School has started, and our first official assignment in our Philosophy of Conflict class was to write a reflective paper which addressed a scenario which we found "unworthy" of forgiveness. In class we explored how different cultures, backgrounds, environments, family styles, etc., define forgiveness.
We went through a few graphs and charts and our professor summarized two main beliefs in relation to Forgiveness:
1.) Those that believe forgiveness has to do with what's best for the community, ie, not letting a rapist out on the street. This is unconditional forgiveness. No matter what you did in the past, if you screw up again in the future, it doesn't matter. That past incident doesn't count.
2.) Those that forgive for their own relief, to relieve themselves of a burden. ie, the person still did something bad but "holding on" to that anger isn't helpful to the individual person. This type of forgiveness is usually considered "conditional" because the person can't make that mistake again or you'll "remember" the past error.
**And just as a clause, in general: One person's beliefs aren't better or worse than anothers. That's not what I'm saying in any way. The assignment was to define it FOR MYSELF ONLY, and provide an example. If you believe the exact opposite, that's totally peachy. This just totally explained to me why I couldn't forgive when people asked me to.***
This is super over simplifying it, but I don't have my notes and this post is going to be super long.
I had these HUGE ah-ha moments in class when I realized what forgiveness meant to me and why in my scenario with Matt I just couldn't do it.
I define forgiveness as absolution, erasing the past- saying it didn't matter. Let's move on and forget about it. But that definition minimizes the experience of the victim. There is no validation for the person who was hurt. The actions do not matter. (That's what it means and communicates to me and what I am expressing TO YOU if I am forgiving you. What you didn't matter, we are all cool. Never happened.)
The other side of this is apparently a European based, individualistic approach to forgiveness which is more along the lines of "forgive, but never forget." Something like that. It all varies depending on each person's background, cultural influences, etc.
Our professor did not grade us with letter grades since this was a reflective paper, and he didn't want us to feel he was judging our experiences. So the possible "grades" were: Excellent, Very good, Good, and Ok. Only three people got "Excellent"'s and I was one of them. He also wrote in his comments that mine was the best he'd read so far. (My dad queried- so yours was the first he read?)
I'm pasting the entire paper in here- it's about 6 pages. (So beware). It was so healing and cathartic however I wanted to include it.
Some notes- he specifically asked us to make "I" statements and to write in a narrative style. He said he was only interested in quotes and such so far as they supplemented our own thoughts. No footnotes allowed, and no citations. No introductory paragraph or conclusionary paragraph necessary in the formal sense.
Off we go!
Assignment
1: Worthy of Forgiveness
Departing class on the second day of lecture, I overheard
Professor Ryan remark that betrayal is the most difficult type of act to inspire forgiveness. Betrayal
is usually tied in with trust, and when we lose trust in a person or
relationship, we may sometimes find that we lose that trust and
self-assuredness in ourselves. Based on my own experiences, which have shaped
my outlook and thoughts on the matter, I agree wholeheartedly that betrayal is
an incredibly difficult violation to forgive, and for me personally, I have
found it to have nearly eliminated my ability to even consider forgiveness. While in meaning, forgiveness may seem to be
a universally understood concept, it is in truth very personally defined and I
have found my own perspective to be quite different from those within my
network of family and friends, which created conflict when I was confronted
with my own experience with betrayal and my attempts to grow beyond it.
In August of 2010 I found myself happily planning my
wedding to a delightful police officer whom I had been in a relationship with
for the preceding eighteen months. Our relationship was fun, loving,
emotionally fulfilling and the best that
I had ever experienced. I was completely confident in our commitment and
dedication to each other and that we would enjoy a lifetime together as we
planned our marriage.
It was at this time I discovered that my partner was
living a dual identity, using a false name and had an entire family I knew
nothing about. He had gone so far as to steal the name tag of another police
officer he worked with and had been using that officer's name and identity in
our relationship. The name I knew him as was not his real name. He lied about
his education, the school he attended, his job, his relationship history, his
parental status, his marital status, his family's names and much more. There was even a possibility of other
identities and that the man in fact may have been a pedophile. The moment of
revelation was both dramatic and violent. The depth of this betrayal and the
resulting grief was deep and has taken a significant period of time to process.
Part of that process is understanding my own thoughts and feelings about a number
of issues, including forgiveness.
During my recovery period I was urged many times by
friends to "forgive" my offender so that I could "move on."
I had no desire to "move on," and preferred to dwell in my thoughts;
trying to process the violations I had experienced. His betrayal of our
relationship, his infidelity, his betrayal of his marriage to his true wife,
his betrayal to his child, all struck and confused me. I did not understand his
motives or his choices in achieving his desires. Being asked to forgive such high violations
against a human being felt muffling to my experience. That I should sit down
and be silent at a time I wanted to scream almost seemed to re-victimize me.
Those that asked me so many times to "let go," "make
peace," and "move on," became offenders themselves for even
asking me to forgive. Before I could even consider forgiveness, I needed to
first try to understand. But understanding violations of trust that significant
proved impossible and I found myself stuck in my grief and confusion. Again I
was urged by friends to forgive the man for what he had done to me, that this
would release me from my pain.
"Forgiveness" is a loaded word and is defined
in different ways by different people who are each shaped by their own life
experiences and cultural influences. Oprah Winfrey has molded an entire
generation's perspective of forgiveness by speaking highly and loudly of how it
is something one does for themselves, and not for the offender. That the act of
forgiveness releases the victim from their burden. Forgiveness is for ourselves, for our
individual relief, and frees us from the shame we experience by carrying that
burden. It was from this point of view
that my friends urged me to forgive. Forgiveness would make my burden light.
For me, this is not how I feel at all about forgiveness,
and the pressure to forgive felt almost violating. I felt that being asked to
forgive this person who had committed these atrocious acts against me was wrong
in and of itself. Being made to feel as if I was doing something wrong, that I
myself was in the wrong because I refused or was simply unable to forgive left
me with a feeling of brokenness and blame.
This was my fault that I felt this way. From religious friends, I was
even told that refusing to forgive my offender was rejecting Christ's atonement
for us, and turning my back on God. They attempted to reassure my hesitations
by saying that if I forgave him, God would surely see to a proper judgment for
the man and I need not concern myself with it. But these were not my beliefs,
but theirs.
In the essay responses to The Sunflower, author Mary
Gordon writes that perhaps the SS man thought that "forgiveness was a kind
of magic eraser, a way of undoing what cannot temporally be undone, a way of
saying, 'it never happened.'" These thoughts and beliefs are how I
personally define forgiveness. To me, offering forgiveness to someone is
offering a type of absolution, a wiping clean of the slate and starting fresh
and anew with no murky past to muddy the future. In this instance, to erase the
events of the past would dishonor my experience and this is why offering
forgiveness was such a tremendous burden for those seemingly helpful friends to
place on me. It did not make my burden light to consider offering a personal
absolution to the man. It invalidated and minimized my experience. The weight of the social obligation to
forgive was overwhelming. Betrayal and
physical violence are not simple concepts to understand and offering absolution
to a violator whom seemingly feels no remorse is absurd and provides no benefit
to me as a victim whatsoever.
What I find to be most important as we seek to restore
the balance after surviving these violations others inflict on us, whether that
be intentional or unintentional, is the opportunity for the victim to be heard.
They, and I, need our words to be listened to, processed and acknowledged.
Gordon continues in her response essay, " it becomes, then, a
narcissistic... act because it places the perpetrator's need to be purged of
guilt ahead of the victim's need for restitution or simple recognition of
having been harmed." Despite his wife's screaming demands, I was never
granted an apology for my offender's actions, nor was I offered recognition of
my injuries by my offender. Even if I
had, given the volume and seriousness of the offenses, I don't know that I
would have believed the sincerity of any attempts at reconciliation or an
apology. Such deliberate, conscience violations against another human being are
truly unforgivable to me. In addition, an individual whom lied about something
so basic as his name and the college he attended could easily force an apology
with no understanding of the depth of damage he had done and the apology would
hold no weight. There is nothing to forgive in these instances- the acts are
simply unforgivable.
In all of my self-reflection I finally came to the
conclusion that I did not need to concern myself with forgiving my
offender. What I needed to focus on was
forgiving myself. While I could not grant my offender absolution, because I did
not feel he deserved it, I did feel that my lack of trust in myself was unfair,
and my doubt misplaced. What happened was not my fault, but it was up to me to
finally face those dreaded words and "move on" from the experience
and attempt to depart from my dwelling-place.
There were a few actions I did feel that would help
rectify my faith in myself and allow me to find a place in the world again. I
filed complaints with the proper authorities and sought about seeking to create
a public record of the events. As Gordon wrote, "one can forgive another
in a ritual context, if that ritual takes place with the authority of the
community." While I was not seeking
to forgive my offender, I believed such a ritual would be both therapeutic, and
among other things, provide the benefit of assisting to restore my own inner
faith and confidence. For me, I found ritual in notifying the proper
authorities, and by pursuing legal action. The process of filing briefs and
preparing for court was comforting. While the experience was terrifying and
produced high levels of anxiety, it also provided a clear path to resolution,
one way or another. While I knew that the likelihood of sustaining a financial
judgment from the courts was slim, that was not my motivation in pursuing
litigation. My motivation was simply to have my offender, and a person of
authority, ideally a judge, hear my words and respect them. I wanted to be able
to speak, uninterrupted, in public, of the torts that had been committed
against me.
I worked hard to make it happen and one day last winter I
stood in a very small courtroom in my offender's home town and read from a
prepared statement detailing the lies I had so readily believed, the revelations
of truth, and the physical violence I both endured and witnessed. I spoke of how he had abused his authority by
staking out a hidden location along a highway and pulled me over without cause.
I spoke of how he tackled and handcuffed me in my home and refused to free me.
I spoke of the emotional ramifications of his manipulations and lies. The room
was silent and my offender was made to stand and listen to me speak for twenty
minutes of the effects his actions had had on me. I was emotional, but finally,
over two years after the incidents had occurred my experience was finally
recognized in a public arena, in a community where we both lived.
I wished that I could have walked away from the
experience right there, and deprived him of the ability to respond. I did not
need to hear what he had to say, I feared it really because I did not know what
was coming. Again, Gordon shares her view that anything less than a public
acknowledgment of guilt would be a perversion of the sacrament. There was
nothing I gained for my own self-growth by listening to my offender speak,
other than his acknowledgment that some of the incidents I described had
occurred; statements which I had not expected to be validated, but as I
listened to him lying under oath and unable to prove otherwise I simply tried
to release myself from the shock and awe. Nothing mattered more than my own
words being heard by the people around me. Regardless of the result of the
hearing, I took my power back by having my offenses acknowledged in a court of
law and subjecting my offender to a public airing of his actions. That day I
emerged from the courthouse, I emerged victorious at last.
My promptings to take this course of action and in
denying forgiveness (sought or not) were
led by my desire to heal from the experience. Determining that my offender was
unworthy of forgiveness validated the depth of my emotional trauma. Had I been able to forgive him, there
was an internal presumption on my own part that his offenses would be mitigated
in seriousness. To forgive such atrocities, to grant what I perceive to be
absolution to this man grants him permission to move on as though he had never
committed any wrongs. That was not what I wanted and not what would be most
helpful for me as I healed. For me, I dreamed that he would be able to ruminate
and dwell on his horrific actions as I had done. Once again, we turn to Gordon
as she expresses this same idea; "If the dying Nazi solider wished to
atone, he should have insisted that he be placed in the camps, so that he could
die in the miserable circumstances of those in whose name he is asking
forgiveness." To truly atone, our violators must experience what we
experienced; they must be willing to put themselves into our shoes and feel
what we have felt. If they are unwilling to do that, absolution will never
come.
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