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.