A few years after they separated, Michelle attended a meditation retreat with the goal of releasing the “toxic” energy that continued to possess her. “First, I had to forgive and let go of the past and cultivate compassion for myself, for him, and for us,” she says. “I did a lot of screaming and crying. Afterward, I felt exhausted, but hardly better.”
The surprise came on her way home when she stopped by her ex’s house to pick up their children. He quietly took her aside. “I’ve been thinking that I have to get over us,” she remembers him saying. “I don’t want to turn into one of those bitter, angry people who at eighty years old still complains about something that happened in the past. We have three children together. The things that we liked and loved about each other are still there, so maybe we can build on that.”
“It’s difficult to convey just how profound that moment felt to me,” Michelle says now, considering that the two had hardly been speaking. “It was the first time in my life I had the experience of shared consciousness, a raw certainty that my internal processes had somehow been part of his consciousness, too. In any case, it was a beginning, and we took baby steps from there.”
Now, Michelle reports, she and her ex are very good friends. They recently decided that their kids should live full-time in one house and that the two of them would take turns going between the children’s home and another shared house. The arrangement is working smoothly, she says, adding, “We enjoy our friendship, our co-parenting. We laugh together, we complain together, we are very supportive of each other’s goals, and that includes our own separate romantic lives.
“We both saw through the layers of the past and pain to something greater that we shared, and we cultivated it,” she concludes. “That is love.”
TO FORGIVE DOES NOT MEAN TO FORGET
WE’VE ALL HEARD the idiom “Forgive and forget,” as if processing pain inflicted upon us by others is a quick and easy job. The phrase is an imperative and renders the idea of forgiveness compulsory; in order to heal, we must enter a state of denial and effectively avoid the pain that we have been experiencing.
But, of course, forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice. We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation. What we can do is create space for ourselves to forgive—and, perhaps ironically, part of that involves allowing ourselves to wrestle with our feelings of anger and pain to begin with. Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.
Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness. Without that, we live in an artificial reality that is frozen in time, and sometimes woven from fabrication. I have a friend who believes that a central reason for her divorce is that she spoke the truth after her ex-husband’s parents died and he waxed on about his perfect, idyllic childhood. “But you put your drunken parents to bed each night,” she would point out. “You dropped out of college to do that.” Her words undermined the story he was telling, and his need for a rosier past took precedence over the love between them. It also took precedence over his ability to forgive his parents, and the chance for love alongside the pain of his broken dreams.
At times, reality is love’s great challenge. When our old stories and dreams are shattered, our first instinct may be to resist, deny, or cling to the way things were. But if we loosen our grip, often what fills the space is a tender forgiveness and the potential for a new and different kind of love.
Helen Whitney, director of the documentary Forgiveness, has said, “We talk about forgiveness as if it were one thing. Instead, we should talk about forgivenesses. There are as many ways to forgive as there are people needing to be forgiven.” In other words, there are an incalculable—even infinite—number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness. Expecting it to be a singular action—motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget—can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger. Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution. We cannot simply “forgive and forget,” nor should we.
Recognizing that there are many possible forms of forgiveness enables us to explore the possibilities for forgiveness, and what we need to forgive. When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance—for ourselves, as well as others—over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we’ve been hurt to the core. But that doesn’t mean we ever forget.
A student of mine had been molested by her father when she was younger than seven years old. He had been arrested and jailed after that, and now, as an adult who had had no contact with him for years, she struggled with the idea that to be a good person she had to go see him. She came to me privately and asked if I thought it was necessary for her to meet with him. She was frightened at the prospect, but thought it might be obligatory, a necessary step in her healing. I told her I didn’t think she should feel compelled or coerced to do anything.
Confrontation might be right for some people, but not for others. Only the person who has been harmed can know what’s right for her—and achieving clarity can take a long time. In my student’s case, there were many possible reasons for her feeling that confrontation was obligatory. Perhaps she wanted to feel more empowered or realize firsthand that the little child inside of her was not to blame for what happened. Since her father had been jailed, perhaps she was also dealing with some level of guilt for his suffering. But the bottom line is that no one should feel pressured to confront an abuser. Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all. Some people write letters to an abuser and mail them, while others write letters and burn them to ashes. Still others may prefer to role-play their confrontation scene with a therapist or trusted friend.
Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us. We don’t have to meet them for coffee or invite them to Thanksgiving dinner. We don’t have to engage with them in any way.
Understanding this came as a relief to Marjorie. After attending one of my talks, she described how the practice of lovingkindness had helped her to forgive a once-close friend who had sent her a cruel, damning letter. But just as important, Marjorie said, the practice of self-compassion had enabled her not to include the friend in her current life.
A decade earlier, Marjorie’s teenage daughter had attempted suicide and was admitted to a mental hospital. The friend, who had been Marjorie’s closest confidante for many years, had been an important person to Marjorie’s children, as well. After the suicide attempt, the woman wrote a letter blaming Marjorie for her daughter’s problems. She criticized Marjorie’s child-rearing, her performance at her job—even the way she hugged. At a time when Marjorie most needed kindness and compassion, her friend only added to her pain. After a short, tense conversation, Marjorie and the woman stopped speaking.
Six years later, when Marjorie’s daughter was well and succeeding in college, the friend e-mailed Marjorie. Even the sight of the woman’s name in her e-mail queue caused Marjorie’s blood pressure to spike. Bristling with anger, she opened the message, expecting it to contain more hurtful remarks. She was stunned when she read how much her friend missed her and how sorry she was for what she’d said. But Marjorie was still so angry, she was unmoved by the note. She was furious that this person had the nerve to ask for reconciliation after having caused her so much pain.
Yet over the next few weeks, Marjorie began to remember how close her friend had been to her daughter, including the special times they’d shared. She came to appreciate that her friend, who had no children of her own, had experienced her daughter’s crisis almost as profou
ndly as Marjorie had. As she allowed more and more space for the fullness of this event to unfold in her mind, Marjorie’s ill will diminished, and she made her friend the focus of her lovingkindness meditation. Marjorie began to wish her friend well and hope that she would prosper.
At the same time, she wasn’t prepared to include the woman in her life; she knew she couldn’t again trust her with the intimate secrets they’d once shared. A month later, Marjorie wrote back thanking her for her e-mail, adding: “Know that I forgive you completely and hold no bad feelings for you. I wish you well. Forgiveness leaves us both free to move on.”
Ultimately, we forgive others in order to free ourselves. What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.
Like Marjorie, we may forgive someone who has hurt us, yet choose not to resume a relationship with that person. There is no need to think, Well, I’ve got to get over this so you can be my best friend again. But if we can find a way to forgive and free our hearts, in effect we’re saying, Life is bigger. We’re bigger and stronger than the hurt we’ve suffered.
Forgiveness can also be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime. Regardless of the decision we reach about whether or not to include someone in our present-day life, in the end, forgiveness is a path to peace and an essential element of love for ourselves and others.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
WE ALL ARE, or have been, sons and daughters. In an ideal world, we have warm, loving relationships with our parents or those who raised us. We feel seen, supported, and loved unconditionally by them. As we grow older, they respect our choices and accept us for the people we have become.
Yet for many of us, our families of origin didn’t provide the sort of safe harbors we might fantasize about or hope to create for our children. So often we carry the scars of our early experiences into adulthood. In his book Telling the Truth, the American theologian Frederick Buechner wrote: “You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
It took me years of meditation practice to realize that forgiveness would need to play a role in my coming to terms with my childhood: my mother’s sudden death when I was nine, my father’s disappearance when I was four, and his reappearance, brought down by years of mental illness, when I was eleven. Though neither of my parents deliberately deserted me, nevertheless, I was, in effect, abandoned by them, and to me, it felt like cruel rejection.
My opening to forgiveness first took the form of being able to connect to something bigger. Years into my practice, I was sitting a retreat and the despair of my childhood loneliness and fear surged up and filled me. But as I sat, trying to accept what I was feeling, I also suddenly knew that no matter what I might have gone through or might yet go through, I was capable of love that was big enough to hold whatever sorrow or brokenness might arise.
Rilke wrote, “So you must not be frightened. If a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen, if restiveness like light and cloud shadows passes over your hands and over all you do, you must think that life has not forgotten you.”
I was rocked by the sense of not having been forgotten by life itself. From that understanding, I saw so much more deeply that my parents would have done anything to protect me and couldn’t. Sometimes parents or caregivers are unable to protect their children because of ignorance, circumstances, illness, addiction, their own history of abuse, or just really bad luck. But I saw that there is love in this world—not of my making or contrivance, or my parents’, but raw, natural, present—no matter what.
That’s what gave me the strength to not feel so impoverished and to look at my mother and my father not through the lens of abandonment but with much deeper compassion and forgiveness.
OPENING TO CHANGE OVER TIME
I MEET MANY adults who have long histories of tense, fractious relationships with their mothers or fathers—or both. In some cases, contact between these adult children and the older generation remains sporadic and strained for decades, with bitterness and resentment on both sides. For as long as she remembers, my friend Ellen had a hard time with her mother, Charlotte, a woman she describes as angry, narcissistic, and extremely judgmental.
“For most of my life, she was so disapproving of me, I cut off contact with her for long periods of time,” Ellen says. “I was a child of the sixties, and she just never got me. Even after I started practicing lovingkindness meditation, it felt impossible for me to open my heart to her. I stayed away from her as much as I could.”
Eventually, however, life intervened. Ellen’s father passed away; Charlotte, who was living on her own in Florida, fell and broke her hip; and Ellen’s brother and only sibling refused to get involved. “At first, the idea of becoming my mother’s caregiver seemed like a sick joke, one of those crazy, karmic twists of fate I might have found amusing if it hadn’t been happening to me,” recalls Ellen. “Every cell in my body was screaming, ‘No!’ I’d never felt safe around my mother. Still, there she was, ninety years old, all alone, with a broken body. I had to ask myself: Even if I don’t feel love for this woman, what kind of human being would I be if I turned my back on her? How could I live with myself? After all, even though she was a lousy mother, she did give me life, and I was grateful for that.” Ellen wound up arranging Charlotte’s move to a retirement home a few miles from her house in Boston.
“I have friends, also the daughters of difficult women, who had major rapprochements with their mothers, but I never dreamed that such an opening could take place between Charlotte and me,” Ellen says now. “I didn’t even want it to happen. I didn’t want to forgive her, because that would mean letting her into my life, and that felt too dangerous.”
Ellen need not have worried—at least not initially, because Charlotte was furious with her. She yelled at Ellen and called her a bully. She accused her of stripping her of her independence and turning her into an invalid. Once again, Ellen became the target of her mother’s rage. And though she did what was necessary—taking Charlotte to doctors’ appointments, seeing that she was well taken care of, making perfunctory visits—she says she did it all with a shuttered heart.
Psychologist and author Mary Pipher once said that it’s human nature to love who and what we care for. And, much to her surprise, that’s what happened to Ellen. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, over the few years Charlotte had left, Ellen let down her guard and grew to genuinely love her mother.
“I don’t know if it was her increasing frailty and awareness that she wasn’t going to live forever or my ongoing practice of lovingkindness, but a seismic shift took place in both of us,” Ellen reflects. “For the first time, I began to feel truly seen by my mother. On Mother’s Day a few weeks before she died, she wrote me a card telling me how much she loved me and she thanked me for taking such good care of her. I don’t think I’d felt that depth of love coming from her since I was very young, and maybe never at all.”
As Charlotte lay dying, Ellen realized that all her life she had regarded her mother only in relation to herself, not as a separate person—a woman who was fiercely creative and intelligent but unfulfilled, and who came of age at a time when so little was expected of women. “As I sat by her side not trying to do anything but be present, everything that had divided us came unhooked, and we forgave each other for everything,” says Ellen. “Even though I resisted becoming my mother’s caregiver, I shudder when I think of what a terrible loss it would have been for both of us if we hadn’t had that chance to find our way home to each other. In the end, Charlotte and I—and the great mystery of life itself—were so much bigger than our differences, there was nothing left but love.”
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“DON’T GET AHEAD OF YOURSELF”
OUR RELATIONSHIPS ARE also deeply impacted by our ability to forgive life for being as it is: ever changing, outside of our control. Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it. It’s human nature to want to do all we can to stave off the inevitable. Our resistance to accepting the truth that we and those we love will someday die is deeply rooted in us and the source of some of our greatest suffering. Yet when we’re able to open to the truth of our most shattering losses, at times we find moments of unimagined grace.
Mary, a writer in New York, and Jack, her television producer husband, live and swear by that phrase. “It may sound simplistic, but we’re constantly saying it to each other,” she reflects. “I don’t know how we would have gotten through the last forty-six years if we hadn’t deliberately practiced not looking ahead, because so often, the future has been terrifying.” In 1970, a year after they met and two months before they planned to be married, Jack, then thirty-six, and Mary, twenty-four, went body-surfing off the coast of Long Island. When a giant wave rolled in, Mary dove under it while Jack took the wave and was flung hard against the shallow beach. He broke his neck, and the doctors predicted he’d never walk again. Thankfully the doctors were wrong, and eventually Jack did walk, first with crutches, then canes, and eventually on his own until years later, he needed a walker. The couple’s wedding took place one year after the original date.
But, Mary says now, “I had to let go of the old Jack. I was still in love with him, but he wasn’t the same man as before. In many ways, the accident defined our life, but at the same time, we chose not to let it.” Jack and Mary were determined to live as close to a normal life as possible, and they raised two daughters, traveled widely, and worked hard at their respective professions. Over the years, however, Jack’s physical challenges became more pressing and limited what they could and couldn’t do. “At each stage, even as life got more constrained, we both managed to maintain a certain amount of independence and look at the glass as half-full,” says Mary.
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