Forgive and live …?
Foreword: I’m delighted to welcome Kim as guest blogger, active subscriber to Dissociative Writers, and facilitator of the daytime Writing-in-Place workshop. Kim is a licensed mental health counselor as well as a person with DID. This post is one of occasional posts by subscribers to DW who share their writing.~ Lyn
by Guest Blogger Kim E.
Today I found myself musing about having compassion for abusers/perpetrators. Forgiveness, involving a form of compassion, and in my case how 1) I seem to have more compassion/forgiveness of my mom and dad, maybe even my grandpa, than my mental and holistic health providers do, yet 2) how this actually may be an impasse in my healing journey.
Forgiveness, Compassion, and Rage
I tend to forgive and have more compassion for them, my perpetrators, than I do for myself. I end up with rage toward “life” for doing whatever it did to them that led them to do what they did to me! That leads me to have a lot of often unacknowledged rage that ends up eventually turned against me, and a lot of shame about what was done to me. Both of these intense emotions lead me to want to be done with life and living – to thoughts of suicide. Unable to see the good person I am, and unable to turn that compassion and forgiveness toward myself, I end up stuck in my own healing process, in a spiral of suicidal thoughts, urges and depression.
Forgiving My Dad
I can summarize the moment of forgiveness and the compassion I was able to show/provide toward my Dad. He had been pretty much my only source of love, due to his lavish attention, and of hate and confusion due to sexual, physical, mental/psychological, and emotional abuse. I was excommunicated from my family multiple times for my sexual explorations, for my rejection of or embracing of religious beliefs, and for confronting my family with the sexual and emotional abuse I had experienced at the hands of my cousin, uncle, and father. Late in life, my father was suffering, dying of kidney cancer that had metastasized to his bones and brain. I had attended a family event, I believe a holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas. I walked by a room on my way to the bathroom and saw my Dad sitting in tears. He looked up at me and said: “I’m sorry… for everything.”
He looked so broken, a shell of a person, pathetic really. Not the all-powerful, God-like father I had known, loved, revered, and feared. He was just a man, and he was sorry. He was suffering. I replied “Dad, we all do the best we can.” And I quickly walked off to relieve myself in the bathroom. It was a poignant moment. Brief, but poignant. I had given him permission to die with less guilt. I had given him forgiveness, shown him compassion. It’s a lot more than I ever received, and a lot more than I have ever been able to give myself or my parts. My Dad died about 3 months later. It was the last time I saw him. I did not attend his funeral or wake.
Compassion as a Barrier
In some ways, the compassion I have for my perpetrators/abusers is so much more than I am or have been able to show or have toward myself. In many ways it has been a barrier to my healing. In my mind, they loved me as best they could. I have not been able to experience hate or rage toward them. These are emotions that both my mental and holistic health providers hold and express, and state are reasonable given my descriptions of what I experienced at the hands of my perpetrators/abusers. Yet I end up only directing my hate toward “life”, “the powers that be”, for doing this, for allowing this to happen to them, to me and to my son. I hate and rage at the world and at life and end up not wanting to be in this world, not wanting to be alive, even though I am a good person, am kind, compassionate, and have a safe, love-filled life now, in my present.
Compassion and Forgiveness for Myself
Healing for me will require forgiveness and compassion, not for my perpetrators/abusers, but for myself, to conquer the shame, the rage, the hate toward myself, toward the world, toward life, and the process it takes to become healed, healthy, real, alive, whole… to be present and engaged in living, maybe even thriving.
My tasks are finding compassion for myself, and forgiving life, the world, for all the evil it has shown me and all the evil I therefore am aware is in it… This last seems perhaps an insurmountable, unachievable task. One I feel I am asked to do frequently, whenever someone says I need to accept… life.
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May I see my own limits with compassion, just as I view the limits of others.
~ Joan Halifax
Lyn