When Forgiveness Doesn't Heal: Creating room for anger and grief

I’ve heard a lot of things about forgiveness in my life, as I’m sure most people have. The common offenders go something like this:

“Unforgiveness hurts you worse than it hurts the person who harmed you.”

“Forgive others because God forgives you.”

“Forgiveness shows strength.”

“Living in unforgiveness holds you captive.”

“If you want to be forgiven, you should forgive.”

And on and on and on. People seem to unilaterally love the idea of forgiveness.  Maybe this comes from religion. Maybe it comes from memes on the Internet, written in pretty cursive fonts, plastered over flowery wallpaper. I don’t know. But I do know that whenever I hear someone say something like this about forgiveness, I get a yucky feeling in my stomach. Forgiveness language sounds eerily like the language of toxic positivity to me. 

As a therapist, I sit with clients on a daily basis and hear many stories of harm and abuse.  I hear a lot of things from these strong survivors that give me hope about the human condition -- I hear about peoples’ resilience and strength and their will to carve out better lives for themselves. But I also hear about the pain of the struggles they live with on account of what they’ve suffered.  And quite often, I hear clients say things like “I know I shouldn’t be mad about this, I know I should forgive…” In these moments, I think something akin to projective identification happens for me.  Projective identification is the process whereby the emotion that one person disowns shows up in the other person. What shows up in me in these moments, in a very physical sort of way, is not the feeling of forgiveness but the feeling of anger. 

So often, my client’s abusers trained them out of feeling their feelings. Because abuse is primarily about power, as in, the abuser overpowering the victim, it becomes the case that the victim is safer if they don’t fight back, and instead, dissociates their own feelings. This is often referred to as fawning (a response we turn to when fighting, fleeing, and freezing are not the best options for survival).  So often, victims of abuse can’t feel what they feel, and sometimes, the feelings they’ve tried not to know show up in their friends and therapists instead.  When they say “I should forgive” what we feel is often anger. Why?

Anger is there to keep us safe. It is a functional emotion, an active emotion. Its job is to alert us to violation and to help us fight against it. Anger is there to keep our bodies safe from danger. It is our primal way of saying “no.”  Anger gets a bad rap because it can be inconvenient and sometimes loud, but if we can see past that, we might realize that it is a friend.  The problem is that in most, if not all, abuse cases, because of the imbalance of power, the abused person is not usually safe enough to show anger. Instead, yelling or protesting could actually invite more harm. The anger is there, but it has to be silenced, put away, stuffed down. In therapy, people relive their stories of harm, little bits at a time, as they tell about what happened to them in an environment that is safe. And so often, these people still feel unsafe about expressing anger toward their abusers, so they do what they’ve learned to do, and they dismiss their anger.

I believe we are all capable of glorious and beautiful things: love, laughter, joy, friendship, kindness. Abusers, because of their own shame and powerlessness, want to erase what is glorious in their victims.  Thankfully, they are never successful -- what is glorious is at our core and cannot be erased, but it can certainly be hidden under layers of trauma and shame.  A big piece of this is the way in which abusers lure victims into feeling complicit, or at fault for the abuse.  When a victim feels they are to blame for what happened to them, they locate the badness inside themselves, and they decide that somehow they must have deserved it. It might be easy in this state of low self worth to forgive, but is it actually helpful? Does it invite real healing?  

One definition of forgiveness in the Meriam Webster dictionary is “To stop feeling anger toward someone who has done something wrong: to stop blaming someone.”  This is great advice when it is our loving partner or our young child who has made an honest  mistake and comes to us humbly apologizing.  Forgiveness is an obvious and decent thing to do in these situations. But what about when it is an abuser who, through their actions, has caused us immense harm and emotional and/or physical trauma?  From what I see, victims are very willing to stop feeling anger -- most likely, they never even got to start feeling it. And they are more than willing to blame themselves, rather than blaming their perpetrators, because they’ve been trained to do so.

Well-meaning friends might steer people toward forgiveness because anger can feel overwhelming, and we don’t always know what to say to an angry person. We might fear that if we welcome anger, our friend will stay in it forever, so we quiet them with niceties about forgiveness. But what if we trust that they won’t remain in their anger? What if we decided to believe that maybe anger, empathically held, receives permission to turn into grief, and pain that is grieved has permission to become meaningful?  

Sometimes the concept of forgiveness, as it is so often presented and understood, feels much like asking survivors to do what they’ve already been doing -- fawning (another way of saying this is people pleasing, or self-sacrificing).  Fawning is work, and it is exhausting for survivors.  At its worst, when we encourage a survivor to forgive, we might be inviting them into further harm and shame.  What if instead, we invite them into their humanity, by making space for their anger? Once they are allowed this space, it will be so much easier for them to grieve the pain, and this, not forgiveness, is the beginning of the path back into the light. 

I think we can dream bigger than forgiveness.  We can invite victims to feel and express the very apt anger they’ve long been dismissing. Encouraging forgiveness might just be another way of dismissing pain (like abusers do), and we can do better than this.  We can offer presence, and we can be respectful witnesses to anger and grief when we have the honor of being in their sacred presence.