Should I forgive if I was traumatized?
Forgiveness in the healing process from trauma/abuse is a complicated thing to talk about. Forgiveness may have been used as a weapon in abuse cycles to deny or minimize trauma. At the same time, forgiveness can be a process that provides healing and freedom to the person who is doing the forgiving. Let’s explore the nuances of forgiveness when you’ve experienced trauma.
What is forgiveness?
Sometime those who are perpetuating abuse cycles will define forgiveness as forgetting and pretending the offense never happened — acting as if the offense never occurred. In a spiritual abuse context, this might involve adding on that God commands this kind of forgiveness. This definition is unhealthy and inaccurate. It’s a tool of emotional abuse.
It needs to be said that forgiveness is NOT forgetting. It’s important that you remember what’s happened to you and set appropriate boundaries. Forgiveness does not mean restored trust or restored relationship. Trust needs to be earned, relationships need repair to be restored, and your boundaries should be set based on what you need to feel safe and well.
People define forgiveness in different ways. For some it means not pursuing revenge or trying to even scores. To others it means letting go of hatred and anger and creating room for understanding and peace.
If you have been abused, there might be some fear around the idea of creating a space for understanding. That’s because it might be difficult to differentiate between understanding and excusing. It might feel like if you give understanding to your abuser, it’s the same as saying that what they did was unavoidable or okay.
You can understand why someone has done something, and it can remain an unacceptable thing to do. You can understand someone had positive intentions, but that does not erase the negative impact of their actions.
Letting go of anger and hatred is really about freeing yourself. The person who is being forgiven may feel relief that they’ve been forgiven, they might not know you’ve forgiven them, or they may not care — it doesn’t matter one way or another, because the process isn’t for them. It’s a process to allow yourself to disentangle your thoughts, emotions, and actions from the perpetrator and their abuse. It’s a process that diminishes the perpetrator’s power and empowers you.
Where can forgiveness go wrong?
There’s several ways forgiveness can go wrong. Let’s break down three common problematic messages about forgiveness.
Not Enough Time: If forgiveness is rushed and expected to occur immediately, there may not be enough time for you to process the harm that has been done to you. You need to feel the anger, sadness, rage, etc. as part of a very healthy emotional process. Those emotions have such an important role in helping you understand what’s happened to you, how to protect yourself, and to tell you when change is needed. Living in a permanent state of anger and pain is not good, but skipping those emotions all together is unhealthy (and impossible, as you can’t actually skip or erase emotion, you can only suppress it).
Forced: When forgiveness is forced, it’s not empowering. Forgiveness is a process you should have autonomy over. If you want to choose not to forgive, that is your right. You choose if it happens, you choose when it happens, and you choose how it happens. It’s your anger, your pain. You get to choose how long to hold on to those things.
Making it the Same as Forgetting: Forgiveness doesn’t mean you get amnesia. If you decide whether to entrust deep emotional things with a person, or if it’s safe to live with them, or to give them your money — you set boundaries based off of what you know about that person and how they make you feel. If someone you previously trusted wronged you, you can let go of the anger and pain and still factor the experiences into what boundaries you set. Restoring relationship and trust is a separate process that takes place over time.
What’s a healthier approach?
If you’ve experienced trauma or abuse, first set the appropriate boundaries to keep yourself safe and to have healthy relationships. As you're doing that, give yourself space to feel, to heal, to know the impact that the trauma/abuse had on you. Trust yourself and your healing process.
If at some point you feel open to letting go of your anger and pain, know that you can do this without excusing the abuse. Engaging in the letting go process may even give you a sense of peace, freedom, and empowerment.
In that process, there will be some aspects of your abuser that you will come to understand in a bigger context (e.g. the impact their own trauma has on them) and there are some things that you might never understand but you will choose to let go of so that you can move on.
Hopefully in this process, you are experiencing increased confidence that it’s not only your anger and connection to your pain that keeps you safe. You learn that you will set boundaries and will protect yourself even when not emotionally activated.
So should you forgive?
If you’ve been traumatized or abused, should you forgive? The answer to that is entirely up to you. That is something only you can choose, because only you can know if it’s right for you. Only you know if it is what you need right now, if you’re at a place where you’re ready to let go of the pain/anger, or if you even can.
Forgiveness isn’t simple or instantaneous. Maybe you want to forgive but you don’t know how. Maybe you don’t want to forgive, or put energy into that process. If you can’t or don’t want to forgive right now, that is okay. Both forgiveness and healing are a journey. No two people have the same path.
No matter where you are in your process or what you need right now, remember to be kind to yourself. Recovering from trauma and abuse is a painful and unfair process. You’re doing great by being right where you are today.