On Forgiveness

On Forgiveness

by Treecollards


One of the most important interventions I have learned in the last few years of being a doctor is to ask the question, “What is the goal?” Especially in end-of-life or palliative care situations, knowing the goal makes it relatively easy to chose specific strategies, such as IV fluids or CPR, by whether or not they contribute to that goal.

I think of forgiveness as a strategy, and therefore I ask myself the question, is forgiveness a strategy that will contribute to my goal?

What is my goal?

I want to free the world, rescue and protect it from perpetration, that is, the violation of trust brought about by empathic failure. Some of the strategies I know how to use include: naming acts of perpetration as I see them; helping people (myself included) get past the denial and self-protective aversion that makes it so difficult to see what is really going on; not cooperating with perpetrators, trying to keep them from positions of power, not letting them define the terms of the argument, (the framing: please read George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, it is so helpful); advocating the goal of non-domination-based models of human interaction and society, promoting the strategies appropriate to that goal, such as non-violent communication, conflict resolution and child rearing; meditation and body awareness practices; and the formal study of empathy and perpetration.

I don’t at the present see forgiveness as a strategy that fosters my goal. In fact, I had this horrible image as I thought about all this: After the last fish in the sea is dead, and the last tree on the land is cut down, the last person alive on the planet gasps with their last breath of poisoned air, “I forgive them!”

So what goal does forgiveness serve? For one thing, I think that forgiveness is a strategy for dealing with the feelings of being overwhelmed and broken that are such a massive part of recovery from perpetration. It reminds me of the strategy of “turn it over,” which I used early in my recovery, when I was actively Twelve-Stepping. It’s a way of avoiding total breakdown or death by leaping over the most intense, unendurable feelings, the ones you know broke you completely the first time around, leaping over them into the “god-space.” Being in the “god-space,” like achieving enlightenment or “getting happy” through prayer, definitely helps a person feel better, and may save lives, too.

But as the Zen masters say, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” I am all in favor of forgiveness as a pain management, coping strategy for survivors. I am basically in favor of anything that relieves the pain. But I don’t see forgiveness as a political strategy that will free all of us. You can’t stop there.

The more I think about the forgiveness movement, the more I want to ask the always helpful question, “who benefits?” (Remember how Deep Throat advised, “follow the money”?) I hesitate a little to make these suggestions, because I have a lot of respect for some of the advocates of forgiveness, many of whom are themselves survivors of atrocities. But it seems to me that only the perpetrators benefit when victims get caught up in, and stop at, forgiveness. Instead of a social movement aimed at eradicating the causes of oppression, we have people engaged in an individual process of changing themselves so they can endure oppression better. I think this plays right into the hands of the perpetrators, especially their strategy of getting us to think that we create our own suffering: if you feel bad, it’s just because you have not completely forgiven those who hurt you.

Those “bad” feelings, especially the anger, are energy that can be used in the service of rescuing the planet. My goal would be to help people make that connection, connecting personal healing with social justice.

There are an awful lot of people out there carrying these horrible, huge, mind and body breaking, death shrouded feelings resulting from atrocity, and there is virtually no agreement among mental health practitioners about how to help them. Because of the power structure of our society, which permeates all our institutions, including the healing professions, a lot of what passes for treatment is fundamentally re-enactive, dedicated to maintaining and reinforcing power and denial, and subsequently helplessness and hopelessness, all the while reporting in amazement the growing numbers of people with “chemical imbalances.”

Perhaps it is possible for a survivor to have had truly effective therapy, to be a committed activist in the work of ending perpetration, and to advocate forgiveness of perpetrators. But for myself, today, I am not there.

safety is not a whistle

when conservative or mainstream agencies or groups address violence, the primary words that come up are 'crime' and 'safety'. 'crime' is generally code for poor, for people of color or immigrants. and 'safety' is about some particular kinds of protection: protecting respectable neighborhoods from intrusion by the unwanted, protecting girls and women from the streets, the night, by restricting our ability to be out in the world. the idea of being safe from economic exploitation or vulnerability, or one's own parents, or from government, doesn't really factor into the rhetoric.

'safety' campaigns involve lights, and whistles, both fine ideas in and of themselves--- but which taken in isolation totally ignore the issue of why we are supposed to expect violent attack, and from who. or they involve laws which only target economically and racially vulnerable people, and swell prison populations. 'safety' is either an excuse for state violence, or it's so deeply depoliticized and trivial, that it holds no meaningful promise for survivors of extreme oppression and violence.

a little more than a year ago, i worked with someone who was training as a somatics therapist. somatics can potentially be really helpful for some survivors, because it provides a way to help our bodies heal and express the pain of trauma. it was a very good experience for me, including the moments where my experiences of physical and sexual torture challenged the limits of what the body worker knew about healing. for the first few sessions, she would ask me various things about how my body could feel safe, or what kinds of movement or positions felt safer. eventually we were able to communicate about the fact that the questions just felt strange, or almost irrelevant to me. i could say that things felt bad, or less safe, or safer --- but the goal of establishing safety, in my body, in the presence of another person who'd i'd met recently --- was so far out of reach as to be impossible. for a while, it was an emotionally frustrating bind, because the body worker was presuming that we couldn't continue our work together if i felt unsafe, and i was totally unable to give her or myself an answer about how that might ever occur. so as she would try again to figure out with me how i could feel safe, based on the presumption that without that experience, i couldn't do any healing work, i would feel increasingly hopeless and alienated. part of what helped me through that process was knowing, from experience, that i'd already, in my life, been able to do a lot of healing without an experience of safety. once i was able to communicate more about it, and once the body worker figured out that my showing up and participating meant that i was being about as trusting as i conceivably could, we were able to move forward, with the shared understanding that i was going to work on healing, without the precondition of being or feeling "safe".

in talking to friends who've had similar experiences of torture or sexual exploitation, we were able to laugh (sadly) about the idea that anyone would think that feeling safe could be so achievable, so simple. although it wasn't the first time i'd thought or considered the issue of trauma and feeling unsafe, it highlighted for me the fact that i've lived most of my life, and done almost everything i've ever done, while feeling deeply unsafe. "unsafe", to me, means knowing that terrible and unexpected things may happen to me, even today, as an adult with my own home. probably, hopefully, likely, they won't --- but then again, once the unthinkable and unbearable have already happened, over and over, a bunch of times, well... all bets are off. it also means knowing that even if my life in the moment involves no bigger dramas than paying bills and doing lots of laundry, the memories, not just thoughts or images, but the full-body, emotionally wrenching, overwhelming memories --- are still with me. one of the consequences of being tortured in ways that --- as a child --- are totally incomprehensible and impossible to defend against, is that you get driven into a space that people sometimes think of as "edge of death" or "beyond horror". it's not something anyone just comes back from, at least without many many years of healing, and a lot of resources and support, and some pretty extraordinary resilience. in the meantime, not dying outright means deciding, consciously or not, to live, with most of one's psyche in that borderland between destruction and survival. it doesn't matter if i'm alone in my home, with locks locked, under a blanket, and about a 99.9% certainty that noone's going to show up. and it's not the .1% chance that someone will that makes me really feel so unsafe. it's that i was taken away from 'safety' as a small child, like it's some birthplace i don't remember, and have never re-visited. locks and blankets and friends and a home make me feel safer, less unsafe, and that's hugely important. trust, safety, security, are continuums --- and it's not that i'm always at the worst extremes. but "safe", i don't know or have.

while feelings of despair are sometimes part of the sexual trauma survivor borderland i live in, and while safety is mostly an unknown for me, it's actually really important to me to assert some relationship to the idea at least, of feeling safe. and i'm hopeful that it matters.

returning to the beginning of this post, i think it's especially important to talk about "safety" in ways that are politicizing, and that particularly speak to the needs and survival of people who've been deeply victimized. safety, to me, isn't cliche, or conservative. it's something i crave, like a missing piece of myself. being able to sleep, deeply and restfully, and wake up feeling strong and peaceful... being able to share with people who i am and what my life has been without bracing myself for objectifying, insensitive, or pitying responses. being able to ask for help and trust that some of the things i really really need will actually come to me, from people who care, and have resources to give freely. most importantly, living in a world that's some close approximation of safe, not specifically for me, but for kids, for people who are vulnerable, for animals, for the earth. safe... from exposure to slaughterhouses, pesticides, pedophiles, pimps, irradiation, presidents, militaries and militias, the IMF, bosses, and pornographers. see, here's the trick--- to go through extremes of sexual and physical torture, and to survive it emotionally, you have to be in touch with pain, to really know your own, know what it's about, rage it, grieve it, cry it, and turn it into art and action and words. to survive emotionally, you have to let yourself know the world that created torture, and to understand your connection to it. and if you understand that you're connected to the world, and to the beings in it, then it becomes absolutely and totally impossible to experience "safety" while knowing the constancy of oppression and violence. it matters greatly to me that i've had the luck, privilege, and stamina to stay alive and establish some kind of environmental/external safety around myself, represented by my loved ones, my home and its lockable doors, my checking acct, my adult citizenship, my education, my skills. but it's not, it's never ever nearly enough for me.

safety for me, is the goal of social change. without safety, sexual choices are never fully choices. without safety, health is always compromised, partial, vulnerable. without safety, pleasure is always tinged by grief and rage, because any pleasure highlights, by contrast, the intensity and variety of pain. without safety, words are always at least a little constrained, or frightening, or costly. without safety, privileges and 'protections' acquire distorted importance, and still are always inadequate. without safety, i can't rest. this kind of safety can't be had by restricting, or taking away freedoms, by giving up choices, or by policing, or criminalizing. it comes only with deep respect, to the point of reverence, for life in its many incarnations. it comes with the insistence on stopping abuse and torture and the willingness to confront and recognize perpetration, and it comes with the commitment to finding solutions to violence which deal not only with individuals as perpetrators, but even more so, with the histories and systems and that create them.

shrayberin