Of course, it’s not the word fuck; that would be too obvious wouldn’t it?
I’m writing this from inside the wound and I don’t care how it sounds. I’ve been pre-occupied about revenge justice and forgiveness, although I think justice (in my opinion) is simply a euphemism and also a synonym, for revenge. Same difference, just served up differently. What stoked these contemplations is the new 8 part mini series of The Count of Monte Cristo (I nearly typed cunt but that’s what his lust to avenge himself turned him into didn’t it?)
I’ve said previously that life often speaks through metaphor and that messages find you in all manner of ways with things you’re drawn to watch or read, not for the sake of entertainment or escape, but as an oracle to find a deeper truth and meaning for life. Up until now, I’ve never seen an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo let alone read the book, but I’m obsessed with this new series, unashamedly on my fourth watch within 3 weeks. There’s a strong message in it for me and I feel it viscerally. Captivated, enthralled and unflinchingly obsessed, the story’s themes have drawn me in like a moth to light as I’ve made parallels with my own life and how it was wrecked and stolen at an age where I could do nothing about it, a trespass on my undeveloped soul. Themes of jealousy and betrayal, lies and deceit, avarice and greed ruining lives hit home to me, themes I’ve experienced in my own life as a child and echoed in adulthood.
Above all what’s lingering for me is justice, revenge, and forgiveness. Can you leave it to fate to deliver justice or, as in the story, do you become the instrument of providence? Is doling out atonement in our hands? In the opening scene of the series as the protagonist, Edmund Dantes, confesses and talks of cold revenge the priest in the confessional box implores Dantes to leave justice in the hands of God and to forgive, that he’ll burn in his own hell of pain, and that “love will never come without forgiveness”. But Dantes in return questions the priest through gritted teeth: what if God nor providence delivers justice, then what? Whose hands should deliver the atonement?
I quietly agreed with what Dumas writes for his protagonist, Dantes: how can you leave it to fate to deliver that justice when you can serve it up cold yourself? You’re not responsible for the pain but you are responsible for your healing. That’s hardly fair with the scales of injustice tipped heavily on your side. And it’s a difficult thought that your transgressor may live a relatively stress free and comfortable life without getting their share of comeuppance and without karma taking a juicy bite out of their arse.
Although right now, the all important word on my mind is the F word: forgiveness. Is it as simple as ‘just forgiving’? It’s too easy to utter those words when you’re not the victim of someone else’s offence. Betrayal is a thief of benevolence and I know exactly how that feels, especially when the betrayal is steeped in lies and deceit.
What does it mean to fully let go of pain, and I mean wholly, truly, completely let go, without the mask of premature resilience and positivity that shrouds deep feelings of unresolved pain and resentment? You can’t just walk away from pain and continue to live superficially happy, whilst stuffed and boxed away in the recesses of your psyche is unresolved pain. Is it even possible to “just forgive, let go and move on”? It’s not as simple as that.
Do you forgive others or do you forgive yourself? You can’t ‘just let it go’ can you? Pain has to be processed – I know that through my own healing journey. And do transgressors need to face justice to atone? Do you forgive the abuser and transgressor or do you forgive yourself and vow that you’re not going to be a container for the pain to destroy you, letting go of the emotional charge, not being a vessel for bad vibe and not plotting to avenge yourself? Is forgiveness coming to terms with and accepting fully what happened?
And who are we truly forgiving: ourselves, the transgressor or the situation?
I’m not going to apologise for all the questions: this is my state of my mind right now and I’ve been off kilter for the last 7 days and ‘not all there’, in a disassociated stupor. I even managed to ‘steal’ a book from a charity shop a few days ago. Unwittingly of course. I picked it up, not even knowing if I wanted to buy it, forgotten I’d picked it up, and in a daze, walked out of the shop until half way up the street realising the book was still in my hand and I’d forgotten to pay for it. In sheer embarrassment I never returned. I’ll go back and buy something for double the value to atone.
I admit I’ve struggled with the F word for years, and I bet there’s an army of you who agree with me. For me, forgive is the wrong word and its context hugely misconstrued. Even my mum thinks agrees with me. Where and why and how has this happened? Why does the default meaning of forgiveness feel like you’re exonerating your transgressor, letting them off the hook in a “oh yeah, it’s ok that you fucked up my life…!” way, absolving them of their crime? In reality doesn’t it mean not holding onto resentment, bitterness and anger, and not being a life long container of pain and suffering inflicted by others?
To me, the word is an enigma.
Perhaps it’s an idiom we need to rethink. Forgive doesn’t mean what we think it means – let go of resentment or feelings of wanting retribution. Dictionary definitions are to stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offence, flaw, or mistake. Or to cease to feel resentment against someone who has done something to harm, annoy, or upset you.
But whenever someone has said to me “just forgive” “let it go and move on” (apart from wanting to scream at them like a banshee) it instantly bears the heavy and often unbearable connotation that I’m letting those off the hook that hurt me. That if you forgive they are somehow pardoned, excused, exonerated, absolved, acquitted of any harm, crime or wrong doing inflicted – and that they’ll find out through the ether that they’re off the hook without punishment. In the next millisecond I usually become perturbed about how life will deliver their comeuppance and how will their slice of justice be served up to them? That’s how I (and I’m sure many others may agree with me) feel about the word.
I think the meaning should be revisited for the simple task of helping people who are healing from pain. There should be another way of saying it. Perhaps “I forgive myself of the pain I’m carrying”. Or “I forgive the situation so it has no hold over me”, meaning, that I’m no longer holding onto resentment. It shouldn’t be about “forgiving” the perpetrator who inflicted your your pain. It’s too big of a burden.
I agree, when you carry pain, anger, resentment it’s a poison only you feel. It consumes you and eats you alive. As Abbe Faria says to Dantes in the dungeon’s of Chateau D’If: “when planning revenge, dig your own grave first“. Pain takes time to heal, for some a lifetime, for others, they take it to their grave. It’s the invisible wounds that are the hardest to heal.
Thinking about situations that have come up in my life during my adulthood and over the past five years, I’ve let go of some pain but hung on to others. High on my cannot-forigve-list are lies, deceit and betrayal. These are the themes of my life that destroyed my childhood, and perhaps themes I need to learn to let go of when they arise in my life. But I can’t, with mini vendetta’s floating around on the horizon, wanting to put wrongs right and ‘putting people in their place’. Don’t get me wrong, I do understand what letting go of pain feels like. I say that because I harbour no resentment or bad vibe toward The Narc who could be coldly malignant in true Jekyll & Hyde style during the 18 months I was seeing him (2022-2023). Towards the end of our relationship I was beginning to hate him for some of the ways he treated me, but genuinely (and I say this whole heartedly) I’ve let go of the pain. I have no ill-wishes or ill-feeling towards him despite the emotional narcissistic abuse I endured. He’s not absolved of the times he treated me so cruelly – that is absolutely not ok. But simultaneously, there’s no resentment towards him and I wish him well. Does that mean he’s forgiven or is the mere fact that I’ve let go of the pain mean that the situation is forgiven? Forgiveness is a paradox in this sense.
Perhaps forgiveness is coming to terms with what happened, when there’s no emotional trigger with the memory, that’s when you know you’ve healed the pain and not a vessel for it. As I wrote before, my pain metasized and possessed me for a long time, nearly two decades in total from around 13 years old. Vestiges of this pain still exist but wisdom and age help to temper ill-feelings.
Have I forgiven the unholy trinity for what they perpetrated on mum and I and the ramifications of it? No not fully. When I think about that portion of my childhood, much of the emotional charge has gone, replaced with a coldness and indifference towards them: does that still class as an emotional charge and am I still the container for the pain? I’m unsure. Do I want revenge? No, not in the traditional sense but I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Do I want justice? Yes, of course: why should they be off the hook completely? Those who knowingly inflict pain through contrived lies and deceit should be taught a moral lesson if the opportunity arises although I haven’t set out to avenge myself (honestly).
Whether life has delivered atonement, I’ll never know although there are frayed ends of unfinished business, 35 years later, something I’m now intellectually and mentally equipped to do something about. Writing this makes me understand that they are not forgiven (yet), and that I am still containing some of the pain. The unholy trinity had an opportunity to atone when they interrupted my life on and off from around 2011-2015. But my pain was mocked and dismissed, intensifying the wound, squeezing acid straight into it, compounding the pain and slinging my spear of forgiveness in the opposite direction. A simple “sorry for what we did” and an acknowledgement would have gone a very long way. Sorry, like forgiveness, are the hardest words. The lies that people seem to hold onto and thrive on is something that bothers me muchly. I abhorr lies, I really do. Especially when people hide behind their deceit to weaponise it. Lies are like thin ice. It doesn’t take much to break through the surface and once you do, the cold hard truth will hurt you like a thousand daggers. But most people tip toe around on their thin ice of lies for their whole life without a showdown with their truth.
Intellectually I know that it’s their internal wound being inflicted outwardly. Do I understand why the unholy trinity did what they did? Perhaps, although I’m not allowing myself to accept that they may have had their own internal wounds to deal with. I haven’t got that far yet. Am I still blaming them for my pain? The child part of me blames them for the pain she endured, and that part of me is alive in the depths of my psyche. The adult self knows that their internal wounds were reflected outwardly. But I’m not allowing myself to step into their shoes just yet. It will come in time. Once my child is fully heard, healed and integrated, only then I can move on to full acceptance with compassion. The soft, pillowy cushion of compassion is there, under the great hard wall of hurt that still divides my heart, a barrier that’ll come down in time, but it’s not ready to. Perhaps that’s what Dumas meant in the line that love will not come again without forgiveness. There’s always love underneath any kind of pain; that’s probably what forgiveness is, accessing love for yourself when juxtaposed with the pain but you don’t want to surrender to that love as a form of self-protection and self-preservation, in the sense that if I allow that love then you’ve lost the battle only to open yourself up to more abuse and violation.
There’s an internal tug of war between the pain body and the soul. I bounce around like a ping pong ball ricocheting from softness of the soul to the great wall of hurt and back again, to-ing and fro-ing. The pain is losing it’s grip though as I contemplate the F word more and more, thinking of how to give in to forgiveness and how to truly let go, bringing the great wall of hurt down brick by brick.
What if I did let go and allow myself to look at my transgressors with the pillow of compassion, what would happen to my life? Will it change my heart? And what would happen to the perpetrators of my pain? I think some people have the propensity to forgive more easily than others – maybe it’s in their DNA, may they are the really old souls who’ve lived many life times and have had millenia to practice. Wounds take time to heal and forgiveness will have its timeline too.
Perhaps the lesson of this life for all of us is being able to attain a level of “forgive them, for they know not what they do”. But I’m not there yet…
If baring my soul to you (and the world) has moved or touched a part of you in any way, then your support would be very welcome. To help me on this healing journey, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee (although mines a tea) via the link below:
https://buymeacoffee.com/healingmychildhoodtrauma
Etymology online:
forgive(v.)
Middle English foryeven, from Old English forgiefan “give, grant, allow; remit (a debt), pardon (an offense),” also “give up” and “give in marriage” (past tense forgeaf, past participle forgifen); from for-, here probably “completely,” + giefan “to give” (from PIE root *ghabh- “to give or receive”).
The sense of “to give up desire or power to punish” (late Old English) is from use of such a compound as a Germanic loan-translation of Vulgar Latin *perdonare (Old Saxon fargeban, Dutch vergeven, German vergeben “to forgive,” Gothic fragiban “to grant;” and see pardon (n.)). Related: Forgave; forgiven; forgiving.
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