Forgiveness - Focusing on Ourselves

The idea of forgiveness brings up strong feelings for many people, myself included. I struggle to write about it and to talk about it, which makes me think it’s important to try – even if I’m somewhat clumsy. We often shy away from topics that leave us unsettled or frustrated for their heaviness and lack of clarity. But in some ways, I think this can make things worse – robbing us of the opportunity to stretch our internal capacities to bear the messiness of our existence. Perhaps devoting a little bit of time here and there to heavier topics will build our mental and emotional muscles, so to speak. 

Why forgiveness? Earlier today, I read a quote by Leonard Cohen about letting people “off the hook” – it made me think about how hard that is to do sometimes. Often, we hold onto hurt, hoping to never be hurt again. To a certain extent, this is a natural response, but at some point, we begin to lose things. Our lives become smaller, our hearts heavy, our gaze forever trained on the possibility of hurt in the future. When this is the case, what does it mean to let someone off the hook or forgive? I found this so difficult to imagine, I decided to come at it from a different angle – an angle of letting ourselves off the hook. 

When we become hypervigilant after a painful experience, we take on a tremendous burden, telling ourselves we should have seen it coming, so from now on, we will be ever-watchful. We may even tell ourselves that what happened to us was someone else’s fault, but when we vow to never let it happen again, a part of us imagines that we “let” it happen the first time, so it’s up to us to prevent it. This gives us a sense of control, which feels deeply important when we’re hurt and afraid. But imagining we have more control than we actually do comes at a cost. 

Inflating our sense of control is like running towards a mirage in the distance – the control we wish we had is an illusion, so we run and run, but never reach it. Only when we give up the illusion of total control can we stop and rest. I imagine this is what it might be like to let ourselves off the hook, to forgive. We stop believing we should have known better or that we have the ability to prevent this pain from happening again. We give control back to the universe, nature, a deity, or maybe chance. When we do this, we might find that we’re left with grief – the painful thing happened and no matter how much we wish we could have prevented it, we could not.

I think grief is often the thing that keeps us on the hook, running towards the mirage of control. To let go would mean accepting that the painful thing happened, we survived, and now we are changed. This is so hard to accept. I think it can make us feel small and powerless to be so impacted by people and events in our lives. But perhaps we need to know that our power is limited so we don’t lose ourselves chasing mirages of control. And perhaps this makes us big in a different way, not because we can control everything, but because we’ve accepted that we can’t and that takes courage and honesty to admit. 

I think no matter what we believe about forgiveness, we need to think about it. Perhaps a good starting place for us all is to recognize that forgiveness will look different for everyone and it’s up to each one of us to examine it for ourselves. If you’d like support exploring this topic and more, please reach out. The weight of our messy existence is not so heavy when we carry it together. 

Warmly,

Ileana Arganda-Stevens, LMFT#129032

Therapist, Program Manager, Supervisor