Forgiveness
is the key to happiness.

Although I believe with my whole heart that this is true, it can sound like a fortune cookie answer to devastating emotional pain.

Trauma means injury, agony, ordeal sometimes lasting for decades. The biggest trouble with forgiveness is the insensitivity and glibness of many of the people recommending it.

In a physical trauma we have to stop the bleeding before any healing can take place. When the trauma is emotional, enormous compassion is required to hold a safe space and LISTEN to the victim’s pain, rage, shock, terror, suffering, despair, desire for revenge. To suggest to a person who has been raped to forgive the rapist is cruel, thoughtless, and absurd! 

Before any discussion of forgiveness can take place, empathy must validate the experience of the victim and provide a balm for the soul damage that person has sustained. It takes tremendous strength and empathy to listen in this way because it will surely stir up one’s own unhealed pain. Only after truly deeply listening and listening and listening and listening, heart to heart, and soul to soul, maybe for years to what has happened to a person who has been victimized will that person be ready to consider the idea that more healing is possible and available through forgiveness.

Victims need to feel that someone really gets what they went through and how much it hurt them, what it cost them to survive it. Only then can they begin to consider that forgiving is for their own healing, not to let the perpetrator off the hook. Only then can they take in the idea that forgiving doesn’t make what the perpetrator did to them okay. It was never okay. 

You can forgive a person and still send them to their deserved punishment. You can forgive a person and reject them from your life. You can forgive a person and do whatever is needed to protect and take care of yourself. Forgiveness is the last piece in the healing protocol—an internal process meant to give you back the peace of mind and happiness that were stolen from you. Until victims are fully heard and given the respect and dignity they deserve by a compassionate and emotionally available human being forgiveness is not only impossible, but also quite literally adds insult to injury.