Pathway to Happiness - Forgiveness

[image removed because of possible copyright infringement] 

I had originally picked a beautiful photo for this post. (edited December 2012)
 
The photograph I originally chose was of an artesian spring continually bubbling up from the ground, so much that it had formed a freshwater pond. The water from the spring was pure enough to drink.

I've said before that the pathway to happiness, the pathway to a lifestyle of living in today, is not by burying the past, nor by wallowing in it, but by exposing it.

I'm not talking about exposing to the general public the horrid details of who did what to whom, deciding whose fault it was, or seeking justice for all the wrongs experienced at the hands or lips of others. I'm talking about dealing with the feelings and beliefs about ourselves that past experiences have produced in our lives, and being free of them.

Hiding those feelings is what got me into trouble in the first place. I know that the self-protecting behaviors, the beliefs I developed about myself all those years ago kept me in slavery to awful, soul-shrinking words like "should", "must", and "bad".

One of the steps in my healing process was that on a list that only I would ever see, I listed all of the people in my life who had ever hurt me, what they did, how it made me feel and what behaviors it produced in me as a result. It was a long list; some people took up more room than others. And the list took a few weeks to complete. The reason I had to make this list was that it wasn't enough to bring to God the issues I had with these people and come to a "blanket" forgiveness for all of them. No, this had to be specific, because in each of these experiences, I had allowed my hurt to develop into resentment, and bitterness had taken root. I held onto these hurts; they shaped me and turned me into who I thought I was.

I had been accused of having a "victim mentality." I fully admitted that I had such a mentality. I thought it was fine to have one, if you were really a victim. I believed that the abuse I suffered at the hands of family members and others made me a card-carrying "Victim Club" member!

But slowly I began to see that the roots of the behaviors I hated in me were from the attitudes and beliefs I developed as a response to those things I suffered - and that the only way to be rid of them was to deal with the abuse itself. In specifics.

I won't lie to you. It was a painful process to bring up to the surface buried memories of things I would have just as soon forgotten. In my case, I had to remember in detail - and allow myself to experience all the emotion that I should have expressed at the time but couldn't because of my situation. My counselor explained to me the reason why I couldn't express those things at the time; I already knew that it was because I was a child and didn't have the emotional maturity to handle these things - things that shouldn't happen to anyone.

But God used my counselor to put His finger on the reason why I developed the behaviors I did, in terms I could understand for the first time in my life. My counselor used the analogy of a soldier in a modern war zone - you're in constant danger of attack, never knowing who is a friend and who is a foe, always having to be on guard, witnessing horrible things happen to others and being glad it's not you, yet feeling guilty for making it out of there when others didn't, not allowed to react to the atrocities that would make most people weep, expected to work for the same people who made you go there and see that, resenting the very people (in the soldier's case, the army) who are such a part of your identity ... it made perfect sense to me. Then when you come home from the war zone, that mind-set is still there: "Gotta protect myself. The world is not a safe place. They're being nice now, but they will betray me eventually. How can they even spend time with me? if they knew who I was, what I've done to survive - they'd never give me the time of day."

So part of my recovery was going back into every one of those experiences and allowing myself to feel all the anger, all the hurt, all the rage and sadness that were appropriate to feel for what I went through. The path to forgiveness is sometimes talked about as sweetness and light, daisies and butterflies. Not when the hurt goes deep, driven down inside by years and years of abuse. The first admission to make in the process of forgiveness is the admission of having been wronged, and that it was that person's fault, not the fault of the (I'll use the word) victim. No excuses made for the person who did it; making excuses is a counterfeit for forgiveness - not the real thing at all. What he/she did was wrong and it hurt me. It hurt me in ways that until now, I have not been able to express, and it made me believe this thing about myself and do that thing to other people because of it.

Until I realize the wrongness of what was done to me, it really can't be called forgiveness when I eventually get there. It is normal and healthy to BE angry, to BE sad, to BE hurt by those things. It doesn't mean I'm a bad person; it means I'm human. I learn to reject the message I got from that person's treatment of me. I speak words of comfort to that hurting, frightened and suspicious inner child (see my recent post "Beautiful" for more information about that). I realize (for real, not just pay lip service to it) that even if the person wanted to give back to me what he or she took from me by treating me that way, they couldn't. The moment they took it from me, it flew from their hands and disappeared. And finally, after all that, I make a decision to NOT make (or expect) that person pay me back for the offense. That means they never have to make the first move and say they're sorry. I literally let that person off the hook. I write off their debt to me.

This process can take months. It did for me. I can only tell you that it is worth it. As I dealt with those experiences, releasing every experience, every person into the hands of God who saw it all anyway, I was finally able to fully forgive the people on my list (which I kept, by the way - as a tool for later on and as a reminder of how far God has brought me). It doesn't mean that I was able to re-establish relationships with all of these people; some of them continued to spill poison out of themselves onto me, and I realized it wasn't healthy for me to re-enter that atmosphere. But the resentment and the bitterness ... was gone.

As new things happen or old things creep back in, I go through that same process. It's not easy, and it doesn't get easier with time and repetition. But having experienced the benefits, I am more willing to go there and do what needs to be done in order to be free.

Freedom. I like the feeling.

. . . . to be continued...