I write these words from inside the wound and I don’t really care how it sounds. I’ve been off kilter for the last seven 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.
Back to what I intended to write about…
Lately, I’ve been ruminating themes of revenge and getting justice, but just to make it clear, non of my personal vendettas are at play. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up: I think wanting justice is simply a socially acceptable euphemism for revenge. The outcome is the same with A N Other getting their comeuppance.
Once again, my ruminations have been stoked by an oracle via the small screen, an intermittent occurrence over the last decade. Life often speaks to me through metaphor and messages that have found me in all manner of ways, especially things I’ve been 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 my life. This time, it’s the new eight part mini series of The Count of Monte Cristo which has stoked these contemplations. Up until now, I’ve never seen any of the many adaptations of the story, let alone having read the book, but I’m completely hooked with this new series, unashamedly on my fourth binge-watch within three 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 a flame 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. Storylines of jealousy and betrayal, lies and deceit, avarice and greed ruining lives hit home to me, experienced in my own life as a child and echoed in adulthood.
Above all what’s lingering in my consciousness are the themes of justice, revenge, and forgiveness: do you leave justice in the hands of fate as an energetic play of cause and effect, or, akin to the book, do you become the instrument of providence? Is serving up atonement in our hands and should it be? The control freak that I am, I want to see justice served and I’m probably not alone in saying this. In the opening scene of the series, the protagonist, Edmund Dantes, confesses and speaks of cold revenge, but the priest witnessing the confession implores Dantes to leave justice in the hands of God and to forgive, that Dantes will 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 calculatingly cold yourself? Revenge can be a salavatingly delicious thought. Oh to be a fly on the wall once your machinations for revenge are in full swing! Here’s the rub: you’re not responsible for the pain inflicted but you are responsible for your healing. That’s hardly seems fair does it? And it’s a feather-spitting 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.
Which brings me on to what’s really bothering me, and that’s the the F word: forgiveness. I’ve read a lot about the act of forgiveness and intellectually, I get it. But visercally the pain still smoulders as I helter skelter on a never-ending continuum of perspective but reaching no conclusion. What does it mean to fully let go of pain that has been unfairly inflicted by A N Other? I mean wholly, truly, completely let go, without the mask of premature resilience and false positivity that shrouds deep feelings of unresolved pain and resentment – something I have been guilty of doing in my own life (and I still can’t help but harbour ill-feeling against various transgressors). You can’t just walk away from your pain and continue to live a superficially happy life, whilst unresolved pain is stuffed and boxed away in the recesses of your psyche. I ask myself is it even possible to “just forgive, let go and move on”? I really don’t think it’s as simple as that. In fact, I detest it (hate is a strong word) when people spew out oversimplified comments like “just forgive and move on” with breezy levity which ignore the complexity of trauma, emotional processing, and the need for accountability. Only you know the depth of your pain when you’ve been victim of A N Other’s machinations. Pain has to be processed – I know that through documenting this healing journey. Whenever someone has said to me “just forgive” or“just 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 A N Other for however they violated you, that they’re somehow pardoned, excused, exonerated, absolved, acquitted of any harm, crime or wrong doing inflicted – and that they’ll somehow find out through the ether that they’re off the hook without punishment. In the next millisecond I usually become perturbed at the thought of how life will deliver their comeuppance and how their slice of justice be served up to them.
The rhetorical burning question for me is should those that trespass against you atone for their sins, and should you/me/I be the instrument to ensure that justice is served?
I struggle with the F word, I really do. It’s a push-me-pull-you energetic. On one hand, I want to let go and surrender the plot to avenge the pain. I’m all too aware that I’m a vessel for the pain by holding on. On the other hand, I’m scared to let go of the pain. It serves as a reminder. It’s like an itchy blanket – it’s uncomfortably comforting in a convoluted sense. I don’t want to let ‘them’, the A N Others, off the hook. Treachery and betrayal is a thief of benevolence. And revenge is a fierce, malevolent and all consuming energy.
Another rhetorical question that remains perched on my shelf of Big Unanswered Questions Abuout Life is what and who are we truly forgiving: ourselves, the transgressor or the situation?
Not to put too fine a point on it, I believe forgive is the wrong word and its context hugely misconstrued. Why does it feel as though “to forgive” is akin to exonerating your transgressor, letting them off the hook in a “oh yeah, it’s ok that you trampled on my life…I’ll forgive you anyway” and I personally picture them having the last laugh. When I’m on the precipice of wanting to let go and forgive, it feels to me like I’m absolving ‘them’ of their crime and I step back with fervour.
To me, the word forgive 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.
I think the meaning should be revisited for the simple task of aiding people like me who are healing from childhood trauma, pain and violation. 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”. It shouldn’t be about “forgiving” the perpetrator who inflicted your your pain. It’s too big 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. And it seems some wounds are easier to let go than others.
Thinking about my own life and more recent years, I’ve let go of certain pain but hung on to others and there’s no rhyme or reason. It’s strange that I harbour no resentment or bad vibe toward The Narc who could be unjustifiably malignant in true Jekyll & Hyde style during the 18 months I was seeing him (2022-2023) which rendered me an unrecognisable version of myself after the relationship ended. Towards the end of our I was beginning to actually hate him for 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 especially when I was isolated with him travelling abroad – he was at his worst at those times as he knew I had nowhere to run other than jump overboard. It was absolutely not ok. But simultaneously, there’s no resentment towards him. Does that mean he’s forgiven or is the mere fact that I’ve let go of the resentment mean that the situation is forgiven? Forgiveness is a paradox in this sense.
And another distinction I’ve made is I find female betrayal much harder to forgive than male. Perhaps I think women should know better, after eons of struggle as a gender. But woman’s inhumanity toward woman is another post for another day (for me to get on my soap box).
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 vendettas floating around on the horizon, wanting to put wrongs right and ‘putting people in their place’ with regular re-enactments cropping up to fulfil this energetic loop. It’s incredulous 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 stab 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.
Perhaps forgiveness is coming to terms with what happened, when there’s no emotional charge with the memory or saying the person’s name without spitting feathers. 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 those years of my childhood, I admit that a lot of the emotional charge has gone, replaced instead with a hard coldness but in IFS terms, perhaps that’s a ‘fire fighter’ or protective part stepping in to avoid feeling and being with the inner child. Do I want revenge? No, not in the traditional purgatory 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 plot and scheme with ill- intent through contrived lies and deceit should be taught a moral lesson if the opportunity arises, although I haven’t set out to avenge the child. 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 heal. 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, spraying acid straight into it, compounding the pain and slinging my spear of forgiveness in the opposite direction. A simple “sorry for what we did” some accountability and acknowledgement would have been a warm blanket to abate the pain. But sorry, like forgive, are the hardest words.
Intellectually I know that it may have been the unholy trinity’s insecurities and internal wounds being inflicted outwardly against my mum and I, although I’m not allowing myself to accept or entertain that thought yet. I haven’t evolved 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 better. 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 hard great 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 and hold onto the pain as a form of self-protection and self-preservation. I’m scared that if I allow that love then I’ve lost the battle and possibly even open myself up to more abuse and violation. Even as I write this, I can feel myself holding onto pain that I don’t want to let go of.
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 sink into the pillow of compassion and truly forgive, 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 me is being able to attain a level of “forgive them, for they know not what they do”. But unfortunately, I’m not there yet…
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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