants, but he will become isolated and lonely and impossible to love.”

            “That’s a tragedy,” she said. “I see what you are saying. I’m trapped by my fear and rage, by my desire for justice. If I forgive him and let God bless him and keep him, then I can release myself from my prison. I can let myself be loved. I can live without having to control. When I can’t have what I want, I can cry, really cry, grieve and let got to make room for a new love.”

            “Yes,” I said. “Love is always available if we can open our eyes, see it and risk letting it into our hearts. But teaching him a lesson will not open your heart. Forgiving him and letting him go, will.”

            “So, I’m here now,” she said, “My sadness and compassion has freed me, but I know that prison of anger and fear will return. What do I do when it does?”

            “You cry, sad tears, not raging tears, you remember not getting a part in that play. That memory is a treasure. It cleanses you with real sadness, with real letting go of control. It brings you to the present reality that life, not just for you but for all of us, hurts. So, cry. Be sad. The good thing about sadness is it’s boring. If you let yourself feel it and don’t block it, soon you will want to feel something else. You will be curious. You will wonder and want again.”

            “So, forgiving him is a gift to me.”

            “Yes, it is.”

            Nobody ever changes or gets better because someone wants them to or because someone tells them they should. We only change when that change feels good to us, when this change is something we want, that obviously benefits us.

            We can’t forgive someone because it is the right thing to do, because it will satisfy someone else, because it will make them feel better. We will only change if changing will feel good to us. Real change must satisfy us.  
            And if we move through an emotional process of forgiveness which begins with sadness, a sadness which truly fills us with a new set of neurohormones substance P, MAO and CRF. When sadness neurohormones enter the brain, they wash away the fear/anger neurohormones. These sadness neurohormones leave us limp and weary but with a clear picture of reality, of life as it is. We see life is a tragedy; that love hurts.

            Our sadness can move us out of our pity-party, poor-me-story in which we are the single victim and place us among all humanity. There we see that our offender, too, is a thread woven into the human tragic fabric. Our abuser, too, is injured and lost.

            We can have compassion for them as we have compassion for ourselves. We can release them to Fate. We can let go of our responsibility to teach them a lesson and help them find accountability. Let God do that and accept God’s invitation to you to enter the next chapter of your life cleansed in humility and sadness with the courage to risk loving and caring again.