Forgiveness is Not a Requirement for Healing

I mostly appreciate The Good Men Project, but they suffer a bit from something I call HuffPost syndrome. They have good intentions, but they publish so many articles on such a variety of topics, that they seem more intent on getting clicks than offering thoughtful and consistent arguments. I'm responding to a piece of pablum entitled,

“Why You’ll Never Truly Heal Until You Forgive Your Parents”

The opening sentence is worse than the headline:

“Growing up, most of us didn’t get the parents we needed.”

No, and some of us actually got monsters. This sweeping generalization may be literally true, but it also creates an obscenely false equivolancy between ‘poor parenting’ skills and violent, sadistic abuse and assault.

“Some of us got the strict ones. Some got the absent ones. Some got the overly controlling ones. Some got parents who were themselves children, trying to survive their own worlds while raising us. And all of this left marks. Sometimes, very deep ones.”

And some of us got raped, pimped out, and tortured. Some of us got “marks” so deep we ended up dead. Are you trying to tell me that my brother Frankie might not have killed himself had he only forgiven his parents? Will forgiving my parents free me from having to take four medications, including an anti-psychotic, for the rest of my life?

I understand about intergenerational trauma. I know my parents were also badly abused as children. You say you had to learn that your parents, “weren’t gods but just normal people like me.” Violent sexual abuse of children may be common or widespread, but there ain’t nothing normal about it. There’s a solar system of distance between a person who abuses and rapes their children, and those that don’t.

You write that “forgiveness is less about them and more about us,” but you make them the object of your essay’s title. By shackling my ability to heal to a mythical concept of “parental forgivess,” you keep me under their thumb. 

You declare an aspiration to “get free of” the script of childhood trauma, but all you present is an alternative version of a script that you’ve written for yourself, which you then project onto other survivors. I’ll grant that you may have needed to forgive your parents, but how dare you presume to know what my healing journey must look like.

My anger about and resentment towards what was done, and by whom it was done, have never been about trying to “fix the past.” These perfectly normal human emotions and attitudes, helped (and help) me maintain distance and separation from the past, and from my abusers. They free me from the past’s power to continue to shape or mold me as I grow into a future of my own design.

Telling a survivor of childhood abuse to “stop blaming” is a form of victim shaming, which is ironic because it is our shame about what was done to us that mostly holds us back from our healing.  I put the blame for my abuse where it is warranted, directly on my abusers. They will be guilty of those crimes for as long as I’m alive to remember them. I don’t need to let go of this reality.

I don't agree with survivors who say they don’t want their past abuse to define them. On the one hand, I get it, I’m not only someone who was abused. I am much more than that. But I absolutely am defined by what was done to me, a reason not least of which is that I survived. I made it through hell and back. And I’m still here. And my life is as good as I could hope for it to be, under these circumstances.

At some point in our healing work, survivors transition away from feeling like victims, and embracing our identity as survivors. But I’ve gone a step or few beyond that to feeling pride in who I am, not despite what happened, but because it happened and I’m still here. I wear this identity as a badge. 

Imagining who I might have been if I had been raised by “normal” parents will always leave me feeling resentful. I would like to have been that person. I had a right to be that person. It sucks a lot that the world was denied so many of that little boy’s talents and gifts. At the same time, through my healing, I have been able to bring that pre-abuse child back to life, because he is the one who is writing this. The idea that anger holds us back is a denial of our all too human nature. My anger is a righteous ally and friend, one that validates me as a whole human being.

I am 65 years old. I (mostly) hate my parents. Fuck them both. Saying that isn’t a burden or a flaw. It’s my right. And I can say it with pride and a smile on my face. It does me no harm to speak those words aloud, and brings me a little joy. I’m not going to let anyone else tell me what feelings or attitudes I need to have in order to be free of my trauma.

Instead of forgiving my parents, what I needed to do was abandon them. This has brought that young boy back to life, and will continue to bring him comfort for the rest of it.