Liberation Ends at Forgiveness
Exclusive Writing Lab on how confronting memoir as act of absolution
Adding forgiveness into your process of processing, the four layers of forgiveness, and some practical tips. Plus, a prompt question.
I cannot quite believe I’m doing a third posting on processing, but this conversation seems to get bigger as I write about it. Over at the Studio we are all talking about processing now, too. It seems we cannot talk about it enough right now, and this could be about the time of year…winter…but also the intensity of the last couple of years. Bottom line, it feels like people aren’t just processing specific memories in their writing, but at the collective level, too. And, as part of this processing, people seem to be re-evaluating the past, the present and even their hopes for the future.
And that has me thinking about forgiveness, an important component of processing (and life).
A Little Background
When I first encountered forgiveness, I was a young child attending the Catholic church. Forgiveness was require of me, and others, in order to be good, acceptable, virtuous in the community of the church. It was one of those “rules.” Forgive = good. Don’t forgive = bad.
Over the years, I clung to this rather limited understanding of forgiveness which, like God Himself, up-on-a-cloud, made me feel small and scared. I had to forgive. Case closed. Sound familiar?
Then came the news that priests in the Church were sleeping with little kids, and the Vatican was shuffling the abusers around to other churches and new unsuspecting victims. I also learned that this same Church forced young girls, who found themselves pregnant, to give up their babies…forever. (Which, by the way, is against the law. No matter your age, if you are able to have a baby, you have a legal right to keep it). And the blows kept coming. This Church and it’s demands on me didn’t bring me around, rather the duplicity of “do as I say, but not as I do,” made me toss up my hands.
When I left, I had to unstick my ideas about forgiveness from that institution and go it alone. Enter Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
“Oh, arg, forgiveness?” you say. Anything but that? But you know in your heart that someday, sometime, it will come to that. ~ Women Who Run with the Wolves
Women Who Run With the Wolves
Years ago, I wrote an article about forgiveness for the Huffington Post, and quoted my favorite author on the subject.
Poet, psychoanalyst, and post-trauma specialist, Estes writes about the human struggle in a way that will move you at a heart and soul level. The stories she tells and then analyzes, will help you with this process of processing, too. For this post, I want to zero on in what processing can do for us around forgiveness, for without an effort toward at least reckoning with this idea, you may not be able to go the distance with your processing…you may not be able to push through to the other side.
Estes & The Stages of Forgiveness
to forego—to leave it alone
to forebear—to abstain from punishing
to forget—to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell
to forgive—to abandon the debt
to forego:
This means “to take a break from thinking about the person or the event for a while…[it] means to take up that weaving, that writing, to go to that ocean, to do some learning and loving that strengthens you, and to allow the issue to drop away for a time.”
to forebear:
This means, “…neither thinking about it or acting on it in small or large ways…This does not mean to go blind or dead and lose the self-protective vigilance. It means to give a bit of grace to the situation and see how that assists…[it means] to have patience, to bear up against, to channel emotion.”
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