Forgiving someone for a mistake is beautiful. It shows acknowledgement that we all make mistakes and we can relate to it in some way. However, a lifetime of intentional cruelty is not a mistake. If we cannot imagine treating others the way that someone treated us, forgiveness tends to feel like the F-word. The truth is, some pain takes a lifetime to work through. And the last thing the victim needs to hear is that it’s their fault for not forgiving the very person who caused that pain. Rushing ourselves to forgive the abuser before giving our pain the due process it deserves is toxic forgiveness. Toxic forgiveness will stagnate our healing.
Pete Walker devotes a whole chapter on forgiveness in his groundbreaking book. He describes what it looks like when used for healing, but he also validates that forgiveness is not always an option.
“It is crucial to understand that certain types of abuse are so extreme and damaging to the victim that forgiveness is simply not an option. Examples of this include sociopathy, conscious cruelty, and many forms of scapegoating and parental incest.”
Complex-PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker (Chapter 14 – Forgiveness: Begin With The Self)
There are those who have forgiven some major atrocities and it has worked out well in their healing. That’s because forgiveness is a tool – nothing more, nothing less. But like all tools, we can’t expect the same one to work for every trauma. Nor can we expect every person to respond the same to every tool. That’s why we have tools plural, not tool singular. It’s all about options.
But oh, how quick the kumbaya shamers, the quack-therapists, and the internet gaslighters are to tell us everything forgiveness does not mean. As if we haven’t heard the same garbage spewed at us a million times before.
Toxic Forgiveness Speeches: Why So Much Energy into Saying What it Does Not Mean?
Funny how when we forgive an honest person who made an honest mistake, we practice all of the following that the toxic forgiveness speeches say forgiveness is not.
- Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting the person back in your life
- Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting
- Forgiveness doesn’t mean loving the one who wronged us
- Forgiveness doesn’t mean tolerating the behavior
Where the sincere mistake is concerned, the one who committed it shows remorse and we forgive because that person is sorry and unlikely to repeat the mistake. But when it comes to healing from trauma that was caused by an abuser without a conscience, the term forgiveness is spin-doctored into a whole new definition. It’s even used as leading us into the promised land of full healing.
- Forgiveness is no longer letting what happened control you
- Forgiveness sets you free
- Forgiveness just means you have made peace with the past
- Forgiveness means releasing the pain
So, if “forgiveness” of the inexcusable has such a vastly different definition from the one we use when forgiving honest people who make honest mistakes, then forgiveness is not the problem. The problem is we need a different word entirely.
(Was the above loud enough?)
Forgiveness Reconsidered
Let’s take the bullet points above on what the toxic forgiveness speeches “claim” forgiveness does for us. But this time, removing the term forgiveness. Now what are we left with?
- No longer letting what happened control you
- Set you free
- You have made peace with the past
- Releasing the pain
Aren’t these the ultimate healing goals? We don’t want the pain to direct our lives. And of course we want release from the bondage of trauma. But is forgiving the abuser our only means of achieving this? Absolutely not! And just because the toxic forgiveness speeches are saying the above is what forgiveness means doesn’t make it true.
Fully Validate the Self First
So, how do we achieve these goals without forgiving the abuser? As chapter 14 of Pete Walker’s book suggests, begin with the self. We must process our trauma fully, and in such a way that we validate ourselves.
First comes the clarity stage.
We need to make sense out of the senseless. For many adult survivors of Cluster B disordered parents, abuse was so normalized, we have no idea the number of psychological abuses that also should not have happened. We need answers to questions, like Why did this happen to me? and What kind of parent does this to their own child? And so, this is the stage where we start earning our honorary PhD on sociopathy, psychopathy, and other disordered minds. This is how we begin to understand that what happened to us wasn’t our fault.
There are those who use their knowledge to rush into forgiving their abusive parent. Either by reasoning that their parent didn’t know any better because of their disorder, or the abusive parent may have been traumatized by their parents too. While both may be true, forgiveness at this premature stage stagnates the healing. It’s evident in how they cease sharing their story – not because they have reached that promised land of “full healing” – but because it triggers painful emotions that they prefer invalidating on behalf of their abuser. It is also evident in how they are using the same trauma responses and poor coping mechanisms as they navigate life.
Next is working through the emotions and the body.
This takes longer than the clarity stage. We must work through our emotions while processing our trauma. Validate and champion for our past hurts like we never could while we were enduring the traumas. We also must get in tune with our bodies because that’s where our trauma is stored. Psychological trauma impacts our brain and body chemistry. So, we need to understand if our bodies are stuck in fight-or-flight or if they are stuck in freeze. For some, they have the trifecta (all three). The body stuck in a trauma response is what affects us both emotionally and mentally. But once we earn our second honorary PhD on trauma, emotions, and its science, we release ourselves of the irrational guilt we’ve been carrying. Practice self-compassion by giving our pain the due process it deserves.
This is where the toxic forgiveness speeches tend to scream loudest. They want us to hurry up and forgive our abuser because in their mind, this crucial stage in our healing takes too long. So, they reason, we must be intentionally holding on to something. Either we are holding a grudge or holding on to our trauma. Despite their accusations, we are not the ones holding on to our trauma. Trauma Glossary 3: The Brain and Body on Trauma is proof that our trauma is holding on to us. And we are not holding a grudge. We are exploring and validating ourselves, for once in our lives. We need to grieve what happened to us and we also need to get justifiably angry at those injustices.
Then decide how we will move forward.
For some, working through the pain can last a lifetime but it is not a reflection of their unwillingness to forgive. It simply means that the abuse was too extreme and damaging. And in no way are they healing “wrong”. But forgiving the abuser before we give our pain its due process will guarantee our pain lasts a lifetime.
As we process the pain, we gain an understanding of how it has directed our lives. But we need to do one more thing for ourselves before we consider forgiveness. Our trauma responses and coping mechanisms are habits that keep us stuck. So, we must make a commitment to ourselves on deciding better habits that will pull us out of surviving and into a thriving existence. And what tools will we take along on our journey?
Once you make this commitment to yourself, then and only then are you ready to decide whether or not you can forgive your abuser. Contrary to popular misinformation, there is no right or wrong answer. Some can it and works out well for them. Some can’t and that deserves equal respect. Because either way, you’ve just achieved the full checklist of what the toxic forgiveness speeches have promised without having to forgive your abuser.
What Toxic Forgiveness Really is
A beautiful word made ugly. Forgiving an honest mistake is something we should all practice. However, redefining the term just to manipulate and shame victims into forgiving their abuser is word-rape. Lacking the imagination for a new word, they have taken the term forgiveness and turned it into a swear word.
Victim shaming language. I recently read a meme on forgiveness that said “Holding grudges doesn’t make you strong. It makes you bitter. It makes you weak. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong. It sets you free.” Well, all I can say is throw that meme away. It’s garbage. I don’t know or care who wrote it but I know this much. They lack empathy for trauma survivors. Not forgiving our abuser is NOT the same as holding a grudge. Nor are we weak or bitter because we have painful memories.
A means of minimizing the damages our abusers inflict on us and others. Funny how a culture that promotes de-stigmatizing and enabling abusers – just because they are considered to have a “mental illness” – have no trouble stigmatizing their victims for not forgiving them. Last I checked, this is called hypocrisy.
Throwing accountability on the victim. They have so many flippant excuses for our abusers. Yet, according to them, we are the ones who must be “the better people, so just get over it and forgive them already”.
Pure ignorance. They actually believe that forgiveness is our only chance at healing. This is because they are uneducated on the biological science behind our trauma. Nor do they comprehend the amount of time and the resources required to work through it.
Judgmental busy-bodies. They should step down from their victim shaming, virtue signaling podium and learn how to mind their own business. Keep their noses out of our healing business.