The Journey Towards Forgiveness
Written December 2011
The journey towards forgiveness can be difficult or easy depending upon how we feel about the person or situation in question. You cannot forgive on command but must come at it sideways, to surprise it into submission. You cannot complete the journey unless you are able to take that first step. And that first step must always be taken by you, for you, and only for you. It is very difficult to forgive another unless you are first willing to forgive yourself.
The key to achieving forgiveness is the willingness to be completely honest with yourself, accepting all your faults and in particular, accepting that you have a shadow side. Another key is to be willing to open the box crammed full of your feelings that you tightly packed months, years or even decades before. Mostly, that box doesn't see the light of day let alone its contents.
You see, we carry that box around with us from birth, adding to it regularly when we don't want to deal with or acknowledge what is in front of us; difficult emotions, difficult situations, difficult people, pain, ignoring health issues and sometimes even making mountains out of mole hills. That box will be forever chained to us, keeping us where we don't want to be, obstructing and hindering us, and unless we can find the motivation to sift through its contents, gradually emptying it out one item at a time, it will get heavier and heavier until our friends and family desert us as they become sick and tired of our crushing negativity.
The other box we carry is that which holds our beliefs. This box is filled to the brim with outdated and obsolete opinions that no longer serve our continued evolution and inhibits our ability to forgive. The majority of these beliefs are given to us by our peers, parents and society. We learn by the examples around us thus becoming the sum of our experiences. Some of the most toxic beliefs are fostered by religion as it vies for your soul and hard earned cash while preaching their own brand of forgiveness which is exclusive rather than inclusive.
As we grow into adults, we gather from our experiences many beliefs, philosophies, rules and judgments that define how we should act in the world, act towards each other and develop expectations that people will act in a certain way to us. We are rather like a pristine snowflake beginning its long trek down the hill to become the snowball gathering as it goes, litter, empty drink cans, cigarette butts, mud, weeds and other forms of discarded flotsam. By the end of its journey the snowflake no longer resembles the pure state it once was having harvested all this waste and junk. By the end, the snowflake is subsumed by the snowball and has forgotten its original uncorrupted form. The snowflake thus believes it is the snowball. Our waste and junk are our beliefs and our suppressed emotions. It falls upon us to be willing to excavate both the boxes we carry to discover the pristine snowflake we once were.
Items in both boxes sometimes contradict adding to our confusion and hinder our ability to cope with and find resolution to these items. For example, I was taught the belief that anger was a nasty and destructive emotion and had to be suppressed by any means possible. That was put in my belief box. But when I experienced anger, how could I express it when my belief so opposed expressing it? I chose then to open my other box and pour in the anger to mix it with the already churning and festering emotions contained within.
We all have situations, issues and circumstances that act to prevent us from forgiving those we feel have caused us pain and distress. It is as though we think they will feel our pain the longer we hold onto it. They are oblivious to our pain. It is for ourselves we forgive, not our perpetrators. Letting it go saves us from dragging the pain around for many more years.
My particular un-forgiveness circumstance, amongst loads of others, was due to the childhood treatment I received, or rather felt I received, from my parents. During our life, it is our perception that matters and this could differ from actuality. It is easy to expand or magnify some event or situation out of proportion so that we perceive it as being bigger than it really is thus adding to our agony and emotional stress.
My perception of my experience was that it started at my first conscious thought and continued for over three decades and persisted even after I left home to marry. Even now, there are remnants of those formative years echoing through the mind song I hear every day although through my willingness to forgive and my willingness to face my deepest fears, that song is now almost inaudible amongst the background noise.
My mother wasn't your average outgoing sort who would challenge the world. She was timid, rarely travelled, and was quiet and fearful of the world around her. My experience of her is that of a smother rather than a mother. I couldn't go out into the world without being cosseted and closeted in cotton wool. I couldn't ride my bike in the main road, and I couldn't go to see my friends as they were outside this main road. Thus I didn't see my school friends outside school hours. I could only bring them home for tea and remember only one time I spent the night at a friend's house. And that was when I was 19.
Forgiveness can come from the most unlikely events or sources, and usually, you can't see these coming. Had I not been willing to communicate to someone else my experiences of gender confusion, I would not have been witness to an extraordinary cleansing of over 50 years of anger and resentment and frustration allowing an inner transformation from one of abject isolation to one of love.
This all began with a simple mistake, my mistake. I had removed several direct debits from our bank account and apparently, deleted the wrong ones. Thus, our rent did not get paid for two months. Oblivious to this until our statement arrived, I went to see the manager to sort things out. After that was dealt with, we began chatting about life, the universe and everything in between and the topic of my gender transition bubbled to the surface. Not only was she compassionate towards my gender choices, I discovered that she had a friend who was going through the same transition as me. She understood. And for me, that made a real difference.
She asked me how my mother was handling my gender transition. What I said surprised me. The words came from my mouth but the language and prose and energy seemed to emanate from some far off place. I listened intently at the words I was voicing and would have sat there with my chin on the floor had I not been the one talking. Suddenly, to my great surprise, pieces of the puzzle started falling into place and continued to do so for several hours. It was as though a single domino had fallen initiating a cascade of awareness I hadn't expected.
You see, my mother had been a child at the start of World War 2 and this experience, unbeknown to me, had left deep emotional scars. She rarely talked about this period in her life so I never understood the depth of those scars until now.
On one particular day, her school was bombed 10 minutes after she left for the day leaving several of her friends and teachers dead or dying under several layers of rubble. On the walk home she met an equally distressing sight. Many people lay dying along the road having just been strafed from German aircraft passing overhead. Had she been just 5 minutes earlier, she too would have been one of the casualties. Later on in the war she lost her father who was killed when a V2 dropped on the town near where they were living. He went out that morning to do some shopping and never returned.
Suddenly, the whole made sense. Her actions towards me and my sister were out of fear that she would lose us too if we were to venture too far from the nest. Since we are all the sum of our experiences, my mother's actions were borne out of self preservation and the difficulty of facing those deep traumas. I doubt she realised this was the reason behind why she always treated us with kid gloves as it takes an exceptional person to face that sort of devastation. Survivor guilt springs to mind. For some, opening those boxes willingly is just a step too far.
I had taken on her beliefs and felt that the world was a very fearful place to live and so continued the line of succession. Those beliefs coloured my perception of the world and the people around me. My inheritance was fear, IBS, nervous tension, aches and pains, migraines, shyness, apprehension, procrastination, naivety and an inability to deal with challenging situations that occurred choosing instead to go around them rather than facing them head on.
After the ripples within me had begun to settle, I chose to send my mother a dozen roses. I had never done this before. I put on the card attached to the flowers the message “Thank you for being in my life”. I also spoke with her on the phone for around an hour discussing her life during the war years. I actually said to her that I loved her. Not just the words but feeling it as well.
The effects of forgiveness can be subtle or massive. For me, this had the feeling of both. The suddenness of understanding coupled with the delicate ripples of forgiveness continue to effect change within. It is as though the dominoes are falling, dominoes of fear, of shyness, procrastination, IBS, etc, are all falling away, disappearing forever, suddenly no longer part of my experiences and my beliefs.
For me now, there is no hatred or blame as these are outdated beliefs and emotions. If blame has to be laid at someone's door then it must be at mine as I chose to experience this life knowing what it would involve. Life really is about choices, consequences and responsibilities and how we deal with those.
Animosity is such a useless emotion, and one that is all too easily carried, particularly by religious zealots and politicians who have far too many axes to grind. I no longer carry this with me as forgiveness has provided the most breathtaking opportunity to let it go.
There is no doubt that I would have been a very different person had I not chosen to inherit those beliefs. Very few people choose to look within to discover themselves. I have made such a choice and discovered the philosopher inside, released so much and unearthed so much. Understanding oneself is probably one of the most difficult journeys undertaken but also one of the most worthwhile.
So, dear reader, are you willing to face the consequences of opening your boxes? Or would you rather continue hauling them until the day you pass beyond the veil? The choice, as they say, is yours!
top
|
