Relativity of "forgiving"

 

My client strayed from her marriage for a moment, cheated on her wife of five years, together for twelve. While it’s fine for today’s discussion to say this is always wrong (if troubled, one should seek help; if unhappy, one should do therapy, separate, mediate or divorce), there were so many pressurizing factors in her life that a wayward behavior was almost inevitable. Following which, her wife, also a troubled person, cheated as revenge. I believe they could have healed their mutual wounds: They both came to therapy for a little while. My client was deeply sorry for what she’d done. But her wife, based on childhood abandonments and abuse, could not return to love and opted for anger and rejection. And she went all the way out and found a new partner.

Today’s issue is relativity. Is my client a bad person, a marital failure – that is, what her partner wants her to feel she is – because she was not given another chance, was con­demned as unfor­giv­able? Isn’t this odd: If her wife had accepted her very self-aware apology, had let the love wound heal, wouldn’t my client be understood to be a good though flawed person again?

Are we bad because the other did not give us clemency? Because we made a mistake that could not be corrected without the other’s permission? Or are we still good, forgiv­able by our self, redeemed in some objective realm?

These questions are more complicated than anyone would like. A narcissist will always think he is good and right, even when he is a sociopath who has irreparably hurt people. This indicates that we’d have to be rational to know if we remain a good person despite a trans­gres­sion. My client believes what she did was forgivable, and so do I. But this seems to suggest that her wife “should” have found it in herself to forgive, to heal her­self* – something we absolutely can’t demand. And what if we have hurt someone so deeply that we have no right to accept their turn­ing the other cheek, their exoneration? They may be a self-sacrificial character. We shouldn’t accept their self-abnegation.

How much compassion should we have for ourselves? How alone are we in the world, where I have done something that hurts you and I don’t have to consider your justified, or bitter, or neurotic rejection of me? It is a real pill to try to figure out morality and decency amidst these questions.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Beyond these questions is this one: What is the nature of forgiving? As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, the world’s concept of forgiving is to say it, to utter the word, at which point we are somehow changed. That is magic: the impossible. My client’s wife would have to feel better, to recover, which means to expel her pain at the one who hurt her and to receive from her all the justice possible to give. This would feature my client’s brutal self-understanding that leaves no strong and reparative stand for herself. The perpetrator must become her therapist, the selfless healer.

 

We are young

I have searched for and found an old . . . acquaintance? peer? classmate? eventual muse? I had known in high school, fifty-two years ago. I was a senior in Yearbook class, she was a junior who for some reason sat next to me once or fifty times – I have no remem­brance. No one could have been more the neurotic, dissociated infant-in-teen’s clothing than I, while she was one of the on-the-ball intelligentsia. I wrote puerile-clever cap­tions (“titillate”). I never knew what her specialty was on the yearbook, but there’s no doubt that she belonged there and I didn’t.

I was (to be charitable to myself) a lost child sitting next to her who would be, had I been passably human, my feminine idol, but I felt nothing then. At least nothing that I could let ascend from gut and heart to brain. It wasn’t until I went off to college – my Rapunzel’s ivory tower – the very moment I arrived that it occurred to me she was my savior, the container of my life. We wrote serious letters (though hers may have been perfunctory) in which I hid my true mean­ing within purple-prose philoso­phizing. Thank goodness I was too cowardly to poison her with my foolishness.

We’ve been writing now, and of course it’s been strange. What does one call a wistful exhil­ara­tion that is composed mostly of unreal feelings and ancient, residual hope that evaporates the instant one looks at it? I reify nostalgia: I picture her in my head, not 69 but 17, and the present is serenely, forever, the past. I am lost in this ghostly connection.

In just a few emails we’ve acknowledged that we both are not very good at love. We referred to relationship troubles and distance. But actually, I believe we are both extreme­ly good at love. I suspect we were both born with the indestructible kernel of it, which never leaves. Life obstructs it. Maybe this theory makes sense: The further back we look, age sixty, thirty, seventeen, ten, five, the closer we get to that golden kernel, that Eden, our truest happiest self. From that perspective, nostal­gia is rebirth.

Homage to Primal Therapy

 

I can’t believe I never described psychological healing this explicitly before. As far as I recall, I have generally assumed one-half of the essential process.

Healing must be a feeling-expressive experience: The splinters of emotional injury must be pushed out. There is no talking, analyzing or rationalizing away a splinter; there is no “refram­ing” the damage it caused; there is no meditating away its pain, or mindfully dis­tan­cing it. There is no behaving away the devel­opmental arrest and the misdirec­tions in life the damage will cause: We must ultimately regress, founder or fail.

But feeling expression is not enough. If the historical source of the feeling is not known, is not present in consciousness, it will remain severed, floating aimlessly, surging anar­chic­ally within us. Knowledge is essential because we are holistic: mind, body, time. A person who rages with­out targeting the specific childhood crimes committed on him will remain an eternal loop of rage. A woman who cries at Disney movies and television com­mer­cials will never find and release her grief until she remembers her loss and attaches those tears to it. A depressed person will never mitigate his depression until he remem­bers his parent’s deafness to his need for care and em­pathy, a cruel epiphany, his total invisibility in childhood. Anxiety and panic will not evaporate unless the actual fears and terrors are joined.

This linking of the event’s awareness to its feeling is the literal, internal returning to the past, what depth thera­pists call “reliving,” and reliving it the right way: this time with jus­tice. In our earliest years, the brain and body suppressed our pain, splitting it from its experience. Our holistic self was disintegrated. This is what we see all around: severed heads that think and race, eternal loops of rage and nebulous feeling, adults stuck in childhood, primitive hates clothed in sophisticated intellect. This is what we see in most of human­ity, almost all of it.

There is no real answer to this flaw in our nature but to start again, at the begin­ning, when pain and its cause were tragically known.