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.

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* 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.